On August 20, 1940, Leon Trotsky, founder of the Fourth International and lifelong Marxist revolutionary, was assassinated by a Stalinist police agent in Mexico. His murder was the culmination of a series of bloody attacks on all those revolutionaries who were fighting for the historical continuity of Marxism-Leninism through the construction of the Fourth International. Those others killed included Trotsky’s son and co-thinker, Leon Sedov; secretary of the Fourth International Rudolf Klement; another secretary, Erwin Wolf; and Ignace Reiss, who defected from the Stalinist secret police.

The systematic extermination of the leaders of the Fourth International was accompanied by the physical liquidation of all Lenin’s and Trotsky’s closest collaborators in the Bolshevik Party. Trotsky’s secretaries and aides in the Soviet Union were executed: Glazman, Butov, Sermuks, and Poznansky. In the Moscow Trials, beginning in 1936, the Old Bolsheviks were framed, convicted, and shot—Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, Radek, Sokolnikov, and Rykov, to name but a few.

After exhaustive research of official government and police files in the United States and France, unpublished facts have emerged about the murder of the early leaders of the Fourth International. Our inquiries show that the assassinations were set up and conducted by a group of Stalinist agents centered in Paris. They did not attack blindly. They were guided by agents who succeeded in infiltrating the Fourth International itself.

The GPU agent who played the leading role in the murders was a secretary to Trotsky’s son in the Paris Bureau. He attended the founding conference of the Fourth International in 1938. He spoke at the conference and even had himself accepted as Russian delegate in the enforced absence of Trotsky. He wrote for the Bulletin of the Left Opposition and was keeper of the correspondence between the Paris Bureau and Trotsky in exile in Mexico. His reports to the GPU found their way directly to Stalin’s desk in the Kremlin.

This man is Mark Zborowski. Today he lives in a well-to-do suburb of San Francisco on the west coast of the United States and enjoys a reputation as a distinguished anthropologist. His published works include such titles as Life Is with People, Jewish Belongingness and Group Identification and Cultural Components in Responses to Pain.

Life Is with People is not about his infiltration of the Trotskyist movement in France and the betrayal of its leaders to the GPU assassins. It is about “the Jewish little town of Eastern Europe.” His dissertation on pain does not mention the headless, armless, and legless remains of Rudolf Klement dumped in the River Seine.

With the assistance of the American authorities, Zborowski has carved a “new life” for himself. He is surrounded by intellectual admirers, including people like world famous anthropologist and radical Margaret Meade, who wrote the introduction to one of his books. Noted columnist I.F. Stone has been to dinner with Zborowski on three or four occasions over the past ten years. He knew nothing of Zborowski’s past. As far as he was concerned the Harvard anthropologist was “a real nice guy.”

Mark Zborowski was born in Uman, Russia, on January 21, 1908. He arrived in Poland in 1921 and left for France in 1928. He claims that he was never a member of the Polish Communist Party when he left aged 20, though this is disputed by others who knew him. Truthfulness is not one of Zborowski’s strong points. On the contrary, he is an inveterate liar, a fact which led to his conviction on perjury charges in the United States in later life. When he appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee in Washington on February 29, 1956, he was asked:

Q: Did any Communists assist you in your departure from Poland in any way?

Zborowski: Not as I remember.

Q: You are not certain?

Zborowski: No, I am not certain, there might have been some Communists among the people that helped me get out, but I don’t know whether—anyway, I was not conscious of assistance on the part of the Communists.

Writing in the American The New Leader on November 21, 1955, journalist Henry Kasson has another explanation of Zborowski’s early history:

Zborowski was taken by his parents to Lodz, Poland, during the Revolution. There he joined the Communist movement, was arrested (in about 1930) and jumped bail to flee to France. There his services to Soviet intelligence seem to have begun.

Zborowski told the Senate subcommittee that he was approached by the GPU to spy on the Trotskyist movement when he was living in Grenoble, France, in 1932 or 1933. It is possible that they used the fact that he had no proper papers to coerce him into service. Certainly there is not the slightest evidence in his whole record to show that he was politically motivated. There is nothing to indicate that he was a diehard Stalinist or an ideological opponent of Trotskyism. He did it for the money. Which made him more detached, and all the more deadly. He always remained loyal to his paymasters. Throughout his public testimony he never once revealed the names of his GPU controllers; nor did he divulge anything beyond the information already supplied against him by other witnesses. His sole recollection about his GPU contact was that he was “a heavy-set man, grey, wearing glasses”—which is a poor reflection on his standing as an anthropologist if nothing else.

But when it came to supplying information on the Fourth International, Zborowski had everything at his fingertips — names, addresses, descriptions, documents, activities and contacts. He met his controller two or three times a week in a park opposite the Gare d’Austerlitz railway station near where he had an apartment. They exchanged messages, and documents passed hands, usually rolled up in newspapers. By 1936 he had wormed his way into the confidence of Trotsky’s son, Leon Sedov. He did this by regularly turning up at the Left Opposition’s headquarters and offering to do editorial and office work. He did not approach Leon Sedov directly, but worked through his wife, Jeanne Martin (Molinier). When he was asked by the Senate investigating committee how he eventually met Leon Sedov, he replied: I met Sedov, if I am not mistaken, if I recall, at the Sorbonne, in the hall of the Paris University.

Q: Did you just walk up and introduce yourself? Zborowski: No, I was introduced by his wife.

Once working full time, Zborowski had access to information transmitted from the underground opposition in the Soviet Union. When Trotsky took up residence in Mexico in January 1937, Zborowski had secured the Paris organization’s confidence to such an extent that he even had access to the box containing the correspondence between Sedov and his father. While he was busily feeding information to his GPU contacts, Zborowski wrote articles in the Bulletin of the Left Opposition under the pen-name “Etienne,” denouncing Stalinism.

Not everyone in the Paris movement was taken in by the fawning Zborowski. Leon Sedov would often detach himself from his industrious assistant only to be forced back into relying on his help with translations, editing and correspondence. The widow of Ignace Reiss, Mrs. Else Bernaut, recalls that Pierre Naville was among those “‘who took an instant personal dislike to him.’” In her book, Our Own People, written under the name Mrs. Elisabeth K. Poretsky, Mrs. Bernaut says:

He (Zborowski) claimed he had left Poland to avoid being kidnapped by the NKVD, and Naville, who took an instant personal dislike to him, wanted to have his story checked, but was overruled by the group. It was not long before Etienne had become a member of the group’s central committee, with access to all confidential meetings and information; indeed, Sedov made him his deputy at meetings he himself could not attend. Etienne soon knew all the clandestine addresses and had access to all the letters received by the group, including Trotsky’s instructions to the party. Nevertheless, Pierre Naville kept up his “persecution,” as Etienne called it, of Sedov’s close collaborator. Unable to exclude him from confidential meetings, Naville made a point of fetching him in a car at the very last minute, so that Etienne never knew in advance where the meeting was being held.

Henryk Sneevliet, a Dutch communist leader who was in contact with the Left Opposition and later killed by the Nazis in occupied Holland, was passionately skeptical of Zborowski’s credentials. He once told his friends: “‘There is an agent and it is that little Polish Jew, Etienne.’” When Mrs. Bernaut was staying at his Amsterdam home after the murder of her husband by a GPU machine-gun squad, Sneevliet told her: “I say and I repeat that this secretary and right-hand man of Sedov’s is an NKVD agent.”

Zborowski’s cover came dangerously close to being blown in November 1936 when the GPU decided to steal Trotsky’s Russian archives from Paris. During the night of November 6 and 7, 15 bundles of documents weighing just over 160 pounds were stolen from the International Institute of Social History at 7 Rue Michelet. This was no ordinary burglary as Trotsky pointed out to the French judge investigating the break-in:

Had the head of the Paris section of the GPU left his visiting card on the table of the Institute premises, he would, by that gesture, have added very little to the other clues.

The French inquiry noted that:

the operation had been carried out with the aid of a technique absolutely unknown in France up to this day. Only foreign professionals, armed with special tools never yet used by our nation’s criminals ... could have been capable of carrying out such an operation.

(The implement used by the “Kremlin Plumbers” was a torch gun.)

Only four persons knew that a section of Trotsky’s archives had been secretly relocated at the institute. They were the institute’s director Boris Nicolaevsky; the director’s secretary, Lola Estrine (Mrs. David Dallin); Leon Sedov; and Mark Zborowski. Twenty years later Zborowski gave this account of the robbery to the Senate subcommittee.

Q: Did you report to the NKVD the arrival of the Trotsky files at the Nicolaevsky Institute?

Zborowski: Beg pardon?

Q: Did you report the arrival of those files at the institute?

Zborowski: Yes, sir.

Q: Whom did you report that to?

Zborowski: I reported to the man with whom I was at that time in contact.

Q: Was he one of the three men you have discussed?

Zborowski: No, he was a different person altogether. I think he was of Georgian origin. He was of Georgian origin, a dark small-featured, small, not tall man.

Q: Were they stolen on the night of November 7?

Zborowski: I guess so, I don’t recall when he brought them. I know that I was told—

Q: Do you remember where you were on the occasion those files were stolen?

Zborowski: To the best of my recollection I was at home.

At this point, Mr. Robert Morris, the subcommittee’s chief counsel, turned to the chairman, Senator James Eastland from Mississippi, and said: “Mr. Chairman, we have received information that this witness did report the arrival of the Trotsky files at the Nicolaevsky Institute and that this man set up an alibi for himself by attending a meeting celebrating the Soviet Revolution on November 7. You recall that at all?”

Zborowski: No, sir. I don’t recall that, and it happened 20 years ago, I don’t recall that, and I didn’t have to set up no alibi—

Suspicion again fell on Zborowski. But the GPU agent had not only taken the precaution of being at celebrations to mark the Revolution on the night of the break-in. He created another alibi as well. Until the move to the institute the archives were kept in Mrs. Dallin’s apartment. Many year later she explained why they were moved: “You see, we decided that it would be safer to bring Mr. Trotsky’s archives to the institute, that they would be better guarded there and therefore —.” She invited Zborowski to help her wrap the documents into 15 bundles for delivery by taxi to their new address. But Zborowski also made sure that a small proportion of the archives were shifted to a quite different location for safekeeping—his own flat. After the institute robbery, his caution was vindicated—which seemed to eliminate him as a possible suspect.

In his Senate testimony, Zborowski said that he protested to his GPU superiors about their brazen break-in and the unnecessary risk that it was to his cover. They “laughed it off,” according to Zborowski. They said they were not in the habit of informing their agents in advance of their plans because “being nervous, they may betray us.” Why, then, had the GPU gone ahead with its foolhardy robbery? Because they wanted to make a gift to Stalin which would please him, and what better present than Trotsky’s stolen archives. Some way to celebrate the anniversary of the October Revolution!

Mrs. Dallin said that she was deeply troubled by the security aspects of the robbery. She testified before the Senate subcommittee in 1956:

I discussed it many times with Mr. Zborowski, and he said, “You know, it may be the driver of the taxi that we took.” I said, “Now, how can he know that we — what we were transporting in the taxi?” We didn’t talk about this.

As an explanation of the GPU robbery it was absurd. But it satisfied Mrs. Dallin. She may have been confused about how the break-in was accomplished, but not about her loyalty to Zborowski. As she was to testify later:

I considered him a very good friend of mine, and I was a very good friend of his.

Even after the murder of Leon Sedov, Trotsky and leading members of the Fourth International, her faith in Zborowski was unwavering. She even made illegal arrangements for him to travel to the United States in 1941 where, within a year or two, he was host at meetings of the Socialist Workers Party in his New York flat.