Lev Sedov

Lev Lvovich Sedov (, also known as Leon Sedov; 24 February 1906 – 16 February 1938) was the first son of the Soviet communist leader Leon Trotsky and his second wife Natalia Sedova. He was born when his father was in prison facing life imprisonment for having participated in the Revolution of 1905. Life 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. Sedov supported his father in the struggle against Joseph Stalin and became a leader of the Trotskyist movement in his own right. Exile in Turkey and Germany He accompanied his parents into exile in 1929, and then in 1931 he moved to Berlin to study. Alexandra Ramm-Pfemfert and her husband Franz Pfemfert arranged his visa and ensured that he saw an eye-specialist to treat an eye disease from which he was suffering. Carl Sternheim, a friend of the Pfemferts, met him during this period and described him as an extremely nice looking young man with light brown hair and blue eyes but who chain smokes and vividly explains that he goes through fifty of them every day". During this period Sedov spoke little German but was fluent in French. Trotsky's bloc In 1932 he helped Trotsky create a political bloc with the anti-Stalin opposition inside the USSR, and was in contact with some of its members like Ivan Smirnov, through the old bolshevik Goltsmann, which he called in his letters "the informant". Sedov showed he was far more interested in using a direct aggressive policy than Trotsky, stating: “Before everything else we have to drive out the present leadership and get rid of Stalin nothing but their liquidation can bring victory”. The bloc was dissolved in early 1933, according to Pierre Broué.