Zinaida Volkova

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.

Suffering from tuberculosis and depression, and prevented from returning to the Soviet Union, Volkova committed suicide in Berlin in January 1933.

[citation needed] For three months in 1928, Volkova had taken care of her younger sister Nina, while the latter was dying of tuberculosis (TB), then incurable.

[citation needed] In January 1931, Joseph Stalin allowed Volkova to leave the Soviet Union to join her father, Leon Trotsky, in exile.

She was allowed to take one family member with her, and she took her son Vsevolod with her, leaving her daughter Alexandra in Russia with the girl's father.

She was married to Franz Pfemfert, the founder of Die Aktion, a journal of expressionism, and translator of books by Trotsky.

[4] Volkova's daughter Alexandra (born 1923) remained in the USSR and lived for a year with her father, Zakhar Moglin.

Not long before she died, her brother Esteban (Vsevolod) finally met his sister again after travelling to the Soviet Union from Mexico, but in tragic circumstances where Alexandra was dying of cancer and also couldn't communicate with her brother, as Esteban had forgotten his Russian and Alexandra spoke no Spanish, English or French.

In November 1931, Volkova obtained permission to go to Germany for treatment for TB, accompanied by her half-brother, Lev Sedov (Trotsky's son by his second wife).

In the early days of January 1933, Stalin's agents and Kurt von Schleicher's police decided to expel Volkova from Berlin.

Within a month of Volkova's death, Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party came to power in Germany, causing Lev and Vsevolod to flee to Austria, where they lived until the Austrian Civil War of February 1934.

On 24 May 1940, a failed assassination attempt on Trotsky's life by Stalinist agents, led by David Alfaro Siqueiros, saw Vsevolod shot in the foot.