Leon Trotsky’s grandson, Esteban Volkov, died in Mexico at the age of 97. How reported British Trotskyist politician Alan Woods, Volkov’s death marked the disappearance of the “last physical link” with the revolutionary, who was assassinated in 1940.
Woods noted that Esteban’s real name is Vsevolod.
Esteban Volkov was born in Yalta on March 7, 1926. He bore the surname of his father, Platon Volkov, who was shot in Moscow in 1936. Esteban’s mother, Zinaida Bronstein, was Trotsky’s eldest daughter; in 1933 she committed suicide in Berlin.
In 1937, Leon Trotsky moved to Mexico, where his grandson moved two years later. Subsequently, Esteban witnessed several assassination attempts by Soviet agents on his grandfather. In particular, in May 1940, a group of 25 people broke into Trotsky’s house, one of the bullets hit his grandson, while the politician himself was not injured.
Mexican newspaper La Jornada appointed Volkov as the last witness to Trotsky’s assassination in 1940. In August 1940, NKVD agent Ramon Mercader, who was awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union in 1960, killed the politician with an ice pick.
In 2019, Esteban Volkov spoke out against the release of the Russian TV series Trotsky (2017) directed by Alexander Kott and Konstantin Statsky on Netflix. Then, in collaboration with the Argentine Center for Research, Study and Publication of Leon Trotsky (CEIP-LT), he launched a petition calling for the release of the series in online cinemas.
Material header on the CEIP-LT site said that “Netflix and the Russian government joined forces to spread lies about Trotsky”. The petition claimed that the series served as “justification” for the assassination of a revolutionary presented as a “monster”.
In 1990, Esteban Volkov transformed the house in the Coyoacan district (in Mexico City), where he lived with his grandparents, into the Leon Trotsky House-Museum. In this building, the revolutionary lived for the past few years and was killed.
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