On Wednesday, June 15, Russian media reported that 90-year-old retired Major General Lev Sotskov committed suicide in Moscow. Judging by the published information, he shot himself with a premium pistol.
Sotskov’s body was found by his wife in an apartment building down Novatorov Street. A TT award pistol and a note were found next to the deceased. In it, Sotskov wrote that the weapon is a relic of the battles on the Khalkhin Gol River, which he received when he was a representative in the Mongolian special service.
Lev Sotskov was born in 1932 in Leningrad, after studying at the Faculty of International Relations at MGIMO, he went into intelligence, where he served for more than 40 years. He has published a number of non-fiction books and collections of historical documents. And for the book “Operation Tarantella”, dedicated to the activities of the USSR foreign intelligence service from 1930 to 1945 in the UK, he won the SVR Prize in 2006.
In 2009, Lev Sotskov was the compiler of the collection of declassified documents “Secrets of Polish Politics 1935-1945”. These documents were presented during the visit of Vladimir Putin (at that time the Prime Minister of the Russian Federation) to Warsaw.