At 97 years old, in the city of Mexico where he resided, Esteban Sieva Volkov died, grandchild of the great revolutionary Leon Trotsky.
By Gustavo Giménez
With his many years, Sieva was the last living direct relative of the leader of the Russian revolution and had dedicated a great part of his life to protect Trotsky’s home in his last destination in Coyoacan after being transformed into a museum in 1990 thanks to his efforts. A task that kept him in contact with many leaders and militants of Trotskyism internationally and allowed him to develop a work of propaganda on the legacy of the great revolutionary.
Esteban Volkov, who witnessed the two attempts on Leon Trotsky’s life, the last of which, carried out by the GPU agent Ramon Mercader, ended his life on August 21, 1940, was a survivor of the family of one of the greatest revolutionaries of the 20th century, whose members had to pay with persecution and their lives for their “crime” of sharing the Bolshevik ideas for which Trotsky fought, or even, although they had no political militancy, belonged to his direct family line.
A life crisscrossed from childhood by Stalinist persecution
Esnesto Volkov is the son of Zinaida Bronstein, the eldest daughter born from Trotsky’s first marriage. This last appellation was taken by Lyev Davidovich Bronstein from his jailer in Siberia. His first companion, Aleksandra Lvovna Sokolovskaya, with whom he shared the exile in his youth and had two daughters, Zinaida and Nina, died in 1938, in the concentration camps in the period of the Great Purges.
Vsevolod (Sieva’s Russian name) was born on March 7, 1926 in Yalta, on the Crimean peninsula of the Soviet Union. His father, Platon Volkov, was a leading member of the Trotskyist Left Opposition who was deported to Siberia and shot in 1936, following his arrest the previous year. His mother, Zinaida, was allowed to leave the USSR with her young son to visit Trotsky in exile on Pinkipo Island, off the coast of Istanbul where he was in exile.
According to close friends, Sieva’s memories of his father were very hazy. His mother committed suicide in Berlin, where she had traveled for medical treatment in January 1933. The previous year Stalin had terminated the Soviet nationality of Trotsky and all his relatives, placing Zina, suffering from a severe illness, in a helpless situation in a Germany where Nazism was in full ascendancy.
Leon Davidovich wrote, in those years, a letter to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the USSR, making them responsible for Zina’s death and also for the death of his other daughter Nina, in 1928, as a consequence of the persecution unleashed against him and his family.
In it you could read the terrible circumstances of the reunion, after great efforts with her son Sieva and the tragic outcome: “he had not been with his mother for even a week when General Schleicher’s police, in agreement with the Stalinist agents, decided to expel my daughter from Berlin. Where to? To Turkey? To the island of Prinkipo? But the child had to go to school. My daughter had necessarily to receive permanent medical care and normal working conditions and a normal family life. This new blow overcame the sick woman’s ability to resist. On January 5, she asphyxiated with gas. She was thirty years old.”
Stephen Volkov then spent a long period in a boarding school in Berlin until, in 1935, his uncle and son of Trotsky, Leon Sedov, took him with him to Paris, where he had to take refuge when Hitler was enthroned in power in Germany. In Paris Sedov directed the tasks of the Left Opposition, until he was poisoned by Stalinist agents while convalescing from an operation he had to undergo. After a dispute with Sedov’s partner over the legal custody of Sieva, he finally traveled to Mexico in August 1939, where Trotsky and his second partner, Natalia Sedova, were in exile, and was reunited with his maternal grandfather.
Coyoacán
According to those who had contact with the daily life of Esteban Volkov, for a time, the stay in this locality was a quiet place, where Sieva could enjoy the joys of family life. In fact, it was in those terrible years, only a rest in the midst of a new tragedy, the two attempts to assassinate his grandfather, which Trotsky’s grandson had to watch as a direct witness.
The first one consisted of a military gang assassination, organized by the well-known Mexican painter and Stalinist leader David Alfaro Siqueiros. The members of the assassination operation managed to penetrate into the villa where Trotsky lived and fired machine gun fire at his bedroom without being able to reach him or his companion Natalia. In an adjacent room slept Sieva, who was slightly wounded by one of these bursts.
This is how Trotsky recounts that episode: “When the shooting died down we heard our grandson shouting in the next room: ‘Grandfather!’ The child’s voice sounding in the darkness is the most tragic memory I have of that night. The boy, after the first shots diagonally crossed his bed (as evidenced by the marks left on the door and wall), threw himself under the bed. One of the assailants, apparently carried away by panic, threw at the bed, the bullet went through the mattress, hit our grandson in the thumb and stuck in the floor. The assailants threw two firebombs and left the room. Shouting ‘grandfather!’ he followed them into the courtyard, leaving behind him a trail of blood and, under the gunfire, went into the room of one of the guards.”
Weeks later, the second attempt, this time was successful. A GPU agent, Ramon Mercader, who had entered into a relationship with one of old Leon’s secretaries, managed to be taken as a trusted person in the revolutionary’s inner circle. With this license and the excuse of submitting an article of his for Trotsky’s consideration, he managed to infiltrate an ice axe (a pike used in mountaineering) with which he hit Trotsky’s head hard, causing his death.
Sieva was coming back from school when he witnessed the subsequent scene with his grandfather bleeding abundantly due to the severe injury and still with enough strength to signal for the boy to be removed from the place, while he was struggling to stand on his feet.
The legacy of Sieva Volkov
Esteban remained in Mexico for the rest of his life. He maintained a close relationship with his adoptive grandmother, Natalia, until her death in 1962. He graduated as an engineer, where he stood out as part of the team that invented the contraceptive pill, married and had four daughters.
In our Latin American subcontinent old Trotskyist militants remember his activity as a member of the international moral tribunal which acquitted the militant Juan Pablo Bacherer of the slanderous accusations made against him by Guillermo Lora, leader of the POR in Bolivia.
The fact is that Sieva, in spite of not being a member of any of the currents into which Trotskyism is divided, was respected for his commitment and the moral principles for which his grandfather and his entire family gave their lives.
During his childhood and adolescence he and his family were victims of GPU persecution. More than 80 years after the murder of his grandfather, when Sieva was only 14 years old, he became the last survivor of a family in which his father, mother, uncle, maternal grandmother and grandfather were murdered by the totalitarian barbarism that took over the leadership of the Communist Party. In his efforts to keep intact the villa on Avenida Viena in Coyoacán, he played an important role in defending his grandfather’s revolutionary legacy against Stalinist slander and degradation.
As part of those of us who fight against capitalist depredation, which plunges humanity into the greatest exploitation in history and degrades life on the planet to the limit of its survival, as part of those who draw strength and optimism every day from the tireless struggles of the working class and oppressed peoples. Two sentences, from many articles written around his death, serve to close these modest lines. The first, dedicated to Sieva, identifies us: “the followers of Trotsky have a particle of the future of humanity”, the other, summarizes our homage: “another part of Bolshevik history has just died. May the Revolution be with you, comrade.”