Preface¶
Core Argument¶
Esteban Vsievolod Volkov’s preface to a new edition of Trotsky’s My Life serves both as a personal memoir and a political intervention, aimed squarely at re-establishing historical truth against the “sea of confusion, falsifications and alterations” generated by Stalinism and capitalist exploitation. The core argument is that Stalinism and Bolshevism are not identical; Stalin’s regime was a bureaucratic usurpation that systematically destroyed Lenin’s party, and Trotsky’s life and death represent the authentic continuity of revolutionary Marxism. Volkov, as the last surviving witness of Trotsky’s final years in Mexico, provides intimate testimony to refute the slanders and distortions that have accumulated around that period.
The preface draws heavily on Volkov’s own experience as a thirteen-year-old living in the Coyoacán household. He describes not a fortress, as is often claimed, but a half-ruined house where Trotsky himself cleaned a septic well with a pickaxe, refusing all privileges. The security system was rudimentary—wires that pigeons frequently set off. This domestic detail serves to humanise Trotsky while also underscoring the vulnerability of the household. Volkov recounts Trotsky’s premonitory warning to a young guard, Sheldon Hart, that leaving a door open was an unforgivable mistake; Hart was later kidnapped in the first assassination attempt. The Stalinist press in Mexico, funded by Moscow roubles, is accused of preparing the ground for murder, and Trotsky’s laconic remark that journalists would soon “exchange their pens for the machine gun” is cited as grimly prophetic.
The narrative centres on two assassination attempts. The first, on 24 May 1940, was a machine-gun assault led by the painter Alfaro Siqueiros; Trotsky survived only because Natalia pushed him under a table. The second, on 20 August 1940, succeeded via the GPU agent Ramón Mercader (alias Jackson). Volkov’s account of returning from school to find the house in chaos is stark and unembellished. He contrasts the hysterical, beaten Mercader with Trotskyists in Stalin’s camps who died singing the Internationale—a polemical distinction between conscious revolutionaries and “hired gangsters.”
The preface also engages in a broader theoretical polemic. Volkov insists that what failed in Russia was not socialism but a “monstrous totalitarian-bureaucratic caricature,” and that Trotsky’s final years were devoted to building a new revolutionary vanguard to defend the heritage of October. The closing invocation of Trotsky’s testament—with its famous affirmation that “life is beautiful”—is used to frame the entire revolutionary project as worth any sacrifice. Volkov’s tone is that of a partisan historian, writing to rescue a martyred tradition from the “refuse bin of history” to which Stalinism has been consigned.