Esteban Volkov, next to the exhibits in the Museo Casa de León Trotsky, in 2020. Jonás Cortés
He was a man who lived to tell a story. That of a persecution, a betrayal and a murder that didn’t want them to be forgotten. The main protagonists of the story were his grandfather Leon Trotsky and the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, who didn’t stop until he liquidated who he considered his greatest enemy. Esteban Volkov, grandson and executor of the memory of the deposed Russian revolutionary, patiently repeated the story of that crime hundreds, thousands of times throughout his life to anyone who would listen. Last Saturday, that voice and that memory, that of the last witness to one of the most dramatic events of the 20th century, died out forever in the Mexican capital.
Volkov – Esteban to those of us lucky enough to treat him – was 97 years old when he died, but he had long reiterated that he was by far the longest-lived person in his family . Not only his grandfather died under tragic circumstances. His father disappeared into the gulag. His mother eventually committed suicide and was harassed by Stalin’s henchmen. “I have many more years to live to reconcile my family’s life expectancy statistics,” he joked bitterly.
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Visiting the León Trotsky House Museum in the Coyoacán neighborhood with Esteban was like stepping into history. Those of us who felt like his friends would ask him to guide us whenever we received a visitor we wanted to impress. With enormous hospitality – for the museum had also been his home and his greatest legacy – and with infinite kindness, he always showed himself available as long as he had the strength.
Between the walls where his grandfather lived and was murdered, Esteban kept recounting how Ramón Mercader, disguised under the identity of Canadian Frank Jackson, had approached Trotsky, but not directly, but “like he weaves”. he is scratching his net to catch the fly.” On the afternoon of the murder, August 20, 1940, on his way home from school, he had arrived in time to see his grandfather, who was mortally wounded but still conscious . “Put the child away, he mustn’t see it,” were the last words he heard from her. Trotsky tormented himself for hours and died the next day.
The grandson also stopped to show the visitor the dozens of bullet holes that pierced the walls of various rooms, scars from another attack that took place months before the murder. Gunmen from the Mexican Communist Party, disorganized and drunk, attacked the house with gunfire, with only one small casualty: Esteban himself, who fled under his bed, terrified, and wounded his foot.
It was surprising that a person who had experienced such a tragic childhood could instill such moderation and balance. He was also physically in very good condition and his voice sounded like that of a man 20 years his junior. This composure and strength could be attributed to the fact that, as he claimed, he managed to get rid of grudges. It wasn’t hate, but “contempt” he felt for those who had betrayed one of humanity’s greatest ideals.
Esteban always expressed great gratitude for Mexico, the country that welcomed him as a child and where he discovered that life can also be in colour. But he felt like a citizen of a world that still needed Trotsky’s teachings. And he saw the “even more voracious capitalism” of tech companies and the decay of our “beautiful planet” as new and major threats.
In the last years of his life, and while still healthy enough, Esteban continued to cherish his grandfather’s memory. In 2017 he celebrated the publication of a largely unpublished biography of Stalin written by Trotsky when he was assassinated (it was published in Spanish by Lucha de Clases). Two years later, he publicly expressed his rejection of a Netflix series that, in his opinion and according to several historians, insulted and distorted the life of the Red Army creator. “We are facing the second murder of Leon Trotsky,” he wrote me regretfully, but later admitted: “At least the absurd and criminal series fills our museum.”
I met Esteban 11 years ago when, intrigued by the character, I asked him for an interview. At that meeting, he accidentally uttered a sentence and was pleasantly surprised to read that we had given the text that title. In fact, he later reminded me many times that it was a lucky find. Perhaps because the five words that made up that answer explained the very reason that had prompted him to expend so much energy lest the tale of crime and betrayal of which he was the last witness be forgotten: “Without memory there is no future.”
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