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French to English

Leon Sedov: Trotsky’s Son, Stalin’s Victim by Pierre Broué – French to English Translation

Introduction by Peter Katel

Kremlin-ordered murders of dissidents abroad began nearly a century ago.

One telling episode took place in Paris one year before World War II. It deserves to be better known.

On Feb. 16, 1938, Leon Sedov, eldest son of Leon Trotsky and Natalia Sedova, died mysteriously in Paris after an appendicitis operation. He had been poisoned, though that did not become clear until decades later.

Alongside his father, Sedov fought Stalin’s transformation of the USSR and the global Communist movement into a totalitarian machine. Under constant surveillance by his key assistant, later revealed as a Soviet spy, Sedov was a key target of Stalin’s campaign to “liquidate” anti-Stalinists around the world, like their comrades in the USSR.

Two years before he was killed, Sedov had written the first detailed denunciation of the Moscow purge trials. These were a Kremlin spectacle designed around the lie that Trotsky and other veteran revolutionaries were terrorist allies of Hitler.

The late French historian Pierre Broué (1926-2005), Sedov’s only biographer, made the case for Sedov’s historical importance.

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French to English

Albert Camus – After The Epidemic Has Passed

[After the epidemic has passed] For some time, at least, they would be happy. They now knew that there is one thing that one may always yearn for, and sometimes obtain: Human tenderness.

– Albert Camus

La Peste/The Plague, 1947

Translated from French by Peter Katel
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French to English Translations

Translating Camus, The Plague

Notably, all of our fellow citizens very quickly refrained, even in public, from calculating how long their exile would last, a habit they might have adopted. Why? Because, though the most pessimistic may have settled, for instance, on six months, suffering ahead of time all of the bitterness of the months to come, they struggled to raise their courage to meet this challenge, using their last reserves of strength to deal with such a long period of suffering. Yet, sometimes, an encounter with a friend, a notice in the newspaper, a fugitive suspicion or a sudden burst of foresight, led them to realize that, after all, there was no reason why the epidemic shouldn’t last more than six months – maybe a year, or longer still.

Albert Camus

La Peste/The Plague, 1947