Nadezhda Adolfovna Joffe () was born on 14 May 1906 in
Berlin to Berta Ilyinichna Joffe (née Tsypkina, later Ostrovskaya) and
Adolph Joffe, a
Bolshevik politician and Soviet
diplomat. Through her father Joffe was of
Karaite descent. Joffe joined the Trotskyist
Left Opposition within the
Soviet Communist Party shortly after it was formed in 1923 and was first exiled from
Moscow in 1929. Until Trotsky's exile, Joffe was a close friend of
Lev Sedov. She was re-arrested at the beginning of the
Great Purge in 1936, and sent to
Kolyma labor camps in
Siberia, where her first husband, Trotskyist Pavel Kossakovsky, was killed in 1938. She was the last person to see
Leon Trotsky's first wife,
Aleksandra Sokolovskaya, alive in Kolyma in 1938. After
Stalin's death in 1953, Joffe's sentence was annulled and she returned to Moscow in 1956. She wrote a book of memoirs,
Back in Time: My Life, My Fate, My Epoch in 1971–72, which was first published in Moscow after the
dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1992. Her family emigrated to the
United States at the end of her life and she settled in
Brooklyn, New York, where she worked on her father's biography and his letters until her death in 1999, aged 92, collaborating with
Iskra Research publishing house. ==References==