Lev Sedov - Death

Death

After an acute attack of appendicitis in 1938, he was taken to a private clinic instead of a Paris hospital. The clinic was 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 1956, an NKVD agent, Mark Zborowski, who had posed as Sedov’s comrade and friend, testified in a United States court that he had reported to the NKVD as soon as Sedov had entered the hospital under a secret name. However, Pavel Sudoplatov, a lieutenant general in the NKVD 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.

Sedov's grave is at the Parisian cemetery at Thiais.

Read more about this topic:  Lev Sedov

Famous quotes containing the word death:

    There is a rhythm to the ending of a marriage just like the rhythm of a courtship—only backward. You try to start again but get into blaming over and over. Finally you are both worn out, exhausted, hopeless. Then lawyers are called in to pick clean the corpses. The death has occurred much earlier.
    Erica Jong (b. 1942)

    Since the death instinct exists in the heart of everything that lives, since we suffer from trying to repress it, since everything that lives longs for rest, let us unfasten the ties that bind us to life, let us cultivate our death wish, let us develop it, water it like a plant, let it grow unhindered. Suffering and fear are born from the repression of the death wish.
    Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)