Leon Trotsky, a man to be beaten
At 8:30 p.m. on LCP and Wednesday, December 7 at 12:05 a.m. on Arte
«For forty-three years of my conscious life, I remained a revolutionary. » Russia is a long way off, and Leon Trotsky, from Mexico where he found refuge in 1936, after having been expelled in turn from the Soviet Union, Turkey, Norway and France, continues to hope for world revolution. . From these painful years of exile that separate him from his assassination in August 1940 by the Stalinist agent Ramon Mercader, Marie Brunet-Debaines has drawn a cross portrait of the flamboyant Bolshevik and his enigmatic murderer.
Using reconstructions and archival footage, this documentary depicts the constant efforts of the former head of the Red Army, ousted and expelled from the USSR on Stalin’s orders, to feed, despite exile, his political projects.
Spider-like thoroughness of the Soviet services
But the master of the Soviet Union will offer him no respite. After liquidating a number of friends, collaborators and members of Trotsky’s family, it was at the dawn of the Second World War that he decided to get rid of his old adversary once and for all.
From there, the Soviet secret services will meticulously weave their web. Recruited by Russian spies, the Spaniard Ramon Mercader will spend many years training and preparing to reach his target, supported in this sinister enterprise by his mother and her lover, an NKVD agent.
Of his personality and his motivations, the film says surprisingly little. It does, however, illustrate how Moscow’s intelligence services orchestrated, with spidery meticulousness, one of the most spectacular political assassinations of the 20th century.