The grandson and guardian of the legacy of Russian communist revolutionary Leon Trotsky, Esteban Volkov, has died in Mexico City at the age of 97, the museum he founded has announced. “Our director, comrade and friend Mr. Esteban Volkov left this world at the age of 97,” the Leon Trotsky House Museum announced on its Facebook page. The Museum, where you can still see the traces of the bullets that killed Trotsky, is located in the house in Mexico City where the founder of the Red Army, exiled to Mexico in January 1937, had lived until his assassination, on Stalin’s orders, in August 1940.
Born in Ukraine in 1926, Esteban Volkov arrived in Mexico at the age of 13 thanks to the steps taken by his grandfather. His mother, Zinaida, daughter of Trotsky, had committed suicide in Paris while fleeing the regime of Joseph Stalin, and his father had been sent to the gulag in the 1930s. He was considered in Mexico as the last witness still alive. life of the assassination of Leon Trotsky, killed with an ice ax in the head by the secret agent of the NKVD Ramon Mercader. In an interview with the BBC, Volkov said he was coming home from school when he saw a police car in front of the house where he lived with his grandfather, then saw the latter’s body bleeding on the ground. .
After this crime, Volkov had continued to live in Mexico, where he had studied chemistry and founded in 1990 the museum in the former house of Leon Trotsky, in the popular district of Coyoacan. Volkov “has accomplished the most important task of his life: the defense of his grandfather’s ideas and career,” praised the museum in its press release.
