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Special pages :
Nina V. Vorovskaya
| Author(s) | Leon Trotsky |
|---|---|
| Written | 31 March 1931 |
Nina Vorovskaya has died at the age of twenty-three, consumed by raging tuberculosis. Daughter of V. V. Vorovsky, the old Bolshevik revolutionist murdered in Switzerland by White terrorists [in 1923], Nina inherited from her father an independent and stubborn character, all-round talents, and a penetrating fire in her eyes — alas — also the terrible ailment.
What we know of Nina's psychology explains sufficiently how and why she joined the Opposition at an early age. Once she joined, she knew neither doubt nor vacillation. Her room in Moscow was one of the meeting places of the Young Communist League and the party Opposition. Nina broke with friends when they broke from the Opposition. Vorovskaya was excluded from the Young Communist League when it was decided by the party that free speech could not be tolerated.
From her father — it seems also from her mother — Nina inherited artistic gifts: she was an original graphic artist. Illness, chronic from her earliest years, encroached upon her life painfully, and hindered the development of her artistic gifts.
At the beginning of 1929, Nina went abroad for medical treatment. Despite her painful condition, her letters displayed her as she was: stalwart, observant, and ironical.
"X is out of work," she reported in a letter of February 21, 1929, "because he had made up his mind beforehand he would be." In a later letter, about B, she reported that he had been imprisoned in a political isolation section — along with fifty comrades. A comrade passing through from Leningrad made comforting prophecies about the general mood; in her words, "We are growing bigger: instead of one mud-slinging there are two new ones."
Abroad, she underwent a painful (chest) operation. Before Nina had time to recover, she was urgently recalled to Moscow, through the embassy. Semi-officially, they explained to her the suddenness of the call was due to financial considerations. In reality, the authorities had established beyond all question Nina's connection with Oppositionists abroad, and decided at once to cut short her stay.
"Nina V," a friend wrote us from Berlin, "left on Monday, the 22nd, for Moscow. Greatly horrified that she has left, I very much dread that she will have a relapse. She certainly should still be convalescing."
In Moscow, Nina soon fell quickly into a decline. But in her last letters, written in the interval when illness weighed on her with little relief, she retained all her stamp of independent ideas, intransigence, ironic perception.
She wrote with maturity about the men and women who had capitulated, without sparing people closest to her.
Fate did not allow Nina to develop her personality to the full. But all who knew her preserve in their memory her beautiful and tragic image.