[CPProt.net] Trotsky murder icepick resurfaces after 65 years

[Ellie Bruggeman]

Trotsky murder icepick resurfaces after 65 years
11/07/2005 - 3:03:16 PM

One of history’s most famous murder weapons, the icepick used to kill 
Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, has resurfaced, just weeks before 
the 65th anniversary of his assassination on August 20, 1940.

But tests that could prove the weapon’s authenticity have been delayed 
by a dispute between the icepick’s owner, who is shopping it around, and 
Trotsky’s descendants, who want it donated to a revolutionary museum – 
proving that the struggle between socialist ideals and capitalism still 
goes on.

The icepick is now in the possession of Ana Alicia Salas, whose father 
apparently removed it from an evidence room while serving as a secret 
police commander in the 1940s. She is toying with the idea of selling 
the foot-long, sawed-off ice axe, though she says she hasn’t decided how 
much it’s worth.

Trotsky’s grandson, who keeps the revolutionary flame alive by 
maintaining Trotsky’s home as a museum, says he wants the pick.

Trotsky helped lead the 1917 Russian revolution, but split with dictator 
Josef Stalin and fled to Mexico in 1937, accusing Stalin of having 
betrayed the revolution.

Stalin is widely believed to have arranged Trotsky’s murder, in which a 
young man posing as a sympathiser sneaked up behind Trotsky and sank the 
ice pick into his skull.

The murder weapon has become infamous, inspiring even the indie rock 
band Trotsky Icepick, whose songs included A Little Push At The Top Of 
The Stairs before they stopped recording in the mid-1990s.

The weapon in Salas’ possession still has faint, reddish-brown stains 
visible on its gleaming surface. But there’s only one sure way to prove 
whether those stains are Trotsky’s blood, and Esteban Volkov, Trotsky’s 
grandson, holds the key: his DNA.

“Looking at it objectively, this is a piece of history,” Volkov said at 
the home in the leafy Mexico City district of Coyoacan where Trotsky was 
killed, just blocks from where Salas, the icepick owner, also spoke. “It 
should be in the museum.”

Volkov, 79, has offered to give a sample of his own DNA for comparison 
to whatever material can be recovered from the pick, but only on the 
condition that Salas donate the artefact to the Trotsky museum there.


“If it is for commercial purposes, I refuse to participate in this kind 
of thing,” Volkov said with a disdain echoed in the volumes of Trotsky’s 
revolutionary writings on display in the museum’s library.

Salas, 50, refuses to consider such a donation, saying people only value 
the things they pay for.

“Sometimes people don’t value things that are given away,” Salas said.

In a country where police misconduct is legendary, Salas is quick to 
paint her father, Alfred Salas, as a model secret service agent.

She said that Alfred Salas, who retired in 1965 and died in 1985, had 
been granted permission by superiors to keep the icepick in order to put 
together a “museum of criminology”.

He withdrew the pick from the museum and kept it among his personal 
possessions after someone tried to steal the artefact from a criminology 
display.

While she has said in the past that she is seeking “some financial 
benefit” in exchange for the pick, she hedges when asked if she is 
selling the piece.

“I think this instrument is valuable. It is a piece of world history,” 
Salas said as she displayed the pick, wrapped in flannel and kept in an 
old cardboard box labelled Kenmore Electric Heating Pad.

Asked how much she thinks it is worth, she says “I don’t know, because I 
don’t know who’s interested in it.”

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