[citation needed] Sedova studied at the Kharkov Institute for Noble Maidens, from where she was expelled for participating in the revolutionary movement.

Lev Sedov was an active and leading member of the Bolshevik-Leninist movement that his father led and was almost certainly assassinated as a result of that.

Her other son, Sergei Sedov, who was not politically active and remained in Russia, was almost certainly murdered by agents of Joseph Stalin.

Her best-known work in these last years was a biography of Trotsky, which she co-authored with fellow Russian revolutionary Victor Serge.

Under his influence,[citation needed] she came to adopt the position that the USSR was state capitalist and that the Fourth International founded by Trotsky no longer held to the revolutionary programme of Communism.