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| Seva with Trotsky and Natalia Sedova in Coyoacán. [Photo: Museo Casa de León Trotsky] |
It is difficult to
imagine the horrors that the young Seva experienced. He was barely 14 years old when his
grandfather was assassinated. By that time, he had lived through the arrest and
subsequent murder at the hands of the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union, of his father
Platon Volkov, a leading member of the Left Opposition. His mother, Trotsky’s daughter from his first
marriage, Zinaida, committed suicide while trying to get medical attention for
her depression and tuberculosis in Germany.
Seva was taken in by his uncle,
Trotsky’s older son, Leon Sedov. Sedov
was essentially Trotsky’s ambassador to the supporters of the Left Opposition
in Europe and was the linchpin for the creation of the Fourth International. Sedov
was himself assassinated by Stalinist agents in France in 1938. Seva was
reunited with his grandparents in Mexico only after a bitter custody dispute following
the assassination of his uncle. For a young child these series of shocks could
be nothing less than a holocaust on an individual scale. It is therefore all the more remarkable that
Seva did not grow up to be a bitter and depressed individual whose spirit was
broken. Instead, Seva was imbued with the same optimism about the future of
humanity that characterized his grandfather.
I was present at a number
of conferences in the U.S. where Esteban spoke but I only had one brief personal
exchange with him. That was at a
conference on The Legacy of Leon Trotsky and U.S. Trotskyism held at
Fordham University in New York in July of 2008. I spoke to him at the
very end of that conference and only had time to express my appreciation of the
work he had done in keeping the flame of his grandfather’s legacy alive. Even
then, at the advanced age of 82, Esteban had the demeanor of a tall and
handsome man whose eyes expressed both his resolve and his generosity. He
looked far younger than his years. On that occasion my then soon to be partner,
Nina, gave Esteban a flower and he graciously kissed her, in the manner of old-world
etiquette.
I made trips to Coyoacán
on three different occasions. On one of
those trips with my colleague Frank Brenner, we had the good fortune to be
escorted by a guide who had extensive knowledge of the background behind the
struggle to maintain the museum against continuous attempts by the Stalinists
in Mexico to shut it down.
The last time I saw Esteban was virtually, through a
remote video conference at the First International Conference on Trotsky held
in Havana, Cuba in May of 2019. He was
interviewed from the Trotsky Museum by Alan Woods, a long-time scholar of
Trotskyism, a leader of International Marxist Tendency and one of driving
forces behind the new edition of Trotsky’s biography of Stalin. (See our article on announcement of the
publication of the book on Stalin, http://forum.permanent-revolution.org/2016/08/76th-anniversary-of-trotskys.html
and our summary of the last day of the Conference on Trotsky in Havana, http://forum.permanent-revolution.org/2019/06/first-international-academic-meeting-on.html
). In addition to the interview with Esteban,
the Trotsky Museum was one of key backers of the conference in Havana.
An obituary and two interviews conducted by Alan Benjamin
with Esteban Volkov on the subject of Trotsky’s assassination can be found by following
this link : https://socialistorganizer.org/2023/06/17/esteban-seva-volkov-trotskys-grandson-1926-2023/
Esteban Volkov was the
last living witness to Trotsky’s assassination. His presence will be missed.
Alex Steiner, June 18,
2023
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| Esteban (Seva) Volkov in 2012 |
