Lev Lvovich Sedov was the son of the Russian Communist leader Leon Trotsky and his second wife Natalia Sedova.
Background
He was born when his father was in prison facing life imprisonment for having participated in the first Soviet Revolution of 1905. In 1935-1939, while in Paris, Sedov and his partner, Jeanne Martin, also took in and cared for his young nephew, Vsevolod Volkov, called "Sieva" by the family (and who later, in Mexico, took the name Esteban Volkov), the son of Sedov"s late half-sister, Zina.
Career
Sedov supported his father in the struggle against Joseph Stalin and became a leader of the Trotskyist movement in his own right. Just before Hitler came to power in 1933, Sedov was able to move to Paris where he went to work as a Parisian laborer and became an important activist in the Trotskyist movement. He was frequently followed by agents of the Soviet People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs. At the same time, Zborowski notified the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs that Sedov had been transported under an assumed name to the Clinique Mirabeau, which was itself, 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. Some historians who have analyzed the matter believe 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 1994, Pavel Sudoplatov, a lieutenant general in the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs 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. However, in 1956, Zborowski himself had testified before a United States Senate subcommittee that he had contacted the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs to report that Sedov had entered the clinic, and then to confirm his death.
Sedov"s grave is in Cimetière de Thiais, south of Paris.