To me, that bloody and tragic afternoon of the 20th of August still seems to have happened yesterday. I was a young man 14 years of age, Vsevolod (Seva) Esteban Volkov, grandson of Trotsky on my mother's side, and had arrived in Mexico only one year before after a period living with the Rosmers, those close friends of Natalia and Lev Davidovich. I was given the bedroom next to my grandparents and had already had a taste of gunpowder and felt the heat of a bullet grazing my right foot during the first attack on the family led by the Stalinist painter Alfaro Siqueiros and his machine-gunners in the early hours of the 24th of May 1940.
Nearly three months later I was returning home from school in a cheerful frame of mind, walking along the long Vienna Street at the end of which stood the old house. Suddenly I noticed something unusual in the distance: a car obviously badly parked was straggling the dusty way and various uniformed police officers in navy blue and wearing military berets seemed to be standing in the entrance of the house. Such a disturbance was a bit unusual. A sharp pang of anguish gripped my breast as I had a foreboding that something awful had happened in the house and that this time we were not going to be so lucky.
Instinctively I hastened my pace, stepping quickly through the gate which was open, hurrying through the garden, where I bumped into an American comrade, Harold Robins, one of my grandfather's secretaries and bodyguards. He was very agitated, with a revolver in his hand, and could only shout at me in a desperate voice: "Jackson! Jackson!"
At the time I could not grasp the meaning of this hasty exclamation. What had the husband or boyfriend of the American Trotskyist Sylvia Ageloff and friend of the Rosmers and the guards got to do with what was happening? But as I made my way across the garden path towards the house I came across a man with his face covered in blood whom I did not immediately recognise, being held up by two policemen. The man whom I supposed must be the Jackson referred to by Harold, was making a lot of noise, complaining and sobbing, which merged into a kind of howling. He was a real mess.
When I entered the library and looked through the half-open door of the dining-room, I immediately understood the magnitude of the tragedy. My grandfather was lying on the floor with a wound to the head, in a pool of blood, with Natalia and a group of comrades standing around him, applying ice to the wound to stem the flow of blood.
So Jackson - the generous and attentive husband of the Trotskyist comrade Sylvia Ageloff, the man who took the Rosmers in his car to Veracruz when they went back to Europe, and who entertained some of the guards at good restaurants in the centre of Mexico city, the man who displayed a total indifference to politics, and who pretended to have a wealthy Belgian mother who always looked after his material well-being, and a boss overseas who paid juicy commissions for his business deals - was no more than a vulgar agent of the sinister GPU who had wormed his way into the life of the revolutionary leader.
He belonged to that army of murderers and torturers who exercised their reign of terror over the Russian people. These were the shock troops of the counterrevolution, the main pillar of the dictatorship of Stalin and his bureaucracy. They disposed of limitless resources derived from the wealth squeezed from the Soviet working class by the bureaucracy. They were the elite of the elite and the pampered favourites of the dictator.
"My mother is in their hands! They forced me to do it!" Jackson blurted out amidst whimpering and complaints, as the bodyguards, alerted by the first deafening cries of the "Old Man", rushed to the scene of the murder and overcame and beat the assassin. "Jackson!" Lev Davidovich said, as he clung to the door-frame of his office, covered in blood, pointing out the aggressor to Natalia who had come running. It was as if he was trying to say: here it is, Stalin's attack which we were waiting for. With laboured gestures, he tried to point to the study, "Don't kill him - he must talk!" he managed to say while lying on the floor of the dining-room to those who surrounded him. And he was right. This was the best way to shed light on the character of the crime.
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