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From New International, Vol. VIII No. 2, March 1942, p. 63.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Four years ago, the news of the death of Leon Sedoff, eldest son of Leon Trotsky and Natalia Sedoff Trotsky, was announced. It was said then that young Leon, one of the outstanding figures of the Fourth Internationalist movement, died of a surgical operation. This fact alone came as a complete surprise to all who knew this indefatigable fighter in the cause of international socialism, for he was not known to have been previously ill. His death came suddenly and unexpectedly because he was reported to have been resting well from this minor surgery.
The mysterious nature of the death pointed in only one direction – to the Kremlin and the GPU. Stalin, the murderer of so many Old Bolsheviks, sought the extermination of Leon Trotsky and his family. Already the two daughters of Trotsky were dead. Sedoff’s brother, Sergei, disappeared, with death a certainty. His doctor, a Russian surgeon, also died very suddenly, not long after the operation. But let the revolutionary father speak of his revolutionary son and of the circumstances of his death:
“Material difficulties and privations Leon bore lightly, jokingly, like a true proletarian: but of course they too left their mark. Infinitely more harrowing were the effects of subsequent moral tortures. The Moscow Trial of the Sixteen, the monstrous nature of the accusations, the nightmarish testimony of the defendants, among them Smirnov and Mrachovsky, whom Leon so intimately knew and loved; the unexpected internment of his father and mother in Norway, the period of four months without any news; the theft of the archives, the mysterious removal of my wife and myself to Mexico; the second Moscow Trial with its even more delirious accusations and confessions, the disappearance of his brother Sergei, accused of ‘poisoning workers’; the shooting of countless people who had either been close friends or remained friends to the end; the persecutions and the attempts of the GPU in France, the murder of Reiss in Switzerland, the lies, the baseness, the perfidy, the frame-ups – no, ‘Stalinism’ was for Leon not an abstract political concept but an endless series of moral blows and spiritual wounds. Whether the Moscow masters resorted to chemistry, or whether everything they had previously done proved sufficient, the conclusion remains one and the same: It was they who killed him. The day of his death they marked on the Thermidorian calendar as a major celebration.”
At a time when international capitalism is strained to the breaking point in the cause of mutual self-destruction in another imperialist war, when the terrible sufferings of humanity cry out the necessity for the immediate realization of world socialism, we pay our deepest respects to that young and devoted veteran o£ the proletarian movement, editor of the Russian Bulletin, leader of the Fourth International, Leon Sedoff, who died at the hands of perfidious Stalinism.
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