| Leon Sedov |
Tomorrow marks the 70th anniversary of the murder
of Trotsky’s eldest son – Leon Sedov -by agents of the Stalinist secret police,
the GPU. He was thirty-two years of age. This crime constituted part of the
systematic hounding and murder of Trotsky’s key supporters and family, whose
only ‘crime’ was to defend genuine Marxism against Stalin and the crimes of the
Russian bureaucracy.
The murder of Leon Sedov on 16th February 1938 in
a Parisian clinic was a massive personal and political blow to Trotsky and the
movement he created. Sedov was a key leader of the international movement and,
as a consequence, was singled out by the Stalinist murder machine for
assassination.
"Leon entered the revolution as a child", wrote his mother Natalya
Sedov, "and never left it to the end of his days."As a small boy of twelve, Leon,
known affectionately as Lyova, witnessed the Russian Revolution of 1917. He had
attended all the demonstrations, got into fights at school over politics,
including with Kerensky’s son. Apparently, fights were a daily occurrence. He
had visited his father in prison following the July witch-hunts against the
Bolsheviks. On this basis, his future took shape. As with many of the new
generation, he quickly joined the Young Communist League and threw his energies
into the Communist movement and the defence of the young Soviet state. In 1923,
as a fully conscious revolutionary, he devoted his efforts to building the Left
Opposition. He had no time for bureaucratic privileges and energetically took
the ideas of the Opposition into the ranks of the Communist youth.
As a student, Sedov developed an exceptional ability in
mathematics and studied in the Superior Technical Academy. However, his heart
and soul were with the revolution.
In 1927, with the repression and expulsion of the Left Opposition,
Trotsky was subsequently banished by Stalin. Leon Sedov’s fate was tied to
Trotsky’s. He therefore decided to leave his young family in Moscow and join
his mother and father in Soviet Central Asia. Here, in Alma Ata, the main city
in Kazakhstan, he energetically assisted Trotsky with his work in maintaining
the clandestine links with the Opposition in Moscow. At twenty-two years of
age, he was, says Trotsky, "our minister of foreign affairs, minister of
police, and minister of communications". The Trotsky household was under
constant surveillance by the secret police and it was Leon’s responsibility to
break through the cordon.
To begin with huge amounts of correspondence arrived from
all over. Between April and October 1928, they received some 1,000 political
letters and documents and around 700 telegrams, which needed replying to.
Without Sedov’s work, not half of this would have been accomplished. However,
Stalin’s secret police would virtually destroy these links by 1932. In February
1929, Trotsky, Natatia and Leon Sedov had been further exiled by Stalin to
Turkey (Prinkipo).
These years were exceptionally difficult and there were
strains in relations, as Trotsky admits. "People closest to me often had a very
hard time. And inasmuch as the closest to me of all the youth was my son, he
usually had the hardest time of all." However, Trotsky explained that despite
these inevitable frictions, there were inseparable ties. "Beneath the surface
there glowed a deep mutual attachment based upon something immeasurably greater
than bonds of blood – a solidarity of views and appraisals, of sympathies and
antipathies, of joys and sorrows experienced together, of great hopes we had in
common."
It was a period of relearning foreign languages and close
literary collaboration with his father. Trotsky’s archives and library were in
Leon’s hands. He worked tirelessly in the public libraries, first in Turkey,
then Berlin and later in Paris, assembling and researching quotes and
statistics for Trotsky’s monumental ‘History of the Russian Revolution’. The
same went for Trotsky’s ‘Revolution Betrayed’. Trotsky went so far as to say,
"My son’s name should rightly be placed next to mine on almost all my books
written since 1928."
Urged by his parents Leon resumed his scientific studies and
went to live in Berlin in early 1931. Of course, Leon Sedov threw himself into
the work of the International Left Opposition, and soon became the Russian
representative on the International Secretariat. He had become the de facto
editor of the ‘Biulletien Oppozitsii’ in Prinkipo, but was put completely in
charge on his arrival in Berlin, which continued right through until his death.
Each issue was regarded as a major triumph, which he supervised meticulously,
which they attempted to smuggle in different ways into Russia.
Stalin was determined to silence Trotsky and the Opposition.
Leon Sedov was on their hit list. According to Ignace Reiss, who was a secret
agent who broke with Stalin and came over to Trotsky (for which he paid for his
life) the Stalinist GPU stated many times "The Little Son [Leon] does his work
cleverly. The Old Man [Trotsky] wouldn’t find it so easy without him." This was
true. It was the reason why the Stalinists surrounded Leon Sedov with agents,
stooges who wormed their way into the Opposition.
On Hitler’s coming to power, the ‘Biulleten’ was banned and
Leon was forced to move to Paris. Here he continued his revolutionary work, although
he did also manage to pass his scientific exams. However, the Stalinist net
closed in. His letters were opened, his phone was tapped and GPU agents lived
in the flats next to his. Even when he went for a short break, they followed
him. They were the same agents who murdered Ignace Reiss. He however refused to
take too many precautions, especially if they got in the way of work. As
Trotsky explained, "As a genuine revolutionist he placed value on life only to
the extent that it served the struggle of the proletariat for liberation."
In 1933, Trotsky was forced to seek refuge in France, which
brought him closer to Leon Sedov. Leon brought him books from Paris, especially
Russian ones. Trotsky also made trips to Paris. It was in December 1934, that
the twenty-one year old South African Trotskyist, Ted Grant, arrived in Paris
and had discussions with Leon Sedov before finally arriving in England. "Leon
Sedov discussed a number of things with us, including the ‘French turn’ and the
situation in France and England", recalled Ted later.
In 1935, Trotsky, under pressure from the French government,
moved to Norway where the Norwegian Labour Party had won the elections. In August
1936, the Moscow Trials broke out, accusing old Bolsheviks like Zinoviev and
Kamenev, together with Trotsky and his son of counter-revolutionary activity,
being in league with Hitler, and so on. The whole show trial was based on false
confessions extracted from the accused. These slanders had to be answered
immediately. But the Norwegian government gagged Trotsky. Leon Sedov rose to the
occasion to answer the grotesque charges of the Stalin regime. While Trotsky
was isolated in Norway, paralysed and gagged by the ‘socialist’ government,
Leon exposed the trials as a horrendous fraud in his excellent book, the ‘Red
Book on the Moscow Trial’. It was the first thorough-going exposure of the
frame-ups and was published in many languages. Trotsky described it as a
"priceless gift… the first crushing reply to the Kremlin falsifiers." Within a few
months, Trotsky had managed to obtain asylum in Mexico, temporarily out of
reach from Stalin’s clutches.
These years opened a torrent of slanders, lies and calumnies
against the Trotskyist movement. They were nightmare years. Both Trotsky and
Leon Sedov were the chief defendants in the Moscow Trials in absence, accused
of all kinds of heinous crimes. These macabre spectacles were used to murder
all those who had any link with the October Revolution. Millions perished in
the camps and gulags. Many were shot without trial or simply disappeared. Leon’s
sister Zina was driven to suicide by the Stalinists and he was forced to care
for her son, the six year-old Esteban Volkov. His younger brother Sergei was
arrested in Russia and accused of "poisoning workers". He was shot in a labour
camp.
A counter-trial was established by John Dewey to investigate
the allegations made in the Moscow Trials. After examinations and cross
examinations, including of Trotsky, their deliberations concluded that "we
therefore find the Moscow Trials to be a frame-up. We therefore find Trotsky
and Sedov not guilty." But it was only a faint glimmer of light amid the
horrors of Stalin’s holocaust.
Stalinist agents and assassins were closing in around
Trotsky and his family. GPU agent Krivitsky warned Sedov that there was an
agent provocateur in the Paris centre, but was unable to name the man. He was
however able to give a description. His name turned out to be Mark Zborowski, a
Stalinist police agent, who had infiltrated the Trotskyist movement and
befriended Leon.
Leon rejected advice to join his father in Mexico, saying
that work in Paris was too important. At this time, he was under extreme
pressure and suffered from bouts of depression and insomnia. In early February
1938, Leon, suffering from abdominal pain, was urged by Zborowski (known as
Etienne) to enter a Russian clinic in Paris, He left a note with his wife which
she was to open only if an ‘accident’ should happen. Leon was given a routine
operation to relieve the pain, which was successful. He began to recover. Then
he began to suffer pains and loss of consciousness. He died on 16th
February.
As it turned out the hospital was owned by Dr Boris
Girmounski, who formerly served with the Russian secret police. Zborowski, who had
worked in the notorious Society for the Repatriation of Russian Emigres, had
also been a GPU agent since 1934, to which he confessed after the war. He met
with officials from the Soviet Embassy and reported on Sedov’s and Trotsky’s
activities. There is little doubt that Sedov had been murdered by the
Stalinists, probably through poisoning. The next step in the plan was Trotsky’s
assassination.
Leon Sedov was second only to his father in importance as an
organiser of the international revolutionary movement. He showed colossal
personal courage in face of the tragedies unfolding around him. He was prepared
to make whatever sacrifices were needed to develop the revolutionary movement
that could bring about the emancipation of the working class, the only thing worth
living and fighting for. His work, sacrifice and courage remain an outstanding
example to the revolutionary youth of today.
Trotsky wrote an obituary to his fallen son and comrade:
"The old generation with whom … we once embarked upon the
road of revolution … has been swept off the stage. What Tsarist deportations,
prisons, and katorga (Siberian exile), what the privations of life in exile,
what civil war, and what illness had not done, Stalin, the worst scourge of the
revolution, has accomplished in these last few years… The better part of the
middle generation, those… whom the year 1917 awakened and who received their
training in twenty-four armies on the revolutionary front, have also been
exterminated. The best part of the younger generation, Lyova’s contemporaries…
has also been trampled down and crushed… In these years of exile we have made
new friends, some of whom have become… like members of our family. But we first
met all of them … when we were approaching old age. Lyova alone knew us when we
were young; he participated in our life from the moment he acquired
self-awareness. Remaining young, he became almost like our contemporaries…
"Goodbye, Leon, goodbye, dear and incomparable friend. Your
mother and I never thought, never expected that destiny would impose on us this
terrible task of writing your obituary. We lived in firm conviction that long
after we were gone you would be the continuator of our common cause. But we
were not able to protect you. Goodbye, Leon! We bequeath your irreproachable
memory to the younger generation of the workers of the world. You will rightly
live in the hearts of all those who work, suffer, and struggle for a better
world. Revolutionary youth of all countries! Accept from us the memory of our
Leon, adopt him as your son – he is worthy of it – and let him henceforth
participate invisibly in your battles, since destiny has denied him the
happiness of participating in your final victory."
Every year on August 20th a meeting is held at the
graveside of Leon Sedov to commemorate the murder of Leon Trotsky. Today we
remember both these martyrs and pay tribute to their revolutionary courage,
sacrifice and inspiration.
