REVOLUTIONARY THINKER

Leon Trotsky's Great-Granddaughter Is Following Her Own Path To Greatness

Nora Volkow was born three years after Stalin died, and 16 years after the
Soviet dictator sent a student with an ice ax to kill her
great-grandfather. Her grandmother committed suicide, and her grandfather
was shot to death in a Stalinist prison. She grew up in Mexico City knowing
that her family was both steeped in greatness and marked by tragedy.

Today, Volkow is the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse and
one of the United States' leading experts on the science of drug addiction.
"I've studied alcohol, cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin, marijuana and more
recently obesity. There's a pattern in compulsion," she says. "I've never
come across a single person that was addicted that wanted to be addicted.
Something has happened in their brains that has led to that process, and I
want to know what it is."

By all accounts, Volkow is an inspired, and sometimes electrifying,
thinker. Oh, and she also is the great-granddaughter of Russian
revolutionary Leon Trotsky.

Being the descendant of somebody famous can be a blessing. Barry Bonds
inherited father Bobby's baseball ability and surpassed him by an order of
magnitude. Legions of Kennedys, not to mention the current President Bush,
have had an entree into politics because of their lineage.

But Volkow went her own way. She graduated No. 1 in her class at Mexico
City's immense National University, and over the course of two decades ran
the life sciences department at Brookhaven National Laboratory, became a
member of the National Academy of Sciences and wrote groundbreaking papers
on brain imaging and addiction with hardly a thought about what Leon
Trotsky could or could not have done for her.

"My father didn't like to speak of Trotsky, because I think he had been so
traumatized, so he really kept us away from politics," she says. "He never
told me any of those stories until I was grown up."

She acknowledges that the family history is "fascinating" but leaves the
listener to fill in the political and spiritual blanks. Leon Trotsky, in
death as in life, was an ideological lightning rod for an entire century.
Even direct descendants know better than to tell posterity how to think
about him.

A Doer and a Thinker

Nora Volkow now gives speeches, attends multiple meetings and schmoozes
lawmakers on Capitol Hill. She talks to cops and counselors, moving from
her beloved research to embrace the community side of the drug war. "My
life is upside down!" she says with a laugh, but she doesn't regret it: "I
like challenges."

"She just burns it up," said Al Brandenstein, chief scientist of the White
House Office of National Drug Control Policy and a longtime admirer. "She's
incapable of sitting still."

Three months after arriving at NIDA's Bethesda headquarters, Volkow clearly
has not settled in. Her office is sunny, airy -- and almost empty. There
are books and some nice furniture, but the validating staples of official
Washington -- diplomas, framed thank-you letters and, most of all,
grip-and-grin photos of the office occupant with other powerful people --
are nowhere in evidence.

Instead, Volkow has brought in paintings -- including a couple of her own
- -- which sit on the floor, propped against the wall, awaiting hammer and
nails. Like Volkow herself -- an attractive woman with an elfish grin and
dark eyes flashing with intelligence -- the pictures are bold, bright and
disturbing. And they are transparently Mexican, the only things in her
office that give away her background.

"That's my dog, my Rottweiler," she said, pointing to one painting. "She
died when she was 14 years old. She liked to play that she was a fierce
dog, but she was a very gentle creature." She paused. "I like to be a
little bit playful."

But there's nothing playful about the painting, a large sepia canvas
bearing the skeletal outline of a huge hound bent toward the ground as if
scavenging a corpse.

Pressed further, Volkow explains that she paints not for relaxation or
exorcism, but for elasticity of mind -- "to break my patterns of thinking,"
she says. "Does it make me think differently about science? I'd like to
think it does, but I may be deceiving myself."

Volkow thinks about thinking. This is where it has led her:

Using imaging technology to track the activities of the human brain, she
was the first to suggest that prolonged treatment with therapeutic drugs
blunted normal thought patterns and emotions in schizophrenics, even as the
worst of their hallucinations subsided.

She was the first to notice that cocaine addiction triggered tiny
strokes -- that cocaine was toxic -- an idea so radical at the time that it
took her three years before a journal agreed to publish it.

And more recently she has suggested that the brains of drug addicts have
less sensitive pleasure centers -- known as dopamine receptors -- leading
them to take drugs for the sensory jolt that non-addicts may feel without
stimulus.

"She knows how to look at data better than anyone I've ever seen," says
Brookhaven chemist Joanna Fowler, Volkow's longtime collaborator. "When she
was studying cocaine, everyone else was focusing on how rapidly it was
getting to the brain, but she focused on how fast it was leaving the brain
- -- making the receptors crave another hit."

Volkow has published more papers -- about 275 -- than anyone else in her
field. She had administrative experience as Brookhaven's associate director
for life sciences and chairman of its medical department. She was a full
professor of psychiatry at Long Island's Stony Brook University. Given her
credentials, the choice of Volkow to head NIDA appears to have been almost
a no-brainer.

And how she got there makes for an interesting story.

The Father

The hero of the piece is Esteban Volkow Bronstein, now 78, a retired
chemical engineer. He moved from Turkey to Mexico City in 1940 to join his
grandfather, Leon Trotsky, in the large, high-ceilinged house at Viena 45
in Coyoacan, a well-to-do neighborhood of distinctive homes.

By that time, most of the family was either dead or marked for death --
hounded into exile, pursued across continents or killed in the Stalinist
purges of the 1930s. Esteban's grandmother -- Trotsky's first wife -- died
in exile in Siberia. His father and uncle -- Trotsky's sons-in-law -- were
imprisoned and shot.

His mother was able to take an ailing Esteban -- then called Sieva -- out
of the Soviet Union to join her father in Turkey, but her citizenship was
revoked before she could return for her daughter. She committed suicide.
Her sister died of tuberculosis at age 26, and her niece disappeared.

One of Trotsky's sons by his second marriage died young in a Paris
hospital. The second -- an apolitical engineer -- died in a Stalinist
concentration camp.

"So my father has no family," recounts Nora Volkow. "My father ends up with
Trotsky in Mexico because no one else was alive."

By 1940 Trotsky had been on the run for 11 years, since he lost a final
power struggle to Joseph Stalin. Trotsky was one of the leaders of the
October Revolution and served as the Soviet Union's first foreign minister
and first war minister and was viewed as the second most powerful person in
the Revolutionary government, until the death of Vladimir I. Lenin in 1924.
Stalin sent him and his doctrine of "permanent revolution" into exile -- to
Turkey, France, Norway and, finally, in 1937, to Mexico City. For two
years, Trotsky and his second wife, Natalya, lived with the Mexican
muralist Diego Rivera and his wife, the artist Frida Kahlo, in Kahlo's
Coyoacan home. The couples had a falling out -- probably because Trotsky
was having an affair with Kahlo -- and the Trotskys moved to the Calle
Viena house a few blocks away.

So he went for a Moscow visit. His sister, Eva, was dying of cancer. She
had heard no news of her family since her mother took Esteban to Turkey in
1930. "She never knew why she was left behind," Volkow says. "She felt
abandoned." Eva died two months after her brother's visit, the last tragedy
of the Trotsky diaspora.

But the world has changed.

Last year Nora Volkow and her husband went to St. Petersburg for a week's
vacation. It was her first visit to the city she still calls Leningrad. She
jogged along the Neva River and marveled at the spectacular palaces and the
"megalomania" that created them.

Then she left, her sojourn unremarked and unrecorded in the old Russian
capital. "I wanted to be completely, completely anonymous," she says.

And she was.