2023-06-20 16:10:12
Like him, we continue to keep his grandfather’s legacy alive
PSTU Brazil newsroom
On June 16, at the age of 97, in Mexico, Esteban Volkov, grandson of the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, died at the age of 97. Esteban was more than one of the countless witnesses and victims of Stalinist terror, whose family was persecuted and decimated, Esteban was a tireless guardian of the memory and legacy of his grandfather and of the Russian revolution.
His own life and career are historical records of what Stalinism meant. He was the son of Zinaida Volkova, Trotsky’s eldest daughter. He was born in 1926, in the Ukraine, at a time when the then Left Opposition, headed by his grandfather, was already facing harsh persecution for its fight against the Stalinist bureaucracy. He watched as his father was sent and killed in a Gulag [NdT: campo de concentración]and how his mother committed suicide in the face of Stalin’s persecution.
In adolescence, he went to live with his grandfather, then exiled in Mexico, in the city of Coyoacán. There he witnessed Stalin’s final attack on his family and the brutal assassination of Trotsky, in 1940, by the Stalinist agent Ramón Mercader.
He settled permanently in the Latin American country, graduated as a chemical engineer and participated in research for the development of the contraceptive pill. But not even the trauma caused by Stalinist barbarism was able to separate him from the fight for socialism. In the 1990s, he transformed his grandfather’s old house into the Museo Casa de Leon Trotsky, and dedicated the last decades of his life to the effort to keep alive the legacy, ideas, and principles of the revolution. and Trotskyism.
Esteban died, but throughout the world, the principles of the revolution and of Marxism, of which Trotsky was his legitimate heir, remain more alive than ever. Neither Stalinism, nor imperialism nor reformism or any other enemy of the revolution and the struggle of the proletariat were able to put an end to it.
In one of his last interviews, he recalled the principles that guided his grandfather’s actions:
“He had absolute faith that socialism would determine the future of humanity. He had no doubts. But the clock of history ticks more slowly than we would like. Human life is very short compared to historical cycles. But it is unquestionable that humanity needs a different form of social organization if it wants to survive.”
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