Lev Trotsky’s Grandson Shares Exclusive Details of Revolutionary’s Fate Sputnik
go to original August 22, 2017

August 21 marked 77 years since the death of prominent Russian revolutionary Lev Trotsky who was assassinated by Spanish-born NKVD agent Ramon Mercader in his house near Mexico City. Sputnik talked to Trotsky’s grandson Esteban Volkov who was in the house when that fatal attack occurred.

“I came to Mexico a year before the assassination. In fact, there were two attempts on his life: on May 24, 1940, when a group of Stalinists led by artist David Alfaro Siqueiros stormed into the house firing indiscriminately into the rooms where Trotsky’s secretaries and assistants worked. My granddad survived by a miracle when [his wife] Natalia hid him in a dark corner,” Esteban Volkov told Sputnik Mundo.

“I was in the next room and they fired a long burst of automatic gunfire at the bed I slept on. Luckily, they missed and I escaped with just a small scratch on my toe.”

He added that Lev Trotsky knew that the respite Stalin had given him wouldn’t last long and that new attempts on his life were bound to follow.

“Finally, Ramon Mercader, a Catalan-born NKVD agent got chummy with a young US Trotskyite woman and befriended members of Granddad’s security guards. One day he asked my grandfather to look at one of the articles he wrote. Next time, as Granddad was reading his writings, Mercader hit him on the head with an icepick,” Volkov recalled.

“Granddad gave out a loud scream, the bodyguards rushed in and overpowered the assassin,” he added.

Read the rest at Sputnik

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