The World - News from Jan. 5, 1989

Soviet readers were told that the Kremlin was responsible for the murder almost 49 years ago of Leon Trotsky in his exile in Mexico. Historian N. Vasetsky wrote in the weekly Literary Gazette that Trotsky, who with Lenin forged the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, was assassinated in 1940 in an operation ordered from Moscow and run by a secret police agent. “Stalin could not forget old insults . . . either he himself took the decision or he let his entourage know that it was time to put an end to Trotsky,” Vasetsky wrote, acknowledging what has long been believed in the West.