Lev Sedov
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Lev Lvovich Sedov (Russian: Лев Львович Седов, also known as Leon Sedov; February 1906, Saint Petersburg - February 16, 1938, Paris) was the son of the Russian Communist leader Leon Trotsky and his second wife Natalia Sedova. Lev Sedov was born when his father was in prison facing life sentence for having led the first Soviet in the Revolution of 1905.
He lived separately from his parents after the October Revolution in order not to be seen as privileged. He married in 1925 at the age of 19, and had a son, Lev, the following year. He supported his father in the struggle against Joseph Stalin and became a leader of the Trotskyist movement in his own right.
Sedov accompanied his father into exile in 1928, and then moved to Berlin in 1931. Just before Hitler came to power in 1933, Sedov was able to move to Paris[1] where he went to work as a Parisian laborer and became important activist in the Trotskyist movement. He was frequently followed by agents of the Soviet NKVD. After an acute attack of appendicitis in 1938, he was taken to a private clinic instead of a Paris hospital. The clinic was operated by a White Russian with connections to Soviet intelligence, who performed an appendectomy. Complications set in after the operation, but Sedov apparently received no further treatment. He was later taken to a Paris hospital, where he died.[2]
Most historians who have analyzed the matter consider that Sedov was murdered by agents of Stalin who were in Paris watching him, either while in hospital or by poisoning him causing his condition. In 1956, an NKVD agent, Mark Zborowski, who had posed as Sedov’s comrade and friend, testified in a United States court that he had reported to the NKVD as soon as Sedov had entered the hospital under a secret name. However, Pavel Sudoplatov, a lieutenant general in the NKVD who at that time was in charge of planning assassinations abroad, including the one of Sedov's father, claimed in his memoirs, Special Tasks, that Soviet agents played no part in his death.
[edit] Writings
Lev Sedov’s major political work is The Red Book on the Moscow Trials (1936). This book analyzed the Moscow trials with the aim of discrediting them, at a time when a wide consensus accepted the verdicts of the trials.
The grave of Lev Sedov is at the Parisian cemetery at Thiais.
[edit] References
- ^ Obituary. Leon Sedov by Victor Serge
- ^ Barmine, Alexander, One Who Survived, New York: G.P. Putnam (1945), pp. 17, 22: Barmine points out that the Soviet NKVD had a long history of using White Russians who longed to return to visit their homeland. The NKVD had even formed an association in Paris designed to recruit these persons, titled The Friends of the Soviet Fatherland. Typically, in order to gain an entry visa, the White émigré would first be asked to perform an 'act of loyalty' to the Soviet Union, usually a betrayal of another emigre. The method was used to 'set up' many Soviet fugitives for kidnapping or assassination by Stalin's secret police.
