Did Frida Kahlo and Leon Trotsky have an affair?
The surviving family can be very protective of the reputation of a well-known predecessor. Esteban Volkov, grandson of Leon Trotsky, has more reason than most such descendants to defend his famous forebear. After Lenin, Trotsky was the most important leader of the Bolshevik revolution in 1917. But, vigorously opposed to Stalin’s bureaucratic dictatorship, he was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1929, constantly vilified and finally assassinated in 1940. I met Volkov in the same Mexico City house he shared all those years ago, as an adolescent, with his grandfather and his grandfather’s second wife, Natalia, plus several bodyguards and secretaries. The same home from which Trotsky kept up his ceaseless struggle against Stalin. To preserve his grandfather’s memory, Volkov has since turned the house into the Leon Trotsky museum. Volkov is in his mid-70s, slim and very fit-looking. A retired chemist, he is widowed, with four daughters and five grandchildren. He is at first reserved, and s
