Esteban Volkov, grandson and guardian of the legacy of Russian communist revolutionary Leon Trotsky, has died in Mexico City, according to the museum he founded.
“Our director, comrade and friend, Mr Esteban Volkov, has left this world at the age of 97,” the Leon Trotsky House Museum announced on its Facebook page.
The museum is located in the house in Mexico City where Trotsky, exiled to Mexico in January 1937, lived until his assassination in August 1940.
Born in Ukraine in 1926, Esteban Volkov arrived in Mexico at the age of 13 thanks to steps taken by his grandfather. His mother, Zinaida – Trotsky’s daughter – had committed suicide in Paris while fleeing Joseph Stalin’s regime, and his father had been sent to the Gulag in the 1930s.
He was considered in Mexico to be the last surviving witness to the assassination of Leon Trotsky, killed by a blow to the head with an ice axe by NKVD [Russian Interior Ministry] secret agent Ramon Mercader.
In an interview with the BBC, Volkov had recounted that he was on his way home from school when he spotted a police car outside the house where he lived with his grandfather, whose bloodied body he then saw on the floor.
After the crime, Volkov continued to live in Mexico, where he studied chemistry and founded the museum in 1990 in Leon Trotsky’s former home in the working-class district of Coyoacan.
Volkov “accomplished the most important task of his life: defending the ideas and career of his grandfather,” the museum said in its statement.
