San Francisco Examiner Trotsky grandson watched history unfold

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4 ANNIVERSARY SUPPLEMENT OF THE EXAMINER STAFF The grandson of Leon Trotsky, in town to support efforts to clear Trotsky's name, was present for a momentous piece of history - his grandfather's assassination.

Vsevolod ("Seva" for short) Volkov said in an interview with The Examiner that as Trotsky's 14 year-old grandson he saw the scene on Aug. 20, 1940, through a crack in the dining room door. He was not permitted in the room.

"Keep Seva away. He shouldn't see this," said the dying Trotsky, lying on the dining room floor with an inch-deep bead wound sustained when an assassin struck him with an ice ax.

There is revived interest now in Trotsky, a key figure in the Russian Revolution, an intellectual giant and a brilliant speaker and writer who was also the leader of the Red Army.

In Mikhail Gorbachev's Soviet Union, talk is rife that the Kremlin may "rehabilitate" Trotsky -cleanse his name of the evils charged to him by the tyrant Stalin, who forced him into exile in 1929 and then, as historians believe, had him murdered in Mexico.

The main newspaper of the Soviet Young Communists League has stated that Trotsky "was neither a spy nor a murderer" and was not guilty of any crimes. While his political views are still unacceptable, this important newspaper said, they should be published as part of the historical record.

Such comments are viewed as a possible signal that Trotsky's legal rehabilitation is forthcoming. Of those smeared by Stalin, the most prominent was Trotsky.

Already such stalwart Bolshevik figures as Nikolai Bukharin, Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoview have been cleared of Stalinist crimes, though none has been re stored to political grace.

But on that fateful day in 1940, the young Volkov had just returned from school to the guarded, fortress like Trotsky home outside Mexico City.

"I knew something was wrong, so many policemen, so many peo ple. My grandfather, on the floor, was surrounded by Natalya (his second wife and by family and comrades. He was still able to talk. He he told Natalya to keep me away. Then the ambulance came, he was taken away and the next day he died."

Volkov, whose unpronounceable Russian first name later was VOLKOV LIVED WITH HIS GRANDFATHER IN MEXICO CITY As a child, he saw aftermath of an assassin's attack on Trotsky changed by his Mexican foster parents to Esteban (Steven), has matter-of-factly recalled that scene many times in recent months. As the most accessible of Trotsky's survivors, he bas become a celebrity.

He has spoken in New York, Mexico City, London (by telephone) and elsewhere, and he spoke Saturday night at a Socialist Action program in San Francisco. He has been pursued by the media, including Soviet correspondents.

In Mexico City, where he lives, Volkov is a chemist. Until recently he did not participate in politics. He honored the memory of his grandfather without the political trappings. At 62 he is a grandfather himself, lean and rawboned.

He came into prominence on a fabricated story, he said. A Paris magazine reported last November that he had been invited to Moscow for the 70th anniversary celebration of the Bolshevik Revolution.

The story produced calls from correspondents all over the world, Volkov said. "I had to tell them there was no official confirmation ..that the story was invented."

But his quiet, uneventful life had been shattered. As his grandfather's chief defender — "a duty I feel deeply" — he appears at meetings and rallies, focusing on Trots ky but also asking "rehabilitation" for all of Stalin's victims.

"Now, after so many years of darkness, after so many lies, distortions and falsifications about my grandfather, finally it seems a window is opening," he said. "We are very expectant."

He called himself a non-practicing Socialist.

"I agree with the ideals of socialism and I think Marxism is the only rational and scientific method for social change. I would say there is no other social technology available," he said.

He shook his head in dispute with historical accounts that depict Trotsky as harsh and authoritarian.

"He was a very warm and friendly person," Volkov said. "Of course, in the field of politics, be was very tough, very demanding. He was one of the greatest Marxists, on the same level with Engels and Lenin."

To a 13 year-old boy, life in the high-walled Trotsky home was exciting. The visitors' list was long and impressive. Comrades came "from around the world," Volkov said.

But he valued most the trips he made with his grandfather to cactus fields outside Mexico City. Trotsky, the social activist, the visionary, loved cactus. Volkov recalled that his grandfather carried heavy loads of the plants back with him, refusing aid from younger men. He believed that all work had to be shared, Volkov said.

— Vsevolod Volkov Volkov first lived with his grandfather in Turkey in 1931. The next year, when he was 6, he was declared a "stateless" person by the Stalin regime. His mother, suffering from tuberculosis and unstable emotionally, killed herself.

The young Volkov was packed off to Berlin, then Vienna and finally to Paris to live with Trotsky's son, Lev Sedov. When Sedov died mysteriously after an appendix opera. tion, his young charge went to live with his grandfather in Mexico.

In that year, 1839, the Trotsky residence was attacked by would-be assassins attired in military uniforms. Volkov, hiding under his bed, suffered a superficial wound. Trotsky and his wife were unharmed. Afterward the old Bolshevik joked about getting up each day to find that he was still alive. A year later he was murdered.

In Isaac Deutscher's classic trilo gy on Trotsky, there is a photograph of the 13-year-old Volkov with his grandfather and Natalya in their Mexican rock garden. Behind his tortoise shell glasses, Trots ky appears lost in thought as befits a deep thinker.

But Volkov said his grandfather was not preoccupied and could be interrupted — but never when he was working. "He was very emphatic: you had to be respectful of his work." ranks. They have been able to confuse, mislead, and distract the oppressed working classes from their revolutionary goals. As the ship of socialism had in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels its two greatest designers and constructors, it also had two expert captains, V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky, to direct it across the foggy sea of conciliations, class collaboration, and reformism of the social democracy. They were able to direct the craft toward its true revolutionary road, arriving successfully at its port in October 1917 in Russia with its first triumphant revolution.

The revolutionary euphoria didn't last long. Ten years after the glorious October 1917, began the greatest betrayals and distortions of the Marxist principles of internationalism and proletarian dictatorship expressed in workers' democracy, disintegration of the oppressive state, and abolition of human exploitation. These betrayals and distortions were brought about by the Stalinist counterrevolution, which consolidated itself during the lowering of the revolutionary tide of the exhausted and depoliticized masses in the context of the terrible scarcities and isolation of the Soviet Union. The cruel and bloody Czarist dictatorship of ancient Russia showed its repulsive face during the Stalinist dictatorship and its new court of ambitious mercenaries.

Lenin once said that the great revolutionaries, after death, are frequently transformed into harmless icons, canonized by the oppressors to cheat the oppressed masses, castrating their ideas and destroying their revolutionary cutting edge. This became especially true in his own case at the hands of the Stalinist counterrevolution. To the innumerable distortions and falsifications of the Marxist-Leninist ideals, one has to add the endless list of betrayals and crimes.

No justification before history The pain and suffering brought upon hundreds of millions of Soviet citizens by the backwardness in which they lived for more than half a century and by the stupid enclosure in a schizophrenic world of total misinformation, saturated with lies and monstrous repression brought about by the bloody bureaucratic dictatorship, cannot, nor will ever have a justification before history. Nor will the authors of such aberrations obtain forgiveness.

The Stalinist counterrevolution dedicated itself to the extermination of the revolutionary vanguard of the working classes mainly inside the Soviet Union, and on a smaller scale outside its borders through its satellite parties and the executioners and Leon Trotsky bloody GPU [Stalin's secret police]. It constantly established treaties with the working-class enemies, aborting many revolutionary movements and facilitating the road for the triumph of Nazism and the Second World War.

The wounds bestowed upon the revolutionary Marxist Leninist vanguard and the exploited masses of mankind were too severe and painful. Because of this, many regimes of exploitation consolidated themselves for long periods of time, and the coming forth of a true socialism was postponed in the world.

The oppressed classes and their revolutionary vanguard had many ruthless visible enemies and others hiding inside their ranks. Fortunately, though, they also had men and women of great minds and of unusual heroism and dedication who gave their whole minds, their creative energy, and even their lives for the struggle for the abolition of exploitation.

Indomitable revolutionary

Leon Trotsky, indomitable revolutionary, great Marxist theoretician, close friend in struggle of Lenin and key element for the triumph of the Soviet Revolution, was one of these men.

His dedication, absolute loyalty to the socialist cause, mixed with his lucid and deep Marxist appreciation of his historical milieu, made him one of the first to understand in its whole severity the Stalinist bureaucratic counterrevolution; that is, the gradual transformation of the true Bolshevik Party, creator of the revolution, into a gigantic and obedient bureaucratic apparatus unconditionally under the orders of Stalin.

In 1923, Trotsky organized the Left Opposition along with other loyal and vigorous revolutionaries. He started the heroic struggle inside the party to restore the true Marxism Leninism, which was the ideological basis for the October insurrection, in defense of the exploited people.

Trotsky tried to save the Russian Revolution from its total distortion and deviation, but the counterrevolution was irresistible, and the Left Opposition, which wielded a difficult and heroic struggle, was ruthlessly repressed. It went underground, and its leaders were sent to Siberia in 1928 and expelled from Russia in 1929. While Marx studied capitalism from all its angles, disguises, and contradictions, Leon Trotsky studied the Stalinist bureaucracy exhaustively with a Marxist methodology in its morphology and physiology. Half a century later, it is almost impossible to modify his rigorous analysis and concepts of the Stalinist Bonapartism. Today Stalinism can hardly fool even a small child.

Trotsky's most important task In 1933, Trotsky considered it to be a lost cause to try to straighten the wayward roads of the Third International, which had definitively exchanged Marxism for pragmatism and opportunism and had totally abandoned and betrayed the working class. Leon Trotsky gave himself to what he considered the most important task of his life: the creation of the Fouth International. This was a task which culminated in 1938, two years before he was assassinated. Trotsky considered essential the creation of a new proletarian vanguard that could bravely wield the banner of Marxism Leninism and that could be prepared to take action in history. From the time of the Left Opposition, and then later in the Fourth International, Trotskyists have always been in the front lines of the fight against oppression.

Trotskyism is today the main crucible of Marxist thought and action in modern history.

I am moved by a deep emotion, by the fact that at this moment we have here destiny....' among us comrades, companions in struggle of Leon Trotsky and James P. Cannon, the pillars of the Trotskyist movement in the United States. They are for all of us and for the new generation a living example of courage, of full confidence in Marxism, and absolute loyalty to the working classes. I want to convey my profound admiration and respect to all of them.

The duty of the new generation of revolutionary Marxists will be to retake the banner of the fallen in order to continue with the fight for socialism and reach it. In the words of Leon Trotsky: "Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression, and violence and enjoy it to the full."

Clear Trotsky's name!

I would like to conclude my talk by taking up another subject: the question of the rehabilitations in the Soviet Union If Gorbachev's glasnost [openness] is to have some credibility, it is vital that there should be no forbidden areas. Leon Trotsky must be now be rid of all the avalanche of false accusations, lies, slanders, and falsifications which have been leveled at him and his ideas in the Soviet Union and the other deformed workers' states for more than half a century.

Justice strictly demands that Trotsky be restored to his rightful place in the history of the Soviet Union. His works, writings, and political theses must be published, -Esteban Volkov freely discussed, and objectively evaluated, as must the writings of all the others who played a role in the Russian Revolution.

The analysis and basic ideas of Marxism have in no way lost their applicability. Capitalist society has been able to generate a wealth of knowledge and scientific development. Yet it has not found—nor will it ever find—a formula to eradicate hunger, misery, and injustice from our planet. On the contrary, it has placed the human race on the edge of an infernal atomic conflagration.

The only other alternative before us is a socio-economic system in which humankind can master its own destiny and is not just an object to be used and discarded. Real socialism or barbarism, that is our dilemma.

I would like to end up with these words: I had a very difficult childhood, very lonely and full of suffering. But today, after more than half a century, I feel like a privileged human being. I had one of the most interesting and passionate lives to have been an actor and witness to one of the most important historical moments in contemporary history.

I feel that, in a way, I am a very lucky human being to be able to see, after these 50 years of absolute darkness, a change underway in history. I feel we are starting to see some light. Today I see closer the possibility of the advent of socialism.

----- pull-quotes -----

said, 'Don't kill Jackson (the assas sin). He has to talk,' and after that

'I think Marxism is the only rational and scientific method for social change'