Overview
Zinaida Lvovna Volkova (née Bronstein; ; 27 March 1901 – 5 January 1933) was a Russian Marxist. She was Leon Trotsky's first daughter by his first wife, Aleksandra Sokolovskaya, a Marxist from Nikolaev (Ukraine). She was raised by her aunt Yelizaveta, sister of Trotsky, after their parents divorced. Her younger sister, Nina, stayed with her mother.
She married twice, and had a daughter by her first husband and a son by her second. Both husbands died during the Great Purges. In January 1931, Volkova was allowed to leave Russia to visit her father in his exile in Turkey, taking only her younger child, her son. She left her daughter in the care of the girl's father, her first husband. Suffering from tuberculosis and depression, and prevented from returning to the Soviet Union, Volkova committed suicide in Berlin in January 1933.
Biography
Bronstein was born in Siberia, where her parents were living in exile at the time. Her sister Nina was born the next year. As a child, she and her younger sister Nina were raised mostly by her paternal grandparents, David and Anna Bronstein. The girls' parents parted ways in 1902 and as revolutionaries, were often traveling or living in hiding. After the Russian Revolution of 1917, Bronstein married Zakhar Borisovich Moglin (1897–1937). They had a daughter, Alexandra Moglina (1923–1989). They divorced in the mid-1920s. Moglin died during the Great Purges, and Alexandra was exiled to Kazakhstan from 1949–56.
Soon after her divorce, she married her second husband, Platon Ivanovich Volkov (1898–1936), a member of the Trotsky-led Left Opposition. The couple had a son, Vsevolod (diminutive Seva, later Esteban), in 1926. Volkov was exiled to Siberia in 1928, but returned in January 1931. Volkova was about to leave Russia for Turkey with their son by that time, to visit her father in his Turkey exile. Volkov was re-arrested in 1935 during the Great Purges and disappeared in the Gulag in 1936. For three months in 1928, Volkova had taken care of her younger sister Nina, while the latter was dying of tuberculosis (TB), then incurable. Nina had married a man with the surname of Nevelson.
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