Sedov is killed in the clinic
After the Moscow Trials began in August 1936, Trotsky’s son, Leon Sedov, launched a campaign of ruthless exposure of them in the Bulletin of the Left Opposition published in France. With all the brilliance and energy of his father, he wrote and published his Red Book denouncing Stalin’s crimes. His unflinching revolutionary struggle against Stalinism made him a marked man. In the Kremlin he was declared the No. 1 target for assassination after Trotsky himself. Stalin issued instructions that his 32-year-old opponent be executed and the hired killers went to work.
Stalin’s orders changed the nature of Mark Zborowski’s spy role inside the Left Opposition in Paris. He was no longer a humble informer and thief: he became a finger-man for the GPU assassins. The network of Stalinist agents began tightening its ring around Sedov from 1936. It included, among others, Serge Efron, Marcel Rollin (Smirenski), Louis Ducomet, and Francois Rossi, as well as a woman named Renata Steiner. The group set up its headquarters at No. 28 Rue Lacretelle, Paris XVe. They had chosen their location well. Leon Sedov and his wife lived next door at No. 26. Wall to wall.
In August 1936 when Leon Sedov and his wife, Jeanne Martin (Molinier) took a short holiday in a boarding house at the Cap d’Antibes in the south of France, the Stalinist agent Renata Steiner established residence at the same boarding house. Just over a year later, in September 1937, the same Renata Steiner was to be arrested for her active part in the cold-blooded murder of Ignace Reiss after he had broken from the Stalinist regime on July 17, 1937. In that summer of 1936, Renata Steiner contented herself with striking up a friendship with Sedov and his wife. In a neighboring hotel another agent from the same group—Smirenski—waited patiently on the outcome. Sedov was being systematically surrounded.
Gerard Rosenthal, who this year published his memoirs as Trotsky’s European lawyer, tells how the net was tightened even further. When Sedov went to testify before a Parisian judge about the stolen archives, a man shadowed him. He was a White Russian named Tchistoganov, later revealed to be a GPU agent known by the pseudonym of “spectacles.” Then, in January 1937, Sedov was due to meet a Basle lawyer at Mulhouse on the French border to discuss the details of two libel trials. Waiting to trap him were Renata Steiner, Smirenski, and Ducomet. They waited three weeks but Sedov was prevented from making the engagement because of a bout of influenza. In fact, the influenza story was invented by Zborowski. The GPU wanted him to bring Sedov to Mulhouse where he would be spirited back to Moscow to certain death. Zborowski deliberately blew the assignment because he figured he would be kidnapped too and then “we would all be confessing.”
The Mulhouse rendezvous failed, but a few months later they laid the same trap for Ignace Reiss and succeeded in murdering him at Lausanne. Less than six months later Sedov fell victim to their plotting. He suddenly fell ill, was admitted to a clinic suffering from a suspected appendicitis attack, and died.
In examining the death of Sedov there are two important factors to be kept in mind. One year earlier he wrote an article warning “public opinion that in spite of all that I have been through in these recent times, I have in no way lost my moral balance nor my confidence in life. I am therefore in no way inclined to commit suicide or to disappear. If something should happen to me, the cause must be searched for on Stalin’s side and nowhere else.”
The second factor is a statement by Trotsky’s lawyer, Gerard Rosenthal:
During the months of 1937, due to the trials which were taking place, there was a very close collaboration between Leon Sedov and myself. I must have met with him for the last time on the 5th or the 7th of February, 1938. He sometimes talked to me about his health. He did not particularly speak about it in the course of our last meetings. And yet, at the end of January he seems to have complained of abdominal pains…
The abdominal pains were very sudden. What was causing them? Was Sedov being poisoned? When the pains became regular, Lola Estrine (Mrs. David Dallin), called in her sister-in-law, a doctor, who diagnosed a mild attack of appendicitis. After a few days on a special diet, Sedov recovered. Rosenthal saw him at that time, but Sedov did not even mention his health.
On Tuesday, February 8, 1938, the abdominal pains returned even more violently. Mrs. Dallin’s sister-in-law, obviously still diagnosing appendicitis, put ice on his stomach. The next day, February 9, she returned with her husband, who was also a doctor, and they decided that Sedov should be taken immediately to the hospital. She chose the clinic—a small, private clinic run by Russian emigres—the clinic Mirabeau, in the Rue Narcisse-Diaz, Paris XVIe. It exists to this day and still functions as a clinic.
Only four people knew that Sedov was at the clinic, which he entered under a false name, “Martin.” They were his wife, Jeanne Martin (Molinier); Mrs. Dallin; Mrs. Dallin’s sister-in-law; and Mark Zborowski. The latter subsequently admitted tipping off the GPU at the same time he called the ambulance to take Sedov to the hospital. The clinic itself was a strange choice, for Sedov was now in the heart of the Russian empire world. It was a world that was rife with Stalinist agents and provocateurs. The owner of the clinic was a Dr. Girmounski, who, as it transpired, was known to the French police as a Stalinist sympathizer. The surgeon on Sedov’s case was a Dr. Simkov, who mysteriously knew Sedov’s real identity. Trotsky later suggested that as he was such a close collaborator with Dr. Girmounski, it was not unreasonable to suppose that he was a Stalinist sympathizer too. An immediate operation was decided upon. Simkov called in a reputable surgeon to carry it out—a Dr. Thalheimer. The operation went quite satisfactorily. The appendix was not unduly inflamed. The disorder was intestinal.
During the four days that followed the operation, Sedov improved rapidly. His temperature was stable and virtually normal. So much so that on February 13, Mrs. Dallin was able to visit him and he was well enough to arrange with her that they should meet again the next day—together with Zborowski—to do some work. Yet during that very night of February 13 and 14, Sedov, in an inexplicable and sudden delirium, with a raging fever, wandered the clinic corridors naked and collapsed in a nearby room. On his abdomen, near the operation scar, is found a large ecchymosis (bruise). Dr. Thalheimer was summoned urgently. His first words to Jeanne Martin are a most vital clue in establishing that Sedov’s death was not natural. “It seems,” he said, “that a post-operation accident has occurred which is inexplicable to me. Was he given barbiturates? Has this man ever manifested the intention of committing suicide? ... Was the patient an habitual user of drugs of which his being deprived could have provoked this crisis?”
Sedov had no intention of committing suicide whatsoever. Nor was he given to taking drugs or barbiturates. Therefore, according to Dr. Thalheimer’s immediate diagnosis, someone had administered drugs to Sedov on the night of February 13-14. The GPU assassins had seized their chance just as Sedov was recovering so rapidly. Immediate surgical intervention was ordered. Sedov’s intestines were now in paralysis. The operation could not save him. At dawn on February 16, Leon Sedov went into a coma. By 11 a.m. he was dead. The official police and medical reports into his death threw no light on the cause of death. Leon Trotsky fought tirelessly from Mexico for the truth to emerge. But Stalin was enjoying friendly diplomatic relations with the French government at the time …
Dr. Thalheimer now sought refuge behind the wall of professional secrecy—the hypocritical confidentiality between doctor and patient. He, above all, had something to say which could have changed the whole course of the investigation, but he refused. Trotsky protested to the French investigating judge that Thalheimer had:
... refused to give explanations by invoking professional secrecy. The law gives this right to a doctor. But the law does not oblige a doctor to make use of this right. In order to withdraw behind medical secrecy the doctor must have, in this present case, an exceptional motive. What is the motive of Dr. Thalheimer? There can be no question, in relation to this case, of respecting the secret of a patient or of his parents. Consequently, it is a question of keeping a secret of the doctor himself. Of what can this secret consist? I have no reason to suspect Mr. Thalheimer of criminal acts. But it is absolutely evident that if the death of Sedov had resulted naturally and necessarily from the nature of his illness, the surgeon would not have had the slightest motive or the slightest psychological leaning toward refusing to provide the necessary explanations. In withdrawing behind professional secrecy, Mr. Thalheimer says by that gesture: in the course of the illness and in the causes of death there are particular circumstances which I do not wish to cooperate in clarifying.
As to those who committed the crime, Trotsky made clear in his letter of July 18, 1938, to the investigating judge:
The organizers of the crime were the agents of the GPU, pseudo-functionaries of the Soviet institutions in Paris. Those who executed it were the agents of these agents taken from the milieu of White (Russian) emigres, of French or foreign Stalinists, etc. The GPU could not fail to have its agents in a Russian clinic in Paris or in the immediate vicinity.
As to the method employed, Trotsky suspected poisoning. Nothing could, after all, have been simpler for the GPU which was so advanced in experiments with poisons and barbiturates that left no trace. Trotsky put this to the French judge for consideration as to the “natural” death of Sedov.
At the time of the Bukharin-Rykov trial in Moscow in March of this year, it was revealed, with cynical frankness, that one of the methods of the GPU was to help a sickness along by precipitating the moment of death ... through the Moscow trial, humanity learnt that the advances made by Russian medicine, under the direction of the former chief of the secret police, Yagoda, had precipitated the death of patients with the aid of methods impossible or difficult to detect subsequently.
When he appeared before the US Senate judiciary subcommittee in 1956, Mark Zborowski maintained a battery of evasions about Sedov’s murder.
Q: Now, do you remember when Sedov died?
Zborowski: Yes, sir.
Q: Did you call the ambulance?
Zborowski: Pardon?
Q: That took Sedov to hospital?
Zborowski: I don’t remember calling the ambulance, sir. I may have, I don’t recall. At the time I was very upset and I don’t remember calling the ambulance. I think, though — I am not sure, I think they knew — I found out about the transportation to the hospital subsequently, but I am not sure — I may have been the one who called the ambulance.
Q: What hospital was Sedov taken to?
Zborowski: I don’t remember the name of the hospital.
Q: Is it your testimony you don’t remember the name of the hospital to which Sedov was taken?
Zborowski: No, sir, I don’t recall the name of the hospital. I can identify it.
Q: Was it the hospital run by Russian émigrés?
Zborowski: After a while I found out it was run by some Russian people.
Q: So, you do remember —
Zborowski: I don’t remember the name of the hospital. I remember the hospital, sir. If you would tell me the name, I will tell you whether it is or not, but I don’t remember the name of the hospital.
Q: Did you report to the NKVD the fact that he was in the hospital?
Zborowski: I did report the fact that he was in the hospital.
Q: And you reported the name of the hospital, didn’t you?
Zborowski: Probably.
In subsequent cross-examination, this exchange took place:
Q: Now, Sedov did die, did he not?
Zborowski: Yes, he did.
Q: Weren’t there mysterious circumstances surrounding his death?
Zborowski: There were—there were—there was the supposition that there were mysterious circumstances, but according to the final—as I know, according to the final autopsy and post mortem, he had died of peritonitis.
Q: Of peritonitis?
Zborowski: That is right, and it was a perfectly normal death, in the case of his—that is all I know, there was never—there was talk about mysterious circumstances, but it is not to my knowledge.
When the Fourth International was founded in September 1938, three honorary presidents were elected unanimously—Leon Sedov, Rudolf Klement, and Erwin Wolf. For all three, it was a posthumous honor. They had all been struck down by GPU assassins. But attending the main sessions was Zborowski, the man who had fingered them to Stalin’s execution squad. In the enforced absence of Trotsky he insinuated himself as the delegate representing the Russian section.
There was another observer present. She was Sylvia Ageloff from New York. She served as an interpreter during the proceedings. Outside the conference room hovered her boyfriend. He called himself Jacques Mornard. When the conference sessions were over, Mornard and Miss Ageloff would go out on the town. Two years later, on August 20, 1940, he drove an ice pick into the skull of Trotsky while he sat at his desk at Coyoacan in Mexico. When he appeared before the Mexican courts charged with Trotsky’s murder he was asked about the death of Leon Sedov.
Q: What is your opinion about the death of Sedov?
He hesitated before saying:
Mornard: Only what is printed on the case.
Q: Was it the GPU?
Mornard: Yes. The GPU killed Leon Sedov.