Zinaida Volkova
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Zinaida Volkova (née Bronstein, Russian: Зинаида Волкова) (March 27, 1901, Siberia - January 5, 1933, Berlin) was a Russian Marxist. She was Leon Trotsky's first daughter by his first wife, Aleksandra Sokolovskaya.
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[edit] Biography
Zinaida Volkova was born in Siberia where her parents were living in exile at the time. As a child, she was mostly raised by Trotsky's parents, David and Anna Bronstein, since her parents parted ways in 1902 and were both revolutionaries with necessarily erratic lifestyles.
After the Russian Revolution of 1917, Zinaida married Zakhar Moglin (? - ?, perished during the Great Purges) and had a daughter with him, Aleksandra Moglina (1923 - 1989). She then married Platon Ivanovich Volkov (1898 - 1936), a Russian Trotskyist. The couple had a son, Vsevolod (dimunitive Seva, then Esteban) Volkov, who was born in 1926. Platon Volkov was exiled to Siberia in 1928, but returned from the exile in the early 1930s. He was re-arrested in 1935 and disappeared in the Gulag. Zinaida took care of her younger sister, Nina Nevelson, for three months in 1928 while the latter was dying of tuberculosis.
In 1931 Joseph Stalin allowed Zinaida Volkova to leave the Soviet Union to join her father, Leon Trotsky, in exile. However, she was allowed to take one child with her, Vsevolod. Suffering from tuberculosis and depression, she committed suicide in Berlin in January 5th, 1933. In Zina, a film by Ken McMullen, the suggestion is that the relationship between Zinaida and her father, Leon Trotsky, mirrors the Greek tragedy of Antigone - an idea also substantially developed by the work of the great historian Isaac Deutscher.[1]
[edit] Children
Zinaida Volkova's daughter Aleksandra remained in the USSR and was raised by her father, Zakhar Moglin. After Moglin's exile in 1932, she was taken care of by her grandmother, Aleksandra Sokolovskaya, who was in turn exiled in 1935 and perished in the labor camps. Finally, Aleksandra herself was exiled to Siberia, but survived and returned to Moscow after Stalin's death. She died of cancer in 1989.
Volkova's son, Esteban, first stayed with Trotsky in Turkey, then with Trotsky's son Lev Sedov in Germany, Austria and finally Paris. After Lev Sedov's death in 1938, his girlfriend wanted to keep the child. Trotsky sued for custody and won the case, but Sedov's girlfriend went into hiding with the boy. Eventually, Trotsky's friends found Esteban and sent him to Mexico, where he re-joined Trotsky. After Trotsky was assassinated by Stalin's agent in 1940, Esteban remained in Mexico, where he became an engineer and had four daughters. He is the current custodian of the Trotsky museum in Mexico City.
[edit] Notes
- ^ see The Prophet Outcast: Trotsky, 1929-1940 (1963) and Jacquy Chemouni Le Père: son attitude à l'égard des troubles mentaux et la psychanalyse de sa fille Zina (à travers sa correspondance inédite). Cahiers Léon Trotsky 2001: 74, pp. 39-94, repr. in: Trotsky et la psychanalyse. Ed. In Press, Paris 2004, pp. 213-262; some details also in: Julijana Ranc Alexandra Ramm-Pfemfert. Ein Gegenleben. Ed. Nautilus, Hamburg 2003
