“Our director, companion and friend, Dom Esteban Volkov, left this world at the age of 97,” reported on Saturday via Facebook the House Museum of Léon Trotsky, which Volkov founded and led until a few years ago.
The museum is located in the home in Mexico City where Trotsky lived until his assassination on August 21, 1940. The Russian leader had arrived in Mexico in January 1937 in exile.
The museum noted that since Trotsky’s assassination, Volkov “took on the most important task of his life: the defense of his grandfather’s ideas and career”.
Born in Ukraine in 1926, Volkov arrived in Mexico at the age of 13, thanks to the efforts of Trotsky himself, the paper said. The journey.
His mother, Zinaida – the daughter of Trotsky – committed suicide in Paris, fleeing the regime of Joseph Stalin. His father was sent to a gulag in the 1930s.
Volkov was known in Mexico as the “last living witness to the assassination” of the Russian leader. In an interview with the BBC, he recalled the day the revolutionary leader was assassinated. He said he had just returned from school when he saw a police car outside the house where he lived with Trotsky, whom he saw lying bloodied on the ground after being attacked by Stalinist agent Ramón Mercader.
After the crime, Volkov continued to live in Mexico, where he studied chemistry and founded the museum named after his grandfather in 1990, located in the popular neighborhood of Coyoacán.
Source: DN
