Lev Sedov

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For other uses of "Sedov", see Sedov (disambiguation).

Lev Lvovich Sedov (Russian: Лев Львович Седов, also known as Leon Sedov; February 1906 - February 16, 1938) 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 later 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 was an important activist in the Trotskyist movement. He died in a Paris hospital in 1938 after an appendix operation, having been ill for about a year prior.

Most political sympathizers with Sedov consider that he 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.

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.