Biography
Zinaida Lvovna Bronstein was born in Siberia where her parents were living in exile at the time. As a child, she was mostly raised by Trotsky's parents, David and Anna Bronstein, since her parents parted ways in 1902 and were both revolutionaries with necessarily erratic lifestyles.
After the Russian Revolution of 1917, Zinaida married Zakhar Borisovich Moglin (1897 - 1937, perished during the Great Purges) and had a daughter with him, Alexandra Moglina (1923 - 1989). She then married Platon Ivanovich Volkov (1898 - 1936), a Russian Trotskyist. The couple had a son, Vsevolod (diminutive Seva, later Esteban) Volkov, who was born in 1926. Platon Volkov was exiled to Siberia in 1928, but returned from the exile in the early 1930s. He was re-arrested in 1935 and disappeared in the Gulag. Zinaida took care of her younger sister Nina, for three months in 1928 while the latter was dying of tuberculosis.
In 1931 Joseph Stalin allowed Zinaida to leave the Soviet Union to join her father, Leon Trotsky, in exile. However, she was allowed to take one child with her, Vsevolod. Suffering from tuberculosis and depression, she committed suicide in Berlin on January 5, 1933 in spite of a psychotherapy by the famous Berlin psychotherapist Arthur Kronfeld before mediated by Alexandra Ramm-Pfemfert, wife of Franz Pfemfert, the founder of the expressionistic journal Die Aktion, and translator of books of Trotsky. In Zina, a film by Ken McMullen, the suggestion is that the relationship between Zinaida and her father, Leon Trotsky, mirrors the Greek tragedy of Antigone - an idea also substantially developed by the work of the great historian Isaac Deutscher.
Read more about this topic: Zinaida Volkova
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