Jaime Ramón Mercader del Río assassinated Trotsky. With his action he not only made Lenin's great intellectual and close friend disappear, but represented the apex of one of the longest dramas of 20th century history: the laconic and enigmatic Russian Revolution consuming itself. This is his story. *** This is the parable of the depersonalization of a human being who blindly and unconditionally followed a doctrine, becoming the walking stick of the bureaucracy that led him. His fable is about manufacturing the most obedient Soviet individual of all, and his understanding, which in the terms of Hannah Arendt, does in no way symbolize the justification for his criminal acts. For Arendt, the phrase "understand what happened" only means "rationalize what happened," since the work of the intellectual is to think as objectively as possible, moving away from reproducing discourses that deny the reality of the facts and that process the ideas of forgiveness or forgetfulness The theoretical company that Arendt manages tries to clarify the institutional circumstances of the depersonalization of those who commit crimes sponsored by purely administrative consortiums and who effectively detach themselves, after a process of extreme ideologization, from the executor's own conscience. In her book Eichmann...