On August 20, 1940, Leon Trotsky was assassinated by an agent of the Soviet secret police, the GPU, in Coyoacán, a suburb of Mexico City, where he was living in exile. Thus ended the life of the great Marxist theoretician of world socialist revolution and one of the towering figures of modern political history.
Trotsky’s assassination ranks among the most politically consequential crimes of the 20th century, with far-reaching implications for the international working class and the world socialist movement. And yet, for decades, the circumstances surrounding the assassination remained shrouded in secrecy. The massive scale of the Stalinist conspiracy against Trotsky was the subject of a carefully orchestrated cover-up.
In 1975, the International Committee of the Fourth International launched the first systematic investigation by the Trotskyist movement into the assassination. This investigation, known as Security and the Fourth International, led to the exposure of the network of GPU and American intelligence agents within the Fourth International that ensured the success of Stalin’s conspiracy against Trotsky’s life and facilitated state surveillance in the decades that followed. The investigation was bitterly opposed by Pabloite and pseudo-left organizations, which denounced the exposure of spies placed inside the Trotskyist movement as “agent-baiting.” This has remained their position, despite the fact that state intelligence documents released following the dissolution of the Soviet Union confirmed the findings of the International Committee and vindicated Security and the Fourth International.
This letter is a formal request to Susan Weissman to retract her false statements maligning the ICFI and the attorney Alan Gelfand, aimed at discrediting the ICFI investigation, initiated in 1975, into the penetration of the Fourth International by agents of the Soviet secret police.
On August 20, 1940, Leon Trotsky was assassinated by Stalinist agent Ramón Mercader in the Mexico City suburb of Coyoacán. Mercader’s access to the great revolutionary was made possible through his relationship with Sylvia Ageloff, who presented herself as an innocent victim of Mercader’s duplicity, a claim that was never challenged by the SWP. This series of articles constitutes the first systematic investigation by the Trotskyist movement of Ageloff’s role.
We are republishing a statement of the International Committee of the Fourth International originally published on June 15, 1990 in the Fourth International magazine on the death of Mark Zborowski. Zborowski, a GPU spy against the Trotskyist movement, was responsible for the murder of leading cadre of the Fourth International in the 1930s and for preparing, along with other Stalinist agents, the assassination of Leon Trotsky.
This is the text and audio of a lecture delivered by Eric London in Detroit, Michigan reviewing the monumental investigation conducted by the International Committee of the Fourth International titled Security and the Fourth International, which exposed the infiltration of the movement by agents of the FBI and Stalinist GPU.
David North and Eric London speak on the significance of the latest revelations, in the context of the decades-long Security and the Fourth International investigation by the ICFI into Trotsky’s assassination by Stalin’s GPU.
On October 3, 2015, the World Socialist Web Site held the first in a two-part interview series with David North, the chairman of the WSWS International Editorial Board, on the subject, “Why and How the GPU Murdered Leon Trotsky.”
On October 10, 2015, the World Socialist Web Site held the second in a two-part interview series with David North, the chairman of the WSWS International Editorial Board, on the subject, “Why and How the GPU Murdered Leon Trotsky.”
This book uses archival evidence to shed new light on how the governments of the United States and the Soviet Union spied on and infiltrated the world Trotskyist movement from the 1930s through the 1980s.
Tom Henehan, a member of the political committee of the Workers League (predecessor of the Socialist Equality Party), was murdered by hired gunmen while supervising a party event in Brooklyn, New York, on the night of October 15, 1977. He was the victim of a political assassination.
His death followed warnings by Joseph Hansen, the leader of the Socialist Workers Party who was exposed by Security and the Fourth International as an agent of both the GPU and the FBI, that there would be “deadly consequences” for the Workers League if it did not cease its investigations.
