Lilia Estrin Dallin

Lilia Estrin Dallin (1898–1981) (aka Lola Estrin, Paulsen, Lilya Ginzberg) was a prominent member of Trotsky's Paris organization in the 1930s, the wife of the Menshevik David Dallin, and has been suspected of being an NKVD asset because of her association with NKVD agent Mark Zborowski.

She was born in Liepāja, Courland, in 1898 under the name of Liliya Ginzberg (Lilija Ginzberga), and she lived there until 1914. After studying law in Moscow, she became a member of the Menshevik party. In 1923 she emigrated to Berlin where she married Samuel Estrin. The couple professed to be Mensheviks, then changed to being Leninists and Left Oppositionists. After the Nazis rose to power, in 1933, they moved to Paris. (Her CIA dossier shows that she came directly to Paris from Moscow not from Berlin as she claimed.)

In Paris Lilia found work as a secretary for Boris Nicolaevsky at the International Institute of Social History, and she befriended Trotsky's son Lev Sedov, working with him on the Trotskyist journal, Bulletin of the Opposition. She appeared to be the sole support for her husband and his relatives. "I work like an ox," she wrote to Natalia Sedova, "from early morning to late into the night, and I am content. My job (with the Institute) is interesting. After it, I work for the Bulletin and other (Trotskyite) matters which keep me up until one o'clock at night. At seven in the morning I am up again . . . I need no Sundays, no respite. I am a dynamic person, I need action." When NKVD agents broke into the Institute and stole Trotsky's papers, on 6 November 1936, a number of Trotskyists began to suspect that she, along with Mark Zborowski, were NKVD agents. After Lev Sedov died in a Paris hospital under mysterious circumstances in March 1938, his mistress accused Lilia of being an NKVD agent and causing his death. But Lilia was able to convince Trotsky that both she and Zborowski were the innocent victims of NKVD slanders.

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