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Aleksandra Sokolovskaya
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Aleksandra L'vovna Sokolovskaya (Russian: Александра Львовна Соколовская) (1872 - 1938?) was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and Leon Trotsky's first wife. She perished in the Great Purges no earlier than 1938.
Sokolovskaya was a Marxist revolutionary in Nikolaev, Ukraine in the 1890s. She was Leon Trotsky's first wife in 1899-1902, while the two of them were in prison and in Siberian exile together. They had two daughters, Nina Nevelson (1901) and Zinaida Volkova (1902).
When Trotsky considered escaping from Siberia (alone, of necessity) in the summer of 1902, Sokolovskaya fully endorsed his plan. After Trotsky met Natalia Sedova, his future second wife, in Paris in late 1902, his first marriage disintegrated, although the two maintained a friendly relationship until the end.
Not much is known about Sokolovskaya's life post-1902. Her daughters were mostly raised by David and Anna Bronstein, Trotsky's wealthy parents, in Yanovka, Ukraine. Sokolovskaya raised her granddaughter Aleksandra in 1932-1935 after the latter's mother, Zinaida Volkova, was allowed to leave the country in 1931 and her father, Sakhar Moglin, was arrested in 1932. According to the family, Sokolovskaya was an educator and was close to Lenin's widow, Nadezhda Krupskaya, in the early 1930s.
Sokolovskaya was arrested and exiled in 1935. She was last seen in a Kolyma labor camp by Nadezhda Joffe, Adolph Joffe's daughter.