This day in history

Exiled Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky is fatally wounded by an ice-ax-wielding assassin at his compound outside Mexico City. The killer, Ramón Mercader, was a Spanish communist and probable agent of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. Trotsky died from his wounds the next day.

Trotsky played a leading role in the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power, conquering most of Petrograd before Lenin’s triumphant return in November. Appointed Lenin’s secretary of foreign affairs, he negotiated with the Germans for an end to Russian involvement in World War I. In 1918, he became war commissioner and set about building up the Red Army, which succeeded in defeating anti-communist opposition in the Russian Civil War.

In the early 1920s, Trotsky seemed the heir apparent of Lenin, but he lost out in the struggle of succession after Lenin fell ill in 1922. An ideological split led new Soviet leader Joseph Stalin to first expel Trotsky from the Communist Party, then the country and finally culminated in his assassination.

The U.S. launches missile attacks on terrorist camps in Afghanistan and a chemical weapons factory in Sudan in retaliation for the bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

Englishman Paul Ride is sentenced to seven years in jail by a court in Iraq for allegedly illegally entering the country.

The Daily Mirror newspaper publishes pictures of a topless Duchess of York swimming with Texan businessman John Bryan in the South of France.
 

During the Lebanese Civil War, a multinational force including 800 U.S. Marines lands in Beirut to oversee the Palestinian withdrawal from Lebanon.