COMMUNISTS: Out of the Shadows

A half-forgotten figure emerged from Communism's shadows last week to carry on a half-forgotten fight. She was Leon Trotsky's widow, 69.

"Take good care of her," were Trotsky's dying words to his friends. "She has been with me for a long time." Natalia Sedova, daughter of a bourgeois Ukrainian family, was a student in Paris when, in 1902, she met the bookish, intolerant young intellectual who spent his time playing chess in smoky cafés, dreaming violent dreams of world revolution. For the next 38 years, she followed Leon Trotsky around the world—Spain, Switzerland, Finland, the U.S., Norway, Germany, Turkey, Russia —into...