Trotsky's murder remembered by grandson, 72 years on
Esteban Volkov remembers sensing the worst as soon as he saw unusual activity outside the Mexico City home he shared with his exiled grandfather, Leon Trotsky. Bitter experience and a scientific inclination left little room to hope for anything else in the teenager's mind.
"I felt the anxiety rise. The fear," says Volkov, recalling that day 72 years ago on 20 August when he came home from school to find that his grandfather had been struck in the head with an ice pick – the culmination of Joseph Stalin's long campaign to assassinate him. "It would have been going against the laws of probability for us to be lucky again. It would have defied mathematics."
That afternoon – 20 August 1940 – Volkov entered the garden, passing an agitated guard with his pistol drawn, to find the assassin wailing in a corner, beaten up by police. Entering the house, he caught sight of his fatally wounded grandfather on the floor, before being shooed away.
As his life slipped away, the founder of the Red Army who had become a thorn in the side of Stalin's regime, had managed to choke out an order to prevent his grandson getting too close to the bloody scene. "His was a very complete life," the 86-year-old Volkov says, summing up what it all means to him now. "He dedicated it to his ideas and, above all, to putting them into practice."
full: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/aug/19/trotsky-last-day-by-grandson
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