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Top Russian spy defects after betraying ring in U.S.

“We know who he is and where he is,” the unidentified official was quoted as saying. “Do not doubt that a Mercader has been sent after him already.”

Ramon Mercader was the Russian agent who murdered exiled Bolshevik Leon Trotsky with an ice axe in Mexico in 1940.

Your article incorrectly described Leon Trotsky as an “exiled Bolshevik”, when in fact, following the Second Party Congress when the divide between Bolshevik and Menshevik became apparent, Trotsky identified as a Menshevik and several years later as a “social democrat.”

I don’t believe he ever was a Bolshevik in the correct use of the term.

Levi

Stalin tried to airbrush Trotsky out of history, but there is little doubt in the best scholarship on the period: Trotsky was a Bolshevik revolutionary. GBU Editor

Esteban Volkov, Leon Trotsky’s grandson, speaks about his grandfather in a room in the museum that was once both their homes in Mexico City June 8, 2005. Volkov spoke of his relationship with his grandfather, and the day he arrived home from school to find him dying from a pick axe wound to the head.  REUTERS/Andrew Winning

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