Stalin's agents killed Trotsky and members of his family; he sealed his exile papers at Harvard until 1980, and the grandson who survived kept his house as a museum

Leon Trotsky lived in exile from 1929 and was granted asylum in Mexico in 1937. Stalin's purge reached his family. His son Sergei Sedov, an engineer, was arrested in 1935 and is believed to have been shot on 29 October 1937. His daughter Zinaida killed herself in Berlin. His son Lev Sedov was found dead in a Paris hospital in 1938; historians largely believe Stalin's agents poisoned him. Zinaida's husband, Platon Volkov, disappeared in Soviet prisons. Her son Vsevolod, born in 1926, was sent to his grandfather in Mexico. In May 1940 gunmen fired into the bedroom where the boy slept, and he was shot in the foot. In August 1940 Ramón Mercader, an NKVD agent, killed Trotsky in the house. Harvard College Library had bought most of Trotsky's papers from him with funds from John Wood Blodgett Jr.; they reached Cambridge around the time of the killing. Trotsky and his wife, Natalia Sedova, required that the Exile Papers stay closed until 1980, to protect friends and associates from reprisals. That section, about 17,500 items, opened on 2 January 1980. The grandson, renamed Esteban Volkov, raised four daughters in the Coyoacán house and opened it as a museum in 1990. He did not see his half-sister Aleksandra, left in the Soviet Union, for 57 years. He died in June 2023, aged 97. The museum is run by the Mexican state, and the papers are at Harvard's Houghton Library.