lit a candle 4h agoNever heard of him until my grandson started fencing lessons two years ago and the coach mentioned Musketeers of Setun like everyone should know it. 95 years old. Paris 1957 silver, they said. Strange to grieve a stranger from another country but there it is.
Their story
Leonid Grigoryevich Leitman was a Soviet sabre fencer and one of the most respected fencing coaches in Moscow, an Honoured Coach of the USSR who won a world championship silver medal in 1957 and founded the fencing school known as the Musketeers of Setun. He died on 7 November 2026,…
Leonid Grigoryevich Leitman was a Soviet sabre fencer and one of the most respected fencing coaches in Moscow, an Honoured Coach of the USSR who won a world championship silver medal in 1957 and founded the fencing school known as the Musketeers of Setun. He died on 7 November 2026, in his ninety sixth year. The Russian Fencing Federation announced his death.
He was born on 2 August 1931 and went to Moscow's School No. 59. He took up fencing as a teenager and specialised in the sabre, training under Ivan Manaenko from 1945 and, from 1950, under Vitaly Arkadyev, the coach who shaped Soviet sabre fencing. He competed for Dynamo Moscow, won the USSR youth championships and was a medallist at them several times, and graduated from the State Central Institute of Physical Culture in 1954. He was made a Master of Sport of the USSR in 1955.
His greatest result as a competitor came at the 1957 World Fencing Championships in Paris, where he was a member of the Soviet team that won silver in the team sabre event, part of the generation that turned the Soviet Union into a leading fencing nation.
After his competitive career he turned to coaching and refereeing, becoming a referee of international category. He created the Musketeers of Setun school, which between 1958 and 1986 produced four Masters of Sport of International Class and 74 Masters of Sport of the USSR. Among his pupils was the Honoured Master of Sport Alexander Nikishin. For this work he was named an Honoured Coach of the USSR.
Leitman was also a thoughtful writer on his sport. He published articles on technique and tactics in Soviet sports journals from the late 1950s, co-wrote the handbook Fencing for the Young in 1967 and, with Arkadyev and Alexander Ponomarev, the 1975 textbook Stages of a Fencer's Mastery. He also wrote a book about his school. The federation said his methodological and analytical work still guides coaches.
He was married to Valentina Samokhodkina, who died in 2019, and had two children, Andrei and Natalia. In August 2026 the federation marked his 95th birthday, and on his death it remembered him as an outstanding master, mentor and man of firm principles.
Biography adapted from Russian Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0), Russian Fencing Federation, RIA Novosti, Argumenty i Fakty and KP.ru. Wikipedia ↗
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1Leonid Leitman
by People Forever
same, found out through a youtube clip last week and been thinking about it since