트로츠키 손자가 회상하는 트로츠키의 죽음

by 볼셰비키-레닌주의자 posted Dec 24, 2012
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볼코프는 72년 전 8월 20일 학교를 마치고 집에 돌아와, 얼음꼬챙이에 머리를 강타당한 그의 할아버지를 발견했을 때를 회상하며, “공포가 차오르는 것을 느꼈다.”고 말한다. 트로츠키를 살해하려는 스탈린의 오랜 시도 끝에 일어난 일이었다.…집에 들어서면서 어른들이 물러서라고 하기 전까지, 그는 치명적인 상처를 입고 마루에 쓰러져 있는 할아버지를 보았다.

…손자 볼코프는 “그의 삶은 대단히 완성된 것이었다. 그는 사상과 그 사상의 실현에 헌신했다.”고 말한다.…

트로츠키는 1937년 오랜 망명 생활 끝에 멕시코로 왔고,…그 당시 트로츠키는 소비에트에서 사회주의를 어디로 이끌 것인가를 둘러싼 스탈린과의 전투에서 패배한 것만이 아니라, 4명의 자식과 다른 많은 친척들을 잃었다. 그러나 2년 뒤에 도착한 당시 13살의 볼코프는 할아버지의 의기소침한 모습을 볼 수 없었다. “그는 항상 생명력과 에너지가 충만했다. 그는 사회주의의 승리가 필연적이고 회피할 수 없으며 절대적인 것이라는 굉장히 이례적이고 전염성 높은 자신감으로 가득 차 있었다.”라고 볼코프는 회상한다.

…멕시코에 도착하기 이전, 볼코프는 얄타, 모스크바, 베를린, 비엔나, 파리 그리고 터키의 섬에 살았었다. 그 과정에서 그의 아버지는 총살당하고 어머니는 자살하고 이모는 결핵으로 죽었고 그의 친할머니는 시베리아로 유배되었다. 한 때 같이 살았던 볼코프의 삼촌 역시 살해당했다.

…1940년 5월 24일 멕시코 벽화가이자 스탈린주의자인 데이비드 알파로 시퀘이로스가 이끄는 20명가량의 총잡이가 집안으로 쳐들어왔을 때, 세 방향에서 날아드는 총탄을 피해 볼코프는 침대 밑으로 몸을 숨겼다. 옆방에서는 트로츠키의 아내 세도바가 수면제에 취해 자는 트로츠키를 구석에 밀어붙이고 자신의 몸으로 감싸고 있었다.

그 날 이후 집은 철문과 감시탑으로 방어를 했고 외출은 금지되었다. 하지만 유머를 잃지는 않았다. “나타샤, 그들은 우리에게 하루의 삶을 더 허락했소.”라고 농을 하는 것으로, 트로츠키는 거의 매일의 아침을 시작했다. “나의 할아버지는 다음 공격이 있을 것이라는 것을 알고 있었다. 문제는 그것이 어디에서 올 것인가였다.”

안에서부터였다. 스탈린주의 암살자는 믿을 만한 내부 모임의 구성원과 몇 년 전부터 집안에 들어올 수 있는 방법을 만들었다. “아주 잘 짜인 일이었다.”며 볼코프는 감탄한다. “그들에 비하면 우리는 어린애 같았다.”

…“자본주의는 인류가 직면한 문제를 전혀 해결할 수 없는 총제적 재앙이다. 그것은 낡은 체제이다.”…

올해에도 옛집 정원에 망치와 낫으로 장식된 혁명가의 무덤 옆에서 간소한 추모식이 치러질 것이다. 지금은 박물관이 된 이 집은 더 이상 모퉁이에 있는 칼로의 집에서부터 이어지는 긴 추모행렬을 자랑하지 않는다. 이러한 수수함이 볼코프를 불편하게 하는 것 같지는 않다. 볼코프는, 미래 세대는 트로츠키에게 합당한 자리를 내어줄 것이라고 믿는다. 그의 할아버지가 아마 자랑스러워 할, 가차 없는 역사의 흐름에 대한 확고한 믿음으로, “우리는 조급하지 않다.”라고 그는 말한다.

아래 주소로 들어가면, 트로츠키 손자의 인터뷰 동영상을 볼 수 있습니다. 신문 기사보다 풍부한 내용을 담고 있습니다.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2012/aug/20/trotsky-assassination-remembered-grandson-video


Trotsky's murder remembered by grandson, 72 years on

Esteban Volkov recalls returning from school to find Stalin's assassins had struck in the family's Mexico City home

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/aug/19/trotsky-last-day-by-grandson#start-of-comments


Esteban Volkov recalls the life and death of his grandfather Leon Trotsky. Source: guardian.co.uk Link to this videoEsteban 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."

Delivered in the same pleasant garden where so much happened that day, Volkov's account of the last chapter of his grandfather's life provides a glimpse of the person behind the legend, as well as a hint of everyday normality that somehow survived the ideological fervour, historical drama and family tragedy of those extraordinary years.

Trotsky arrived in Mexico in 1937 after nearly a decade of wandering exile on the other side of the Atlantic, granted political asylum by the post-revolutionary government of President Lázaro Cárdenas at the behest of muralist Diego Rivera. By then Trotsky had not only lost the battle to direct the course of socialism in the Soviet Union to Stalin, but also all four of his children, and many other relatives besides. But Volkov, who got to Mexico two years later at the age of 13, says his grandfather never appeared downcast. "He was always full of life and energy," he recalls. "He was filled with a quite extraordinary and contagious confidence that the coming of [authentic] socialism was inevitable, inescapable and absolute."

Volkov also remembers Trotsky – the hard-nosed Bolshevik blamed for the brutal suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion – as a loving and attentive grandfather, when he wasn't shut away with his work. Most of his working hours were spent on a biography of Stalin, because he had been given a substantial advance in dollars, or planning the one he really wanted to write about Lenin.

The Old Man, as he was known in the household, would rise early to feed the chickens and rabbits he kept at the bottom of the garden, and then submerge himself in his work, stopping only for short naps and collective meals. Sometimes Volkov says he would go into the study to be with his grandfather for a while. He smiles at the memory of a game of chess in which he was roundly beaten. But Trotsky deliberately kept his grandson away from the political debates that reverberated around the house, as if to protect him from the terrible costs they had already exacted on his young life.

By the time he arrived in Mexico, Volkov had lived in Yalta, Moscow, Berlin, Vienna, Paris and on a Turkish island. Along the way his father was shot and his mother killed herself, his aunt had died of TB, and his grandmother was deported to Siberia. Volkov's uncle, with whom he lived for a while, was also killed. As well as Trotsky and Natalia Sedova, his second wife, Volkov shared his new Mexican home with about seven secretaries and guards he describes as "a large family". Most of them were American and all of them foreign, to avoid any suggestion that Trotsky was breaking his promise to stay out of local politics.

By then the household no longer had the bohemian air once provided by Rivera and Frida Kahlo. Volkov says the split was rooted in "political differences", rather than the much-rumoured romance between the revolutionary and the painter. He deems such talk irrelevant, given Kahlo's penchant "for sleeping with everyone".

But there were still games in the garden on Sundays, trips to the countryside to collect cacti, and outings to the cinema – at least until 24 May 1940, when about 20 gunmen burst into the house, led by Mexican muralist and Stalinist David Alfaro Siqueiros.

Volkov cowered behind his bed while bullets flew from three sides. In the next room Sedova pushed her husband – doped up with sleeping pills – into a corner, shielding him with her body.

The house was subsequently fortified with metal doors and watchtowers and the outings were banned, but some of the good humour remained. "Natasha, they have given us one more day of life," Volkov remembers Trotsky joking most mornings. "My grandfather knew that the next attack would be soon. The question was where from."

It came from inside. A Stalinist agent had wormed his way into the house through an affair started years before with a trusted member of the inner circle. "It was very well done," Volkov says with a hint of admiration. "We were like children compared to them."

Volkov is suddenly mournful as he remembers the "lonely and empty" period that followed, but describes himself as a lucky man who saw history unfold before him and then the chance of a tranquil and rewarding career as a research chemist and a happy marriage with children. Three of his four daughters – a poet, a statistician and a doctor – still live in Mexico, while the fourth is now the head of the national institute of drug abuse in the US.

Volkov says he is at peace with having let the family revolutionary tradition drop, but he believes that radical change along the lines laid out by his grandfather remains necessary: "Capitalism is a total disaster, completely unable to solve humanity's problems. It is an obsolete system." This year, as on every anniversary of Trotsky's death, a small commemoration is planned beside the revolutionary's small tomb decorated with a hammer and sickle and set in the garden of the old house. Now a museum, it does not boast the queues that form outside Kahlo's house around the corner. Not that the modesty of it all seems to bother Volkov, who predicts that future generations will give Trotsky his rightful place. "We are in no hurry," he says with the kind of confidence in inexorable historical processes that would do his grandfather proud.


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