Quick questions on Trotsky's assassination, August 1940: HSC Modern History Personality

In April 1939 Trotsky moved from the Blue House (Casa Azul) of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo to a separate fortified residence on Avenida Viena, Coyoacan, Mexico City. The move followed a political break with Rivera (over Rivera's 1938 support for the Andre Breton-Trotsky surrealist manifesto in Mexican Trotskyist politics). The Avenida Viena house was protected by watch towers, a 4-metre wall, a steel front door, internal locked doors, and a personal guard of American Trotskyists (Joe Hansen, Charles Cornell, Harold Robins) and Mexican police.

Stalin's order to kill Trotsky had been given in 1939, after the failure of earlier NKVD efforts (the Klement and Sedov deaths). The operation was codenamed Operation Duck (Operatsia Utka) and was directed from Moscow by Pavel Sudoplatov, deputy chief of the NKVD's foreign intelligence directorate. Naum Eitingon was the operational chief in Mexico.

David Alfaro Siqueiros, the Mexican muralist and Spanish Civil War veteran, led a group of some 20 men (mostly Mexican Communists and Spanish Civil War veterans) in a direct assault on the Avenida Viena house in the early hours of 24 May 1940. The group forced the gate (with police uniforms and false identification of a Mexican Communist Party Pacheco), entered the courtyard, and fired some 200 rounds into Trotsky's bedroom. Trotsky and Natalia Sedova survived by rolling under the bed.

Ramon Mercader del Rio (1913-1978) was a Spanish Communist whose mother Caridad Mercader was an NKVD agent. He fought in the Spanish Civil War as a Republican officer; the NKVD recruited him through Caridad in Paris in 1937. Mercader was trained for the Trotsky operation from 1938.

On the afternoon of 20 August 1940 Mercader visited the Coyoacan house carrying a typed draft article. He had concealed under his raincoat a shortened ice axe (in Russian: ledorub; in English the literature varies between "ice axe" and "ice pick"), a 12-inch dagger, and a Star pistol. He went into Trotsky's study with the article. Trotsky sat at his desk and began to read.

Mercader was tried in Mexico for premeditated murder. He refused to identify himself under his real name or his NKVD employment. He was convicted in 1943 and sentenced to 20 years' imprisonment, the maximum under Mexican law. He served the full sentence at the Palacio de Lecumberri.

The 24 May 1940 raid is part of the operation and is the reason the house was on high alert.

The attack was 20 August 1940; the death was at 7:25 PM on 21 August 1940.