San Francisco Examiner: Trotsky grandson watched history unfold

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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 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.

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."

Picture caption

VOLKOV LIVED WITH HIS GRANDFATHER IN MEXICO CITY. As a child, he saw aftermath of an assassin's attack on Trotsky

Pull-quote

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