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Four years ago, on May 24, 1940, the GPU murder machine, on orders from Stalin, struck to destroy Leon Trotsky and his wife Natalia. A squad of more than a score of heavily armed men, masquerading in the uniforms of Mexican police and army, succeeded in penetrating into Trotsky's residence in Coyoacan, a suburb of Mexico City. The premises were riddled with machinegun fire, the attack being concentrated on the bedroom where the aged couple was sleeping. Convinced that their mission had been carried out, the assassins departed after setting off incendiary bombs in order to destroy Trotsky’ archives, particularly the manuscript of his book on Stalin which was then in preparation. (The publication of this book in the United States has since then been suppressed by orders of the State Department.) But Trotsky and his wife miraculously escaped the attack. Stalin was to succeed a few weeks later, when in August the CPU agent Jacson struck Trotsky down from behind with a pickaxe.
The details of this May 1940 crime have long been a matter of public record. The role of the GPU and of the Stalinists in it was established beyond a shadow of a doubt. Many of the participants confessed. It was proved that the murder squad was comprised of former members of the Stalinist-dominated Loyalist brigades in Spain. The leader of the attack, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Mexican painter and notorious CPU agent, was caught red-handed. To this day he does not deny his part but tries brazenly to dismiss it as “an unfortunate bit of political sniping on my part.” (Siqueiros is now back in Mexico City where he roams the streets with impunity and talks of making a tour in the United States, under the auspices of Nelson Rockefeller’s “coordinators of inter-American affairs.”) The trail led directly to the Central Committee of the Mexican Communist Party, one of whose members Serrano was implicated. Likewise indicated was the complicity of the Soviet Embassy in Washington, then under Oumansky, now Stalin’s ambassador to Mexico.
ROBERT SHELDON HARTE FALLS VICTIM OF GPU
In their May 1940 attack, the murderers failed to carry out their main assignment, but, they did not leave the scene without exacting a toll. They kidnapped and killed Robert Sheldon Harte, one of Trotsky’s American secretary-guards. They put two bullets through his head, one in the base of the skull, the other through the temple—and threw his body into a shallow lime-filled grave, near a cabin a few miles away from Trotsky’s residence. After they killed Harte, the Stalinists tried to besmirch his name by intimating in the press that he had been connected with the gang of assassins. They hoped that the lime would disfigure his body beyond recognition, if it ever was found. But in this, too, they failed.
The memory of Robert Sheldon Harte remains unblemished. Bob was only 25 when he died for the ideas in which he believed. He came from a wealthy family, but he found it impossible to accept a society based on exploitation and greed, on lies and cruelty, on perpetual misery and perpetual wars. His hatred of the decaying capitalist system led him to search for a solution. He found it in the program of Trotskyism. From the day he joined the New York local of the Socialist Workers Party, he served with unbounded devotion. He sought for no personal satisfaction beyond the framework of the revolutionary movement and its tasks. His sole ambition was to be worthy of the banner under which he had enlisted. He was not the first co-worker of Leon Trotsky murdered by the GPU. His name must be enrolled among the members of Trotsky’s secretariat against whom the GPU has from the first vented all its fury. Inside the Soviet Union, Stalin killed the following Russian secretaries of Trotsky: M. Glazman, G. Butov, Y. Blumkin, N. Sermuks and I. Poznansky. In addition to Robert Sheldon Harte, the list of Trotsky’s secretaries murdered abroad includes: R. Clement, E. Wolfe, and Trotsky’s own son, Leon Sedov.
TROTSKY’S PROGRAM IS UNCONQUERABLE
Today it ought to be clear even to the blind why Stalin had to silence at all costs the voice of Lenin’s collaborator, the leader of the October insurrection in Petrograd and the organizer of the Red Army. It was to pave the way for the Kremlin’s open betrayal of the world working class and the struggle for Socialism. By killing Trotsky, Stalin hoped to destroy the influence of Trotsky’s ideas and his popularity with the masses in the Soviet Union and throughout the world. Stalin thought he was thereby dealing a death blow to Trotsky’s supreme contribution to the world revolution—The Fourth International.
The power of ideas is beyond the grasp of Stalin and his hirelings. In the not too distant future the unconquerable force of the program of the Fourth International will demonstrate itself on the arena of history. For everyone of our fallen martyrs, thousands upon hundreds of thousands will rally to Trotsky’s banner. In their wake, millions will follow to realize on earth the communist future of man.
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