Trotsky grandson, legacy defender, dies in Mexico

Leon Trotsky’s grandson, who lived in Mexico with the Russian revolutionary at the time of his 1940 assassination, has died at 97, the museum he founded has announced.

“Our director, comrade and friend Esteban Volkov left this world, at the age of 97 years,” the Leon Trotsky House Museum, which Volkov founded and directed until a few years ago, said in a statement published Saturday.

The museum is housed in the Mexico City home where Trotsky lived in exile until August 21, 1940, when he was murdered by a secret agent.

The renowned Russian Bolshevik had arrived in Mexico in January 1937 following years of exile from the Soviet Union and its Stalinist regime.

Since Trotsky’s assassination, Volkov made “defending his grandfather’s ideas and career” the most important task of his life, the museum said.

Volkov was born in Ukraine in 1926 and arrived in Mexico at age 13 thanks to the assistance of Trotsky himself, according to La Jornada newspaper.

His mother Zinaida — Trotsky’s daughter — died by suicide in Paris while fleeing Joseph Stalin’s regime. His father was sent to a gulag in the 1930s.

Volkov was recognized in Mexico as “the last living witness to the assassination” of Trotsky.

In an interview with the BBC he recalled the day his grandfather was killed. He described returning from school and noticing a police car outside his home in the Coyoacan neighborhood. He then saw his grandfather on the floor, bloodied after having been attacked with an ice axe by Stalinist agent Ramon Mercader.

After the assassination, Volkov continued to live in Mexico, where he studied chemistry, and in 1990 founded the museum honoring his grandfather.

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