Mrs. Maria Michahonova Yoffe, the widow of one of Leon Trotsky’s closest friends and associates in the Bolshevik Revolution, Adolf Yoffe, arrived in Israel this morning as a new immigrant. The 75-year-old immigrant who supported Trotsky against Stalin in the 1920s and spent 26 years in Soviet prisons and labor camps between 1929-1956 as a consequence, said she planned to write “so people will know what happens in the Soviet Union.”
A Communist activist in her youth, Mrs. Yoffe said she had been thinking of coming to Israel since her release from prison nearly 20 years ago but hesitated because “after all, what have I done to help Israel?” She said, however, that when she decided to emigrate, it took her only ten days to get an exit visa and the Soviet authorities gave her five days after that to get out of the country. “So here I am,” she told reporters at Ben Gurion Airport.
Her husband, Adolf Yoffe, was elected one of the 22 members of the Bolshevik Party’s Central Committee on July 17, only a few months before the October Revolution. He later became one of the Soviet state’s first diplomats serving as Ambassador to Germany, Japan and China. He killed himself in Nov. 1927 in protest over the expulsion of Trotsky from the Communist Party.
Mrs. Yoffe knew Trotsky well and also knew Lenin and the other founders of the Soviet regime, After her husband’s suicide she was tried and convicted of “revisionism” and began her long prison ordeal. She recalled today that she also knew Vladimir Jabotinsky, the Russian-born Zionist-Revisionist leader. She said he was an excellent orator “but there was no one to compare with Trotsky.”
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
