(autobiography)
I was born in 1895 into a peasant family in Smolensk province. At first my father worked in a Moscow textile factory and then as a caretaker. After attending the village school for two years, I left to earn my living in Moscow where, at the age of thirteen, I found a job in a tavern—washing dishes and cleaning samovars. At fifteen or sixteen, I first came across Party comrades in Moscow, mainly printers. It was also at this time that I began to take a serious interest in underground and legal Marxist writings, as well as broadening my knowledge through self-education. In 1911 I moved to the Caucasus and the south of Russia where I wandered from town to town in search of work. In 1914 I arrived in St Petersburg, worked in an artillery depot making cartridge cases, and then in the insurance-fund offices of the Putilov and Skorokhod factories.
It was with my arrival in the capital that my underground activity really began. I joined the Party and carried out clandestine work right up to the February Revolution. At the end of 1915 and in 1916,I became representative for the Narva district on the Petrograd Bolshevik Committee and I worked with Zalezhsky, Moskvin, Tolmachev and others on its ‘Executive’. At the height of the February Revolution, I was active in the districts held by the Party, and also in the new Petrograd Committee. At the same time, I helped to organise the Union of Petrograd Metal-Workers, in which I held the post of district union secretary and was a member of the central administration.
After the October Revolution, I was sent by the provisional Bureau of the All-Russian Union of Metal-Workers to organise a union in the Urals. Until 1919 I worked there in trade union and Party organisations. In 1919 I was transferred to the Ukraine where I became a member both of the Central Committee of the Union of Metal-Workers and the Presidium of the VTsSPS. In 1920 I was transferred to Moscow as Secretary of the VTsSPS there, and then I was elected President of the Central Committee of the Railwaymen’s Union, which position I hold to this day.
I am a member of the TsIK of the USSR, and I was elected a member of the RKP (b) Central Committee at the eleventh Congress in 1920, being re-elected at the twelfth and thirteenth Congresses. At the present time I am also a Party Secretary.
For a long time Andreyev remained an important member of Stalin’s entourage: from 1926, he was an alternate member of the Politburo, and he was a full member from 1932. In 1930-1, he was President of the TsKK. From 1931 to 1935 he was Commissar for Communications; then Secretary of the Central Committee from 1935 to 1946, president of the Party Control Commission between 1939 and 1952, Commissar for Agriculture from 1943 to 1946, and Vice-president of the Council of Ministers from 1946 until 1953. He was implicated by a campaign waged in Pravda in 1950 against the ‘zveno’ [‘link’], a work-force unit considered too small in contrast to the ‘brigade’. He was removed de facto from the Politburo at that time, and the nineteenth Congress confirmed this move by giving him the rank of a plain member of the Central Committee. Khrushchev, who had in fact participated in Andreyev’s removal, told the twentieth Congress that ‘by a unilateral decision, Stalin had excluded A. A. Andreyev from the work of the Politburo. That was one of his most inexplicable caprices’.
Andreyev began his career with a blunder. First elected on to the Central Committee in 1920, he sided with Trotsky on the union question in 1920-1 and lost his position in 1921. He changed sides, and was re-elected to the Central Committee in 1922, and to the Orgburo, where he remained until 1927. He was also a member of the secretariat in 1924 5. He had leanings towards the right, but did not commit himself to that side in its subdued struggle of 1928-9. ‘Andreyev is with us: he’s being brought back from the Urals’—to be taken in hand, Kamenev was told by Bukharin. The manoeuvre was successful. In 1937 he was sent Stalin to purge Uzbekistan. His career remained smooth until it was overturned by the ‘zveno’, which was loaded with all the problems of the agricultural crisis. Since 1953, Andreyev has been a member of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, and no longer plays any part in political life in the USSR. In 1965, the review Zvezda began publishing his memoirs of October 1917; but only the first instalment ever appeared. …
J.-J. M.
(autobiography)
I was born on 23 March 1883 in Ivanovo-Voznesensk. I was educated at the local secondary school,1 which I left in 1903. Then I went to the Moscow Agricultural Institute (Timiryazev Academy) but did not graduate.
I joined the RSDRP(b) in 1903, having been a member of revolutionary student circles since 1900-1. I became a convinced Bolshevik from the moment I joined the Party. I worked as an organiser and propagandist mainly in the provinces of the central industrial region and in Moscow. In the course of my work, I was arrested thirteen times and spent over four years in prison, including a period in a fortress.
On my first release from prison, I was delegated by the Ivanovo-Voznesensk organisation to attend the Stockholm Congress of 1906 and the London Congress of 1907. I had been a member of the local Party committee since the summer of 1905, and then of the Ivanovo-Voznesensk RSDRP(b) Union, which united a number of local organisations. In 1907 I was transferred by the Central Committee to Moscow, and from the end of 1907 I was a member of the Party Committee there.
During the harsh Tsarist repressions of 1907-10 I continued my Party work despite repeated arrests. In 1908 I was elected a member of the area bureau of the central industrial region and a delegate to the All-Russian Party Conference. However, I was arrested before I could attend. On my release from prison in 1909, I was made an agent of the Central Committee. In May 1910 I was co-opted onto the staff of the Bolshevik ‘centre’ in Russia, but at the end of the year I was prosecuted by the Moscow Chamber of Justice under Article 102 (the Trial of the Thirty-four). From 1910 onwards, there was a noticeable upsurge of enthusiasm in the labour movement. In 1911 I was released and became an activist in Nizhny Novgorod and Sormovo. Then I was informed that I had been co-opted onto the Organisation Committee entrusted with the summoning of the All-Russian Party Conference. I attempted to travel abroad, but was again arrested. Elected a candidate member of the CC, I joined Pozern in producing the Bolshevik paper Povolzhskaya Byl (six numbers of which appeared). In 1912–13, I was a contributor to Pravda in St Petersburg. I was also a member of the Duma ‘fraction’ and the St Petersburg Party Committee’s ispolkom.
The World War found me in Kharkov, whither I had been exiled after my arrest in the capital. From the very beginning of the war, I maintained a consistent internationalist position. In early August 1914, after the Kharkov Bolsheviks’ anti-war proclamation, I was arrested, imprisoned and exiled to Poltava. From there I travelled to Samara and joined the Organisational Bureau created to summon a conference of Bolshevik organisations along the Lower Volga. After its collapse, I was arrested in October 1916, and in February 1917 exiled to the Turukhansk region of Siberia. During this period I did some work on statistics and published a series of research pamphlets on economic problems.
News of the February Revolution reached me in a transit hut in the village of Bobrovka (on the Krasnoyarsk – Yeniseysk highway). I returned to Moscow and joined the Party Bureau for the Central Industrial Region. The sixth Party Congress elected me to the CC. At this time I was also a member of the Moscow Soviet Executive Committee. In August, I was transferred by the CC to Petrograd, where I held seats both on the CC and the Petrograd Soviet Executive Committee, in addition to joining the editorial board of the Party’s military newspaper as CC representative. On 10 November I was elected to the Politburo, and on 16 November to the Military Revolutionary Committee charged with directing the rising. In November I was ordered to the south as Commissar for Railways and took part in the struggle against Kaledin (in Rostov-on-Don). After the seventh Party Congress, I travelled to the Ukraine where I was appointed People’s Secretary of the Workers’ and Peasants’ government, and took part in the fight against the Germans. With the defeat of the Ukrainian government, I joined the Insurrectionary Committee. As a member of the Ukrainian Party CC and the All-Ukrainian Military-Revolutionary Committee, I worked in the ‘neutral zone’ (Chernigov-Kursk region) from August to October, training detachments of the partisan army for the liberation of the Ukraine.
After the second All-Ukrainian Party Conference (in October 1918), I was sent on a secret mission to Kiev. As an experienced conspirator, I was made a member of the clandestine Kiev regional Party Bureau and Chairman of the underground Kiev Soviet. After the overthrow of Petlyura, I joined the new government of the Ukraine. At the eighth Party Congress I was elected a candidate member of the CC, a member of the Commission drafting the Party programme, and a full member of the Ukrainian CC. I was also Chairman of the Kiev Soviet.
In 1919 I was designated a member of the RVS of the Ukrainian Front, and then a member of the fourteenth army RVS. In October of the same year, I was appointed to the RVS of the Kozlov Shock Group. After economic work in Moscow in 1920,I joined the RVS for the North Caucasus Military District. At that time I held seats simultaneously on the Moscow Party Committee, the Don Regional Bureau in Rostov, and the South-East Area Party Committee. During the tenth Party Congress, I was awarded the Order of the Red Banner for my part in the suppression of the Kronstadt mutiny. In 1922-3 I was put in charge of the Agitprop Department of the CC. At the twelfth Party Congress, I was elected a candidate member and at the thirteenth a full member of the Central Committee. In early 1924, I was appointed head of the Political Directorate of the Red Army and a member of the RVS of the USSR. At the same time I held seats on the CC Orgburo and the TsIK of the USSR.
For many years I have undertaken literary tasks on behalf of the Party—my pseudonyms were ‘A. Glotov’, ‘S. Yaglov’, and ‘A.B.’. I have long been interested in the history of the revolutionary movement and the history of our Party. I wrote the pamphlet Turning-Points in the Development of the Communist Party in Russia, which has several times been re-published by many regional Party committees. Amongst my economic works, the most noteworthy is the pamphlet The Shipment of Grain by River, published in 1915, and also a series of articles and surveys on general agronomical questions featured in the journal Zemsky Agronom (Samara) and in agricultural journals in Kharkov and Poltava.
In October 1917, Bubnov was one of the leaders of the Bolshevik Party: a member of the Central Committee, as well as the Politburo, which, although formed on 10 October, never actually met. He was also on the RVS. Brest-Litovsk was a turning-point: an activist with no theoretical strength, Bubnov was also an extreme left-wing communist. He voted against the peace right up to the end, and resigned all posts of responsibility. He had scarcely returned to the Central Committee in 1919 before he was expelled again the following year, no doubt because he was one of the organisers of the so-called ‘Democratic Centralism’ opposition, which reproached the leadership for its excessive ‘Bureaucratic Centralism’.
In October 1923 he was a signatory of the ‘Declaration of the 46’. It was his last act of opposition. Historians agree that his complete about-turn was a function of his appointment in January 1924 as Head of the Political Control of the Red Army and as a member of the RRVS. From then on he allied himself unhesitatingly with the majority and pursued a rapidly rising career. In May 1924 he was elected to the Central Committee and the Orgburo, in December 1925 he became an alternate member of the secretariat. In 1929 he was appointed People’s Commissar for Education. He was not a member of the Stalinist nucleus and the General Secretary put him out of action: in 1934 he disappeared from the Orgburo. In 1937 he was arrested and deported to a camp where he met his death in 1940. With Kossarev he shares the bizarre privilege of having been ‘seen’ in Moscow after his rehabilitation in 1956 by truly perspicacious ‘observers’.
J.-J. M.
(autobiography)
I was born in February 1891 in the village of Fyodorovka, Aleksandrovsk district, Ekaterinoslav province. My parents owned a small plot of land and were both illiterate. I entered school in 1897. In the period preceding 1905, when the activity of revolutionary circles was greatly expanding in the village (one was organised by ‘Artem’), I participated in them, reading and explaining pamphlets to the illiterate. In 1904 when the circles were crushed, I was detained for the first time and interrogated (with humiliating beatings) by gendarmes who had come to the village to investigate ‘sedition’. Under the influence of teachers in the two-class school, I read Darwin’s Origin of the Species to the circle—it also destroyed my belief in God and led me to search for the meaning of my life.
Whilst living with my parents, I worked both on their land and, as a day labourer, on that of the more prosperous farmers. Seeing that it was not worth looking to farming for a career now that there were eight children in the family, I left school in 1904 and went to Aleksandrovsk to study at the Mechanical and Technical School. In 1905, after a pogrom in which my room was ransacked, I returned to the village and took part in the peasant movement. During my studies, I joined revolutionary circles and brought illegal literature to the village.
In 1907, with the return of some comrades from exile, I joined the Bolshevik Party and made contact with workers. During the summer vacations I worked in railway workshops. In term-time I earned money through lessons, in addition to my zemstvo scholarship and the assistance of a zemstvo official. In summer 1909 I was detained on a train for having illegal literature but I escaped.
After finishing school in 1911, I worked in factories until spring 1915, the only interruptions being for unemployment and one spell of six months in prison. I worked in a depot, and I was a plater, metal-worker, fitter and apprentice at the factories in Kramatorsk and Nikopol-Mariupol, as well as at the Bari Brothers’ boiler-making plant in Moscow. During this time I participated in strikes, the insurance campaign, co-operatives and circles. I also undertook agitation and propaganda besides continuing to educate myself.
After May Day 1915 I was mobilised into the army, but after a few months was assigned to the ordnance factory in Petrograd as a lathe operator. I was still there when the February Revolution broke out, and I immediately abandoned work to organise a factory workers’ militia and a factory committee in accordance with the Party line. At the first Conference of Factory Committees of Petrograd, I was elected to the Council.
I devoted myself to this organisation throughout the period up to October, as well as participating in various economic bodies (for example the Factory Conference). At the Congress of Ordnance Factory Workers, I was voted onto the All-Russian Committee (the organ of workers’ control), and at the All-Russian Congress of Factory Committees I was elected to the Council. After October I was elected to the Council of Workers’ Control and then the VSNKh. During the October days I was Commissar of the Artillery Directorate. Since the third Congress of Soviets I have been a member of the VTsIK, and since the creation of the USSR, a member of the TsIK of the Union and its Presidium.
My work in VSNKh from its creation until 1922 included transport, metallurgy, finance and economics. In 1918-19 I was Chairman of the Directorate for State Factories (Sormovo-Kolomna). In 1919 I was head of the VSNKh Commission charged with the reconstruction of industry in the Urals. In early 1920 I was dispatched to the Ukraine where I headed the VSNKh Industrial Bureau, and then the VSNKh itself. Whilst working in Petrograd, Moscow and Kharkov, I was a member of the Union of Metal-Workers and the CC. I have held seats on the All-Ukrainian Revolutionary Committee, then the All-Ukrainian TsIK (from 1920 until the present), and the Sovnarkom, where I was Deputy Chairman.
In 1922 I was appointed head of the Donbass coal industry, from where I was transferred to Kharkov in July 1923 in connection with my election as Chairman of Ukrainian Sovnarkom.
The fourth Ukrainian Party Conference elected me to its CC in 1920, and since 1921 I have been a candidate and then a full member of the CC of the RKP(b).
A prototype of the Western idea of the ‘commissar’ in the 1920s, Chubar was an enterprising, hard and energetic organiser. During the difficult years of the Civil War, he was entrusted with the delicate task of restoring the economy. In July 1919, Lenin gave him full powers to implement, by any means and by any representative of Soviet power, whatever measures he deemed necessary in the Urals. From 1920, he was given the Ukrainian economy to restore, and the Ukraine was to remain his field of action. Enjoying Stalin’s confidence, he took over from Rakovsky in 1923 as head of the Ukrainian government. For eleven years he filled this politically important and weighty post, supporting Stalin to the hilt in his struggle against the opposition, both in the Ukraine and within the Central Committee. He became one of the pillars of Stalin’s teams, first in the field of the economy, and rose to the summit of the Party’s hierarchy: from 1922 he was on the Central Committee; in 1926 he became an alternate member and in 1935 a full member of the Politburo of the CPSU. He left the Ukraine in 1934 after being appointed first deputy to the President of the Council of People’s Commissars, and in 1937 added to this post that of Minister of Finance. An intimate associate of Stalin and his policies, he was also their victim: in 1938 he was dismissed from his government posts and expelled from the Politburo. He was executed a year later. He was rehabilitated in 1956. (See T. H. Koliak, Kommunist Vlas Chubar, Kiev, 1963; and Drobzher and Dukhova, V. Y. Chubar, Moscow, 1963.)
G.H.
(autobiography)
I was born on 6 March 1890 in the town of Glukhov, Chernigov province. I came from a shoemaking family, and after leaving primary school I too became an apprentice shoemaker. We were a large family and poverty was always present at home. This brutalised my father and he made life stirringly oppressive for us. Work among the shoemakers, who were noted for their ignorance, drunkenness and debauchery, also had a strong effect on me, and all this combined to drive me away in search of something new.
I left home at the age of thirteen and reached Astrakhan, but as a Jew lacking permission to reside there, I was sent back home. On the way I came across a few political prisoners, and they were my first spur to revolutionary activity. In Glukhov I met a shoemaker called Boris Rogachevsky who had been banished from Baku for propaganda, and he introduced me to other revolutionaries. In addition, I was greatly influenced by the agrarian disorders of 1904–5 which became widespread in the Glukhov area on the many landowners’ estates. In 1905 I began to perform various technical services for the local RSDRP organisation, for example hectographing and distributing proclamations, and storing weapons.
In 1906 I officially joined the Glukhov RSDRP organisation. In March 1907 I was imprisoned for taking part in a strike, being released one and a half months later. In January 1908 I was arrested in Glukhov for belonging to the RSDRP. After ten months of detention without trial, I appeared before a Kiev circuit court and was given a sentence of five years’ imprisonment, which took into account the fact that I was still a minor. On completion of my sentence I went to Vilno, but was then exiled to Poltava in January 1915 on suspicion of anti-war propaganda. There I worked in an underground RSDRP(b) circle until the outbreak of the Revolution, during which I occupied various Party and Soviet positions.
In 1918 I was one of the founder members of the Ukrainian Bolshevik Communist Party, and was re-elected a member of its Central Committee on five occasions. In the same year, during a mission on which I had been sent to organise Ukrainian partisan detachments to fight against the Petlyura regime, I was arrested and sentenced to be shot. I escaped from the firing squad, but was wounded and forced to hide until the arrival of the Red Army.
In 1919–20 I was sent to the front to fight against Denikin’s forces. During the Civil War, I came close to being shot four times. The first occasion was in 1917 when troops of the Central Rada, in particular the Bogdan Khmelnitsky Regiment, smashed the Poltava Soviet. I was arrested with a group of comrades and humiliatingly ill-treated. We were all threatened with death, but as a member of the Poltava Duma, I was released on the latter’s insistence. The second occasion is described above. The third occurred during the Denikin invasion of the Ukraine, when I was Military Commissar of the Second Composite Division. When I arrived, during the last days of Soviet power in the Ukraine, the situation was extremely grave. Our headquarters were at the Kruty station in Chernigov province. Our task was to halt Denikin’s advance until the evacuation of the town of Nezhin was completed. But this was difficult as the enemy was pressing us hard and our troops were demoralised. A small group and I attempted to beat off a Cossack detachment, but we were surrounded and I was captured, although I escaped in spite of being wounded in the leg. The fourth occasion came when I was Chairman of the Poltava Executive Committee, and I was seized by bandits at Kovyaga station in Kharkov province. I was brutally beaten and thrown into a cellar as a hostage. It was only through the energetic intervention of Berzin, a member of the Southern Front RVS, that I was saved.
In 1922 I was appointed to the Small Council of People’s Commissars of the RSFSR, and in 1923 to the Administrative and Financial Commission of the Sovnarkom of the USSR, which positions I still hold today.
As soon as it was founded in the spring of 1919 Drobnis belonged to the opposition group Democratic Centralism, whose most eminent members were Sapronov, Osinsky and Vladimir Smirnov—all former left-wing communists at the time of the debates on the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty. Drobnis’s autobiography was written too late to inform us of his own precise position either in the discussion of the Brest-Litovsk terms, or within the Democratic Centralism group (often referred to, after its initials, as the ‘Detsist’ group), which protested against the bureaucratisation of the Party’s life.
In 1923, Drobnis was a signatory of the ‘Declaration of the 46’ and belonged to the left-wing opposition. In 1925 he was involved in the ‘Pililenko affair’, as were other ‘Detsist’ leaders who had joined the left-wing opposition; the affair took its name from a militant who attempted to win new Party members over to the opposition by organising mass demonstrations, beginning in the provinces.
Although he received a stern warning that time, Drobnis joined the United Opposition in 1926, and the fifteenth Congress (December 1927) expelled him from the Party on the list of the seventy-five Trotskyites and not on the list of the twenty-five ‘supporters of Sapronov’. In January 1929, he was arrested by the GPU and sent to Siberia. In November 1936, at the Novosibirsk ‘sabotage and terrorism’ trial, it was claimed that nine of the accused ‘Trotskyites’ were agents of Pyatakov. The accusations were based on evidence given by Drobnis against Pyatakov. Both men, of course, were among the accused at the second Moscow trial (January 1937), and they were both sentenced to death and shot. Drobnis, who played only a minor role during the trial, begged for a pardon in his final statement:
If you can find the slightest possibility of allowing me to die otherwise than in disgrace, and to permit me, after the great sufferings of my life, to rejoin the ranks of the class to which I was born, then I should consider it my sacred duty to earn this gift of the working masses and to serve them until my death.
Converted to the majority and robbed of all political power, Drobnis, like Pyatakov and so many others, had thrown himself heart and soul into the mundane task of industrial construction. This pathetic appeal was of no avail.
J.-J. M.
(autobiography)
I was born on 16 February 1889 in the village of Lyudkov, Novozybkov district, Chernigov (now Gomel) province. I come from a peasant family, and my relatives – mother, father, brother and sister – still live in Lyudkov and work the land. The peasants of our village and district owned only small plots of land. [ … ]
Our family was no exception, with three desyatiny1 of land, one horse and one cow to support nine people. My parents were constantly engaged in day labour on the large estates, since they were the only members of the family capable of working. The others were six children (the eldest sister being thirteen years old in 1899), and grandfather, who was 102. Poverty, the eternal companion of our family, compelled the young children to find summer jobs in the fields so as to earn some kopecks. By the age of seven, I was already working with my father, helping him to harrow and to spread manure, whilst in my spare time I grazed cattle for small landowners. Mother’s burden of numerous children, housework in the early morning and every evening, and work in the fields during the day, led her to hate the landowners. She cursed them for living at the peasants’ expense and undervaluing their labour. Hatred for the tyrannical landlords was instilled in all the family from an early age.
Despite these extremely trying conditions, at the age of six, I was sent as the eldest son, to the priest’s daughter for lessons which she gave to me and four other children in the cold kitchen, where calves and lambs were also housed. Her methods of education were rather primitive, for example she almost daily boxed our ears and beat us with a ruler. In spite of my desire for learning at whatever cost, this treatment drove me away after four months, and it was only in the following year that I entered primary school. Being a good pupil there, I was well liked by the headmistress, M. K. Davydovich, who was at that time a member of the SD Party.
When I left school, my ‘parents refused to let me continue my studies despite my entreaties. It was only thanks to the headmistress’s insistence that their resistance was overcome, and in autumn 1899 I entered the three-year municipal school. My parents could not give me any assistance, and so during the holidays I had to work for small gentry landowners to earn money for textbooks and the school uniform. During my four years at this school, I did not lose touch with my former teacher, who had a certain influence on my education. Being still at school in 1905, and although not properly understanding what was happening, I took part in the strike campaigns at the technical, municipal and ‘modern’ schools, for which I was brought to trial before the Starodub area court in 1906, after the suppression of the peasant rebellion in Novozybkov district by Dubasov. I was, however, acquitted.
At the age of fourteen, I left the municipal school, after which my parents categorically refused to allow me to study further, pleading their poverty and demanding that I should find a job to help feed the other children. By this time my brother Fyodor (who was a divisional commander in the Civil War and was killed in 1919 during the taking of Debaltsevo station) had also entered the municipal school and demanded that he should be allowed to continue. I had to give way and go to work in the treasurer’s office in Novoaleksandrovsk, where the treasurer was a relative of ours. After working for one and a half years, I was dismissed on the insistence of the local police chief for belonging to an illegal organisation. By now seventeen, I went to Riga, where I was employed for two years as a stevedore. This work was seasonal, so that I was idle in winter. During the summer, however, I managed to save a small amount of money which enabled me to take electrical and technical courses in winter.
In 1910 I went to work at the Riga cold store. There I came into contact with a group of Lett Bolsheviks and became involved in their activities, although not to the extent of joining the Party. I was dismissed for participating in a strike. In July 1910 I worked on a building site, where a strike also broke out in August, during which I left for Libau, as I was already being sought by the police. I lived in hiding there till the spring of 1911, when I returned to Riga and was re-employed as a stevedore. In November 1911 I was arrested for failure to report to a recuitment office for my call-up, and I was sent under escort back to Novozybkov.
On arrival there, I was conscripted into the Baltic Fleet as an ordinary seaman. It was whilst I was in the Fleet that, in 1912, I officially joined the Bolshevik Party and collaborated with Sladkov (who died in Kronstadt in 1922). On graduating from the Gunnery and Mining School in 1913, I was posted to the battleship Emperor Paul I, which after the Revolution was renamed the Republic. On board this vessel, which was nicknamed the ‘prison ship’ by the sailors, I engaged in militant illegal activity and was one of the instigators of the mutiny in 1915 on the Dreadnought Petropavlovsk. In 1916 I was one of a battalion of sailors sent to the Riga Front, to the area of the Ikskile fortified positions. Before it could attack, the battalion had been so stirred by revolutionary propaganda that it refused to obey orders, and it also won over the Forty-fifth Siberian Infantry Regiment. For this mutiny, the sailors’ battalion was immediately withdrawn to Riga where it was disbanded and sent back to Helsinki under escort. On the way, many sailors were arrested. I feigned illness and remained in hospital in Riga for two months, after which I returned and was sentenced to two months’ detention.
In 1917, after the February Revolution, I was elected President of the Baltic Fleet Central Committee (Tsentrobalt), and although being in the minority (only six members of the Committee were Bolsheviks, and another five were sympathisers), I nevertheless managed to carry through statutes which unambiguously recognised the Provisional government, but which also maintained that all the latter’s orders could only be executed with the agreement of the Committee. In July, I was arrested for mutiny, beaten by Kadets, and imprisoned in the Kresty until 4 September. On my release, I returned to Helsinki and resumed work on behalf of the Baltic Fleet Committee which had been dissolved after the July events by Kerensky’s Commissar, Onipko. At the beginning of October 1917, during the large-scale German incursion into the Baltic, I took part in the struggle for the islands of Dago and Ezel.
In the October rising, I commanded troops at Tsarskoye Selo and Gatchina, and after crushing the Kerensky ‘adventure’, I personally arrested Krasnov and took him to the Smolny Palace. In October, I was elected People’s Commissar for the Navy, holding the post till April 1918. In May, I was tried for surrendering Narva to the Germans, but was acquitted. After this, I was sent to carry out underground activity in the Ukraine and the Crimea. In August 1918, I was arrested in Sebastopol by the government of General Sulkevich and was imprisoned till the end of September. After attempting to escape from Sebastopol prison, I was put in handcuffs and irons, and transferred to the one at Simferopol. I was released following negotiations for an exchange of prisoners between the Sovnarkom and the Germans. In October, I arrived in the neutral zone near the town of Rylsk in Kursk province, where I was first of all military commissar of a regiment and then commander of a battalion. Later, I commanded troops during the drive to Ekaterinoslav, which included the capture of Kharkov.
In February 1919, I was made Commander of the division beyond the Dnieper which, after gaining control in the Crimea, was re-formed as the Crimean Army and which I led until July 1919, being at the same time the Crimean Republic’s Commissar for the Army and Navy. In September 1919, I entered the RKKA Academy, but then these orders were countermanded and I was sent to the South-Eastern Front to lead the Thirty-seventh Infantry Division. On 28 November we took part in the defeat of General Toporkov’s White Army Corps at Kachalin and in the capture of Tsaritsyn. In February 1920 I was appointed Commander of the First Caucasian Cossack Division, and after the rout of Denikin’s forces, I led a cavalry group in the advance towards Maikop. In July 1920 I commanded the Second Cavalry Division on the Southern Front. In 1921, whilst a student on the preparatory course at the Military Academy, I was sent to help crush the Kronstadt mutiny. When I arrived in Oranienbaum, I took command of a mixed division which was involved in the fighting at Kronstadt, and after the mutiny was over, I was appointed Commandant of the fortress there. Within a few days I was recalled to take part in the fight against Antonov’s brigands. After consideration by the RKKA General Staff, I was appointed Commander of the Western Black Sea coast and, in June, Commander of the Fifty-first Perekop Division.
In addition to all this, I was an external student of the Military Academy for eighteen months, from 1 June 1921 until 1 September 1922, when I completed the higher and supplementary courses. In July 1921 I was appointed Commander of the Sixth Infantry Corps. After graduating from the Academy, I was promoted Commander and Commissar of the Fifth Infantry Corps, and then in April 1924 I was made Commander of the Tenth Infantry Corps. On 6 May 1925 I was put in charge of the RKKA artillery forces, and at the third Congress of Soviets I was elected a member of the TsIK.
The military honours I have received are: three Orders of the Red Banner, a gold watch from the VTsIK, a silver watch from the Leningrad Soviet, and a horse.
This ‘bearded giant with a placid face’ (John Reed), justifiably called by the left-wing SR Steinberg ‘the hero of October, the leader of the Baltic seamen … with fiery eyes but a calm temper’, was a man of enthusiasm and impulsive action. Appointed a member of the War Commissariat on 26 October 1917, he led the counter-offensive against Krasnov’s Cossack troops, and signed with him an armistice stipulating the delivery of Kerensky and the removal of Lenin and Trotsky from the government. ... At the end of January 1918, he left for the Ukraine, in charge of detachments of Red troops. Hostile to the Brest-Litovsk treaty, he decided to throw his troops against the Germans after the signature of the peace, and for this he was arrested, tried for high treason, and acquitted. (It was not for the loss of Narva, as he claimed.) According to Steinberg, ‘after his acquittal ... he nurtured the idea of overthrowing the government by force’. He was expelled from the Party, then readmitted a few months later, and in January found himself entrusted, alongside Voroshilov, with the command of the First Ukrainian Army. He distinguished himself by his great courage in battle and his administrative ineptitude. Lenin reproached him and Voroshilov with wasting all their supplies. In March 1921, the former President of Tsentrobalt was at the head of the Soviet detachments that attacked the Kronstadt mutineers over the ice.
Thenceforth Dybenko pursued an ordinary military career: in 1922 he completed his studies at the Military Academy, and then became successively Commander of the Red Army Artillery, head of Supply Services, Commander of the Central Asian Armies, of the Volga Army, and finally Commander for the Leningrad Military District. He was one of the nine judges on the military tribunal that sentenced Tukhachevsky to death for treason. ... He was himself arrested a few months later. Stalin had him tried in camera early in 1938 and, according to Krasnaya Zvezda, came to his trial in person. Stalin promised to appoint him to a post in the Urals if he confessed. Dybenko confessed. Stalin sent him to take over the wood industries in the Urals, and had him shot as he got off the train. Since then General Dybenko has been rehabilitated, like all the other generals.
J.-J. M.
(autobiography)
(Party pseudonyms: ‘Goldfish’, ‘Abdul’, ‘Abel’)
I was born on 7 May 1977 in the village of Tskadisi, Rachi district, Kutaisi province. Until the age of twelve, I grew up in the very beautiful mountain region of Rachi and went to the village school. From 1889 to 1892, I studied at the Mingrelia district school, and then in 1893 moved to Tiflis for further studies, completing my secondary technical education in 1897.
From early 1894, underground student circles began to be formed in Tiflis under the influence of the political strike at the religious seminary (then the centre for revolutionary students), and in other educational establishments. The circle I joined in 1894 had at first a semi-nationalist, semi-Marxist programme. From spring 1896 I was a member of a mixed worker and student circle, and it was then that my Marxist education began. We eagerly devoured all illegal writings of that time, as well as articles from Sovremmenik, the new Mir Bozhy, Samarsky Vestnik, and then Novoye Slovo. In the summer of 1897, not having the money to continue my studies, I found a job on the railways and worked in the assembly shop of the main depot of the Transcaucasian railway. There I became for the first time a propagandist and organiser in workers’ circles. By this time, the Tiflis organisation had noticeably widened its scope so as to include other factories in the city. We already had links with the St Petersburg ‘Union of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class’, and after the first RSDRP Congress new ones were forged with other organisations in Russia. In September 1898 I was transferred to the Baku depot as an engine driver’s mate. There I soon made contacts not only with railway workers, but also with workers from factories and the oilfields. At that time no SD organisation existed in Baku, apart from a small group of workers who had been exiled from Moscow by the notorious Zubatov. With their help I managed to organise workers’ circles in three districts of Baku. Thus the Baku SD organisation can be said to have come into existence in early 1899.
It was with the arrival of the late Vladimir Ketskhoveli, who had been expelled from Tiflis as the organiser of a tram strike, that the activity of the Baku organisation was put on a sound and correct footing. During the years 1899, 1900 and 1901, we managed to form a Baku RSDRP Committee, enlarge our work in the surrounding districts, and create a small, underground printing-press. In spring 1901, the Party suggested that I should devote myself to full-time revolutionary work, and Ketskhoveli and I went underground. In autumn 1901 an Iskra group was formed in Baku and from then onwards we were in regular communication with the paper’s editorial board. During this time we set up a large printing-press on which we reprinted amongst other things numbers 7 and 11 of Iskra and numbers 5 to 8 of Yuzhny Rabochy, and we arranged for foreign literature to be smuggled into the country through Batum.
In April 1902 I was arrested for organising a May Day demonstration. On my release in May, I continued my activities until 2 September, when Ketskhoveli and I were arrested and transferred to the Metekhi prison in Tiflis, where we were held until summer 1903. That summer I voted in the elections to choose a delegate for the second RSDRP Congress. In autumn 1903 I was rearrested and exiled to eastern Siberia, but escaped on the way and finally went underground. Following a decision of the Party in 1903, I worked on the large underground CC printing-press until its transfer to St Petersburg in 1906, in which year I joined the organisation in the capital. Upon the dissolution of the State Duma, I was dispatched to work in the Caucasus.
After the All-Caucasian Congress in autumn 1906, I returned to the Baku organisation as a member of its committee, but was arrested on 5 May 1907 at the Baku Bolshevik Conference. In the autumn, I was exiled to Voronezh, but escaped from my escort on the way and returned to Baku, where I remained until the full conference of the Bolshevik Party in Tammerfors. En route to Finland, I was arrested in St Petersburg on 9 November 1907 and incarcerated in the Kresty prison. In May 1908 I was exiled to Archangel province, but escaped back to St Petersburg in September. I rejected a proposal that I should emigrate and after wandering about St Petersburg and Finland for three months, I returned to exile in the Onega area. I completed my sentence in July 1910 and in the autumn returned to the Baku Committee. In September 1911 I was arrested with Shaumyan, Kasparov, Chernomazov and others when preparations for the All-Russian Conference of Bolsheviks were at their height. I remained in prison until July 1912, when I was banished from the Caucasus. From October to December 1912 I worked in Rostov-on-Don. In December I travelled to Moscow, where I was given twenty-four hours to leave, and so went to St Petersburg. On 4 July I was arrested there, and in December exiled to Yenisey province.
At the end of 1916, I was recalled from exile to do my military service. I served as a private in the Thirteenth Company of the Fourteenth Siberian Regiment, and on 22 February 1917 I was sent to join the army at the front via Petrograd. I arrived in Petrograd on 27 February, that is the first day of the Revolution, and from 28 February to 3 March I joined troops in street demonstrations. Until the Congress of Soviets was summoned in April, I was a member of the Petrograd garrison. In April I was voted on to the VTsIK, and at the first Congress of Soviets I was elected a Bolshevik member of the VTsIK, later also becoming a member of the Petrograd Soviet and Executive Committee. In the days preceding the October events, I was elected one of the ‘Fifteen’—the Bureau of the Workers’ Section of the Petrograd Soviet. I took a very active part both in organising the second Congress of Soviets and in the October Revolution. Since then I have been returned at every election for the VTsIK. At first I directed its Military Department, and then from autumn 1918 until the end of 1922 I was a Presidium member and secretary. Since 30 December 1922 I have been a Presidium member of the VTsIK, and a Presidium member and secretary of the TsIK of the USSR.
One day in 1926, Enukidze confided to Serebryakov: ‘We are not afraid of Stalin. As soon as he wants to take on grand airs, we shall eliminate him.’ A few years later he wearily confided to the same man: ‘What does he want now? I do everything that is demanded of me, but for him it’s not enough. What’s more, he wants me to consider him a genius.’ Enukidze, who had known Koba-Stalin from the early years of militant activity in Georgia and who had been on the Baku Committee with him (1907-8), found it difficult to regard Stalin as a genius at the time when, even for an old friend, it was imperative to do so.
Thus Enukidze became the first major Stalinist to be publicly humiliated and made a victim of the purges. On 1 December 1934, on the evening of Kirov’s assassination, Stalin made him sign, in his capacity as Secretary of the Presidium of the VTsIK, the directive which ordered the acceleration of the trials of real or potential ‘terrorists’ and supressed the right of pardon. On 16 January 1935, Pravda published a long self-criticism by Enukidze, in which he revised the historical origins of the Caucasian workers’ movement: ‘I must correct the errors that slipped into the Granat Encyclopedia and the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. The story of my life is told there as if I had founded the Social Democratic organisation in Baku. That is contrary to the truth [ … ] All I did was to help Ketskhoveli.’ Enukidze, whom present-day historians have restored to the place he occupied in the celebrated clandestine ‘Nina’ printing-press, still refused to put Stalin in the front rank. A few weeks later Stalin relieved him of his functions as Secretary of the VTsIK, and appointed him President of the Transcaucasian Ispolkom.
He had scarcely taken up his new position when Beria gave a lecture ‘On the History of Bolshevik Organisations in Transcaucasia’, in which Enukidze was denounced as a falsificator:
Aveli Enukidze, deliberately and with deliberately hostile intentions, has falsified the history of the Bolshevik organisations in Transcaucasia [ … ] Cynically and impudently, he has deformed well-known historical facts, attributing to himself an incorrect role in the creation of the first illegal printing-press in Baku.
There is no doubt that Enukidze was a talkative and rather boastful man; but one can subscribe to the view of him expressed by Bertram Wolfe:
Enukidze was one of the best of that corps of second-string leaders recruited from the working class, which made up the most dependable strength of Lenin’s party. Unlike the intellectuals who followed him, these professional revolutionaries from the working class essayed little independent thinking, vacillated less, more seldom questioned or broke with him. They found the meaning of their lives in carrying out the orders of the machine.
Despite this – or rather because of it – Enukidze was expelled from the Party in June 1935 as ‘corrupt’ and ‘politically degenerate’. His political degeneracy stemmed, perhaps, from the fact that this rather easy-going man sent packets to his nephew, Lado Enukidze, who had been deported several years before. ... It was said in top Party circles that Enukidze was involved in Kirov’s assassination. Nevertheless, he did not appear at any of the Moscow trials. He was shot after a secret trial on 20 December 1937. The list of charges states that although Enukidze had been expelled from the Party, he had not been completely unmasked, that he was plotting acts of terror, and had committed treason in close collaboration with the ‘General Staff of a Fascist State’.
Enukidze had no political ambitions; he was always prepared to adapt himself to new situations and leaders. He was satisfied at having been an exemplary Bolshevik militant and remained naively attached to the traditions of the revolutionary movement. As Secretary of the VTsIK, he was in charge of supplies to the Kremlin during the Civil War. He involved himself only half-heartedly and reluctantly in the struggle against the left opposition and remained a personal friend of one of its leaders, Serebryakov. He paid for this in 1935 when he was accused of having maintained relationship with ‘enemies of the people’. By accusing of corruption the former supplier of the Kremlin, the man who had organised the very banquets at which Stalin and his group had planned their campaign tactics, the General Secretary denounced what Enukize could have become had his personal simplicity and honesty not prevented it.
J.-J. M.
Mikhail Vasilievich Frunze was born in 1885 in the town of Pishpek, Dzhetysu (formerly Semireche) province (Turkestan). His father, a russified Moldavian peasant from the Tiraspol district of Kherson province, had done his military service in Turkestan and remained there on its completion as assistant to the town’s doctor. His mother – a peasant girl from Voronezh province – had moved to Semireche in the 1870s. Frunze was educated in the town school, and then in the Gymnasium at Verny (now Alma-Ata). His childhood was spent in difficult circumstances as he lost his father at an early age and he had to earn his own living. He first became acquainted with revolutionary ideas at the Gymnasium, where he took part in self-development circles. On graduating from the Gymnasium in 1904, Frunze entered the Polytechnical Institute in St Petersburg. Here he participated in student and worker revolutionary circles and joined the SD Party, siding with the Bolsheviks after the split. In November 1904 he was arrested for being involved in a demonstration and banished from the capital.
At first he worked in Moscow, then Ivanovo-Voznesensk, where he was one of the leaders of the famous textile-workers’ strike in 1905 which for one and a half months paralysed all industry in the region. Then he took part in the Moscow rising of December 1905, manning barricades in the Presnya district of the city held by the revolutionaries. Frunze was the founder of the Ivanovo-Voznesensk area organisation and then the Ivanovo-Voznesensk RSDRP Union, which included both the town and surrounding districts. He was a delegate to the third Party Congress in London in 1905, and to the fourth in Stockholm in 1906. His subsequent arrest in 1907 in Shuya led to a long break in his revolutionary activity. He was sentenced to four years’ hard labour for membership of the SD(b) Party, and to another six years for armed resistance to the police (this case was tried five times, and he was twice condemned to be hanged). He served his sentence in the Vladimir (five and a half years), Nikolaev (two years) and Alexandrov (Siberia) central hard labour prisons.
At the end of 1914, he was allowed to reside in the Verkholensk district of Irkutsk province. In summer 1915 he was arrested for forming an organisation among the exiles. He succeeded in escaping to Chita, where he lived under the name of Vasilenko and helped to edit the Bolshevik daily Vostochnoye Obozreniye. After this, when his hiding-place became known to the police, he made his way back to Russia. Under the name of Mikhailov, he joined the All-Russian Union of Zemstvos and worked on the Western Front.
At the outbreak of the February Revolution, he was already at the head of a huge underground revolutionary organisation with its centre in Minsk and sections in the Tenth and Third Armies. He was one of the leaders of the revolutionary movement in Minsk, Byelorussia and the Western Front, and he personally became head of the Minsk citizens’ militia. Then he was voted on to the Minsk Soviet of Peasants’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, to the Army Committee for the Western Front, and he was finally elected President of the Byelorussian Soviet. After the Kornilov rebellion, during which he was the elected chief of staff for the Minsk region, he returned to the place of his former revolutionary activity, Ivanovo-Voznesensk, and in Shuya was elected President of the Zemstvo Board, the town duma, and the local soviet. He represented Shuya at the Democratic Congress in Petrograd. In October, he arrived in Moscow with a force of 2,000 men and took an active part in the battle.
After the October Revolution, he became Chairman of the Voznesensk province Ispolkom and RKP Committee as well as Military Commissar for the province. At the Constituent Assembly, he represented the Bolsheviks of Vladimir province. After the Yaroslav rebellion, he was appointed Commissar for the Yaroslav Military District. From there he was transferred to the Urals Front and under his command the Southern Army Group of the Eastern Front inflicted a decisive defeat on Kolchak’s troops. Following this, he was put in charge of the whole Eastern Front and directed the operations to sweep the Whites out of Turkestan. During the revolution in Bukhara in August which overthrew the Emir, Frunze secured the revolutionaries’ control by driving the Emir’s forces out of the Bukharan Republic with detachments of the Red Army. In September 1920, he ordered an offensive against Wrangel on the Southern Front. After the seizure of the Crimea and the elimination of Wrangel’s forces, he became commander of all troops in the Crimea and the Ukraine, and representative of the Revolutionary Military Council there. Under his leadership the Petlyura and Makhno rebellions were crushed. He was elected a member of the Ukrainian Bolshevik CC and the Ukrainian TsIK. In 1924 he was appointed Deputy Chairman of the Military Revolutionary Council, at the same time being a Presidium member (since the third Congress of Soviets) of the TsIK of the USSR. On 26 January 1925 he was promoted Chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council and People’s Commissar for the Army and Navy. On 31 October 1925 he died after a prolonged illness and an operation.
In 1924, the Troika attempted to weaken Trotsky’s positions, and replaced his deputy in the War Commissariat, Sklyansky, by Frunze; and when in January 1925 Zinoviev and Kamenev tried to have Trotsky expelled from the Party, the majority in the Central Committee decided to remove him from the War Commissariat and to appoint Frunze in his place. Trotsky rendered homage to his qualities, which in the circumstances can only appear all the more convincing:
Frunze was a man of serious disposition; as a result of his prison years, he had more authority in the Party than the fresh young Sklyansky. Moreover, during the war Frunze demonstrated undeniable qualities as a war captain. As a military administrator, he was incomparably weaker than Sklyansky. He allowed himself to get carried away by abstract schemes.
Later, Trotsky stated simply that Frunze was ‘a highly talented military chief’.
This man, with his square face, cropped hair and clear eyes, seemed predestined to a career as a military chief. He began, all the same, as an ‘exemplary’ clandestine militant, one of the model convicts of the Bolshevik Party. He was arrested by the police: he was sentenced to four years’ hard labour, and sent to Vladimir prison. In 1909 he was accused of organising the attempted murder of a gendarme, and sentenced to death, but the sentence was commuted. In February 1910, he was sentenced to four years’ hard labour for his Bolshevik militance at Ivanovo-Voznesensk, and then in September he was again condemned to death for the same attempted murder of the same gendarme. The sentence was commuted to six years’ hard labour. He spent four years in the prisons of Vladimir and Nikolaev (not seven and a half, as is stated above in the biography). Banished to Eastern Siberia, he escaped and agitated in the army.
In the February Revolution Frunze’s role was as important in the practical sense as it was minor in the political sense. He was one of the leaders of the February Revolution in Byelorussia, but then aligned himself with the position of the Mensheviks and the SRs: critical support for the Provisional government, merger with the Mensheviks.
The Civil War brought out his real qualities: he commanded the Fourth Army on the Eastern Front; then he was at the head of the Southern Army Group during its victorious counter-attack against Kolchak from March to July 1917. From September to November 1919 he led the Soviet Republic’s final struggle against Wrangel.
It was then that with Tukhachevsky and Gusev he elaborated the ‘Doctrine of Proletarian War’, which proclaimed as the pinnacle of achievement the revolutionary initiative embodied in ‘manoeuvre’ and ‘offensive’; both of which were hampered by excessive centralisation, denounced by this group. … The group also advocated the replacement of the heavy regular army by mobile militia detachments. At the tenth Congress in 1921, Frunze was elected to the Central Committee. It was no doubt then that he allied himself with Zinoviev, whose faithful supporter he remained to the end of his life. Zinoviev imposed him in Sklyansky’s place, and then in Trotsky’s, in January 1925, as Commissar for War. The collapse of the Troika made Frunze’s presence in this position extremely awkward for Stalin. Frunze had formerly suffered from stomach ulcers. The Central Committee doctors, on orders from Stalin, insisted that he should be operated on; Frunze’s doctors were opposed to it, for they were certain that his heart would not stand up to the chloroform. The Central Committee doctors had their way, and Frunze died on the operating table on 31 October 1925. … Three months later, the novelist Boris Pilnyak published a short story entitled ‘The Tale of the Unextinguished Moon’ in the January 1926 issue of the review Krasnaya Nov. In this story, an army commander called Gavrilov is liquidated by the leader of a powerful troika, by ‘the man with a straight back’. That issue of the review was seized. A few weeks earlier, Voroshilov had replaced the late Frunze.
At his funeral, Voronsky declared that ‘Frunze had a mind that was straight and open. ... He was spiritually too rich to advance by tortuous or obscure paths’. This battlefield tactician was clearly an ‘idealist’. He had to be removed because he appeared inconvertible. By opposing the interference of the GPU in army affairs from the moment he was appointed, Frunze showed, in effect, that he was as stubborn as a People’s Commissar as he had been as an army chief. He too had a straight back. …
J.-J.M.
(authorised biography)
Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin, President of the TsIK of the USSR and RSFSR, was born on 7 November 1875 in the village of Verkhnyaya Troika, Korchev district, Tver province. His parents were poor peasants. Until the age of thirteen, he helped his father on the land. Kalinin learnt to read and write at the age of ten from a semi-literate army veteran, and at eleven started going to the zemstvo primary school run by a neighbouring landowner, Mme Mordukhay-Boltovsky, whose children were his playfellows. Leaving the school as one of its top pupils, he entered the service of the Mordukhay-Boltovsky family, who lived at that time in St Petersburg. In his own words, he was sloppy and careless in performing his duties of footman. However, his service did allow him to read many books in the family library. At the age of sixteen, the mistress of the house sent him as an apprentice to the cartridge factory in St Petersburg, where he also attended the factory school in the evenings. After two years there, Kalinin began work at the Putilov factory as a lathe operator. Here he made his first political acquaintances and joined a political circle which soon, however, collapsed. Nevertheless, he continued to be drawn into political activity, meeting an elderly worker called Parshukov and a group of workers who were in touch with underground militants.
In 1898 Kalinin joined the Social Democratic Party, continuing to work at the Putilov factory where there were by this time a number of political circles. In the same year, his first articles appeared in Rabochaya Mysl The following year he was arrested for the first time on the grounds of belonging to the ‘St Petersburg Union of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class’, one of whose founders was Lenin. After ten months’ imprisonment he was exiled to the Caucasus. Calling to see his relatives in the village on the way, he reached Tiflis, where he found a job as a metal craftsman on the railways and conducted clandestine activity amongst the Tiflis workers. Dismissed for striking, he moved to a private factory, but was soon deprived of his right to reside in the Caucasus and went to Revel. There he found work at the Volt factory, and after a year transferred to the railways.
In 1903 Kalinin was again arrested and sent to the prison in St Petersburg where he spent six months in custody. Recalling this time, he wrote: ‘In 1903 new ideas were in the air. The prison was crammed with shouting, jostling political prisoners. I cannot remember why the protest started, but the peaceful prison turned into a mad-house.’ The prison governor took even more repressive measures, and in reply the prisoners went on hunger strike. Kalinin was transferred to the Kresty prison where he and forty-one other inmates were harshly ill-treated, one of them dying from his injuries. Kalinin was released one and a half months later, was again forced to travel to Revel, and again found a job at the Volt factory.
Early in 1904, he was rearrested and due to be exiled in Siberia. However, in view of the declaration of war on Japan, Siberia was replaced by Olonets province, where he remained until his release in 1905. After a short stay in the country, he returned to the Putilov works in St Petersburg, joining a district committee and the command staff. Dismissed as the result of a strike, he again returned to the country for a few months, only to come back to the cartridge factory in St Petersburg. But he did not succeed in settling anywhere for long; from the cartridge factory he moved to the Reikhel optical works. He was arrested, returned to the country, then went to Moscow, finding work at a tramway station. After two years, he reappeared in St Petersburg, this time at an armaments factory. Finally, after another arrest, he was banished to the countryside, where he remained for a whole year working in agriculture. Throughout all this time he never interrupted his revolutionary activity.
In 1906 he took the side of the Bolsheviks, was on the staff of the Central Union of Metal-Workers, joined district committees, helped to publish a workers’ newspaper, and was a delegate to the Stockholm Party Congress. During his time in the country his room was thoroughly searched, but he was left at liberty thanks to the favourable testimony of neighbouring peasants, who kept silent about his political activity.
During the first years of the war, Kalinin worked at the Aivaz factory, one of the most technically advanced and militantly revolutionary factories in Petrograd. In November 1916 he was again arrested and was due to be exiled to Siberia, but the outbreak of revolution in February 1917 freed him to take an active part in the preparations for the October Revolution. At elections for the Petrograd Duma, he was voted mayor. In 1919 he became a member of the Central Committee of the RKP, after the death of Sverdlov became President of the VTsIK, and in 1923 President of the TsIK of the USSR.
Supporting his candidature in 1919, Lenin said:
The transition to socialist agriculture we consider possible only by means of a series of agreements with the middle peasants. But we know that the comrades who were most active before the Revolution did not always know how to approach the peasants. The question of the middle peasants is more acute for us than for our comrades in Europe, and we ought to ensure that at the head of the Soviet government there is a man who can show that our attitude towards them will be put into practice exactly as the Party Congress laid down. We know that if we can find a comrade who combines broad experience and an acquaintance with the life of the middle peasant, we shall solve this problem, and I think that the candidate announced in the newspaper this morning satisfies all these conditions. It is Kalinin.
Seeing the main task of his appointment as the strengthening of links between workers and peasants, Kalinin has made frequent tours of the provinces. In 1919 he demanded the removal of local rationing restrictions on the grounds of the hostility towards them of the peasantry, who had difficulty in understanding ‘the usefulness of such decisions made by higher organs with the aim of fulfilling separate directives’.
Two ‘anecdotes’ can be used to draw the curve of the career of ‘the old fox’ (as Panait Istrati called him), who, from March 1919 until his death in 1946, was President of the VTsIK, that is President of the Soviet Republic. In January 1929, as a member of the Politburo but hostile to the accelerated collectivisation policy, he said to Zinoviev: ‘[Stalin] natters on about left-wing measures, but very soon he’ll have to apply my policy in treble quantities. That’s why I’m supporting him.’ In 1945, when Kalinin, old and half blind, had to visit his wife in prison, Djilas met him at an official reception in the Kremlin. Kalinin asked Tito for a Yugoslav cigarette. ‘Don’t smoke it,’ said Stalin, ‘it’s a capitalist cigarette.’ And Kalinin, in confusion, dropped the cigarette from his trembling fingers, while Stalin laughed and an expression of sadistic pleasure spread across his face.
Although he was still a member of the Politburo, Kalinin had long been nothing more than a dummy figure, whose sly peasant face was a symbol of the Soviet State. The defeat of the right-wing opposition in 1929 had robbed his voice of any real importance.
In fact, Kalinin had a natural tendency to avoid political fights and to let himself float with the tide of events and slogans. In March 1917, he agreed with critical support for the Provisional government and merging with the Mensheviks. Lenin’s April Theses offended him so much that on 14 April he declared to the Petrograd Conference that he belonged ‘to the old Bolshevik-Leninists, and I consider that old-style Leninism has in no way shown itself to be inapplicable to the present moment, strange though it may be, and I am amazed that Lenin should state that the Old Bolsheviks have today become an embarrassment’. He was not opposed to the October insurrection, but adopted a dilatory attitude and proposed that it should be postponed.
He distinguished himself in the political battles of Lenin’s era only by his unconditional fidelity to the latter. It was this fidelity, together with his value as a symbol, that earned Kalinin his candidate membership of the Politburo in 1919. In December 1925, he became a full member, at the fifteenth Congress: this was the reward for his fidelity to Stalin, less profound than his attachment to Lenin, but of a permanence that surprised Bukharin in 1928 when Kalinin, who agreed with him, voted with Stalin against him.
Their solidarity had roots in the distant past. In June 1900, when Koba-Stalin came on to the Tiflis Committee of the RSDRP, Kalinin, a metal-craftsman in the Tiflis railway depot, was one of the social democrats leaders of the strike which gained the support of the great majority of the 5,000 railway workers in Tiflis. In 1912, they were both members of the Russian Bureau of the Central Committee. In 1925, Kalinin said of Stalin: ‘This horse will one day land our waggon in the ditch.’ If he remained loyal, however, it was not just because Stalin went so far as to have a caricature published which showed ‘M. K.’ in an embarrassing pose. (Kalinin was a bit too fond of pretty actresses at a time when official puritanism was being established and when a militant’s private life began to count in his ‘career’.) This (effective) blackmail does not account for everything: Kalinin was only capable of following a leader, whose policies, moreover, were close to his own. To follow Stalin no doubt meant breaking with a past to which Kalinin remained sentimentally attached. And Trotsky suggested just that when he wrote that ‘Gradually, reluctantly and unwillingly, Kalinin turned first against me, then against Zinoviev, and finally, but completely unwillingly, against Rykov, Bukharin and Tomsky, to whom he was closely related by common political conceptions’. But Kalinin did not have in any way the character of an oppositionist. He thus served to emphasise the permanence, at the head of the State, of a revolutionary tradition in which his entire youth had been cloaked. Is it a pure coincidence that it was in the year of Kalinin’s death that Stalin changed the name of the Council of People’s Commissars to that of Council of Ministers?
J.-J.M.
(Party name Kamo)
Kamo was born into the family of a prosperous contractor in 1882 in the town of Gori, Tiflis province. His father, a petty tyrant and despot, liked eating well and receiving ‘distinguished’ guests, but was a miser towards his family. His mother, a young and beautiful woman (when Kamo was born she was still not sixteen) gave birth to nearly a dozen children, of whom five survived, and she doted on her eldest son. At seven, Kamo went to the Armenian school where he was taught in Armenian, even though it is a very difficult language for a child and his parents spoke Georgian at home. At eleven, he transferred to the municipal school where he was forced to learn another completely alien language—Russian. Whilst still a child, he befriended poor people, which provoked his father’s displeasure. Witnessing the latter’s coarse and insulting behaviour towards the mother he adored, Kamo took her part and defended her energetically when he was older. In 1898 he was expelled from school for misconduct (free-thinking). He decided to volunteer for the army, and with this end in view went to live with his aunt in Tiflis.
He took lessons from Stalin and Vardayants, who both came from his native town of Gori and were actively involved in the revolutionary movement. They brought him into contact with other comrades and taught him the rudiments of revolutionary Marxism. But his mother fell incurably ill and Kamo returned home. His father had by now run into debt, the family was reduced to poverty and there was not enough money for medicines. After his mother’s death, Kamo returned to Tiflis with his sisters to live with his aunt. In 1901 he joined the SD Party, for two years carried out various technical assignments and received his pseudonym (a mispronunciation of the Russian word Komú). In 1903 he became a member of the RSDRP Caucasian Union Committee, organised its printing-press and energetically helped to send delegates to the second Party Congress. His resourcefulness in distributing illegal literature was inexhaustible.
In November 1903 Kamo was arrested, but he escaped from prison nine months later. In 1904 he joined the Bolshevik Party and, going underground, continued to work in the Caucasian Union Committee. In December 1905 a revolt broke out in Tiflis and during a battle with Cossacks Kamo was wounded, beaten up and arrested. He spent two and a half months in prison and then, after exchanging names with a Georgian, managed to hide. Later he arranged for a shipment of arms and created the opportunity for 32 comrades to escape from the Metekhi fortress. In 1906, aware of the gaps in his knowledge, he considered going to St Petersburg, but the Party gave him a responsible task, that of purchasing arms abroad. The attempt was a failure, as the vessel with the arms on board sank on her way from Bulgaria. In 1907, under the name of Prince Dadiani, he travelled to Finland, stayed with Lenin, and returned to Tiflis with arms and explosives. Here he carried out an extremely daring bank raid and in August 1907 left for Berlin.
In September he was arrested by the German police for being in possession of weapons and a suitcase full of explosives. He was accused of being a terrorist and an anarchist, and threatened with deportation to Russia. Kamo feigned violent insanity and successfully kept this up for four years. In 1908 he was transferred to the Buch mental asylum near Berlin and was put in a ward with ten violent lunatics. In 1909 he was considered cured and transferred to a wing of the Alt-Moabit prison for examination, but here he simulated amnesia. After long and painful tests, the doctors diagnosed insanity and handed him over to Russia. He was escorted by gendarmes to Tiflis and incarcerated in the Metekhi fortress. He was saved from the gallows by the intervention of the German SD press which roundly condemned the German government for extraditing a known sick man to the reactionary Russians as a political criminal. His lawyer, O. Kohn, sent to Tiflis a certificate of mental illness signed by well-known Berlin psychiatrists.
In the courtroom in Tiflis, crowded with people wanting to catch a glimpse of the famous hero, Kamo again feigned insanity. The military court directed that he should be subjected to new tests in the psychiatric hospital in the Metekhi fortress, where for sixteen months he underwent the same tests as in Buch. Here, too, the doctors finally declared him insane and transferred him to the Mikhailov mental hospital, from where he escaped, hiding at first in the flat of a former comrade’s mother, and then in the secluded house of a government official for a month. The authorities took all measures to recapture the celebrated revolutionary, the city was cordoned off, and all exit points strictly watched. Kamo, however, managed to escape on a bicycle, disguised as a schoolboy, and he reached first Mtskhet and then Batum.
The comrades in Batum concealed him amongst barrels and boxes in the hold of a ship which took him to Paris. There he met Lenin, who provided him with money, and then went on to Constantinople and Bulgaria. From Burgas, he went via Constantinople to Trebizond. In Constantinople, while attempting to stow away on board a ship going to Batum, he was arrested by the Turkish authorities. Kamo gave his name as Ivan Zoidze, who was known to the Turkish police as a man conducting anti-Russian propaganda in the Caucasus. So they released him and suggested that he went to Athens. Kamo again managed to make his way back to the Caucasus. Here he reassembled his band of irregulars and in 1912 they attempted the ‘expropriation’ of a mail coach on the Kadjori highway. The raid failed, four men were killed, and Kamo himself was wounded, arrested and again imprisoned in the Metekhi fortress. After a short space of time, he was tried on four charges and on each was sentenced to death. The execution was due to be carried out one month later, but the procurator Golitsinsky was fascinated by Kamo’s character and he postponed sending the sentence for confirmation in expectation of an amnesty on the occasion of the tercentenary of the Romanov dynasty. This subterfuge earned him a reprimand and cost him his career, but under the terms of the amnesty Kamo’s death sentence was replaced by twenty years’ hard labour. In 1915 he was transferred to Kharkov prison where he was put in a cell with common criminals.
He was freed by the February Revolution, went to Moscow and then Petrograd. Lenin sent him to the Caucasus to restore his health, and after resting for a while in a mountain spa, Kamo made his way to Baku where he worked in the Soviet and the Cheka, before going to Moscow. Here the Party CC entrusted him with the organisation of a group operating in Denikin’s rear. After recruiting a detachment and testing its mettle in an original way,1 they set off for the south, but the capture of Rostov upset his calculations. Kamo made for Tiflis, was arrested by the Menshevik government and again found himself in the Metekhi fortress. After his release, he went to Baku, and here he conducted underground activity right up to the entry of the Red Army on 27 April 1920.
At this point his military career ended. He decided to complete his education and Lenin suggested that he should prepare himself for the General Staff Academy. Kamo constantly turned down the responsible posts that were offered to him, considering himself unqualified for them.
On 14 July 1922 he was killed in an accident when a car collided with his bicycle.2
There is scarcely anything to add to this biography of one of the legendary figures of the Bolshevik movement. For once, the legend is not false. This Bolshevik Robin Hood was also a keen militant and profoundly upset by schisms. Krupskaya said of him:
This intrepid Bolshevik of unparalleled temerity and unshakable willpower was at the same time an extremely ingenuous person, a rather naive and tender comrade. He was passionately attached to Lenin, to Krasin and Bogdanov. ... He befriended my mother, talked to her about her aunt and sisters. Kamo often came to Petersburg from Finland. He always took his arms with him and at each visit my mother tied his revolver to his back with particular care.
He owed his name to Stalin who was for a time his tutor in 1899, when the young Semyon Ter-Petrosyan was expelled from school for insulting the faith. With his bad Russian accent Ter-Petrosyan once asked Koba-Stalin, ‘Kamo [instead of Komú, “to whom”] should I take this?’ Koba replied with a laugh: ‘Ah! that’s you, Kamo, Kamo!’
An expert with guns and dynamite, Kamo was a man of sensitivity. In 1907, at the time of the Tiflis ‘expropriation’, he carefully moved passers-by out of the way. In 1911, he was talking to Lenin of his trials and his latest escape: ‘… and he was taken with pity for this man of limitless daring, but naive as a child, with an ardent heart and ready for great exploits, but not knowing what work to put himself to now that he had escaped.’ The Revolution brought him back from exile and threw him into an adventureless world that bored him: ‘The October Revolution threw Kamo out of the life he had made for himself. He was like a great fish out of water.’ The irony of history had this daredevil run over by a car while he was riding a bicycle in the streets of Tiflis. Stalin had one of his sisters deported in 1937.
J.-J.M.
(autobiography)
I was born in 1886 in the small country town of Urzhum in Vyatka province. I lost my parents at a very early age and was left with two sisters to be cared for by our grandmother, who received a monthly pension of three roubles as her late husband had been a soldier under Nicholas I. At the age of seven I was placed in an orphanage since she could not afford to feed three grandchildren. A year later I entered primary school and then the municipal school. I was a good pupil and when I finished there, I was awarded a zemstvo scholarship to go to the Kazan technical school. Here I led a more or less independent life, though hampered by my limited grant (ninety-six roubles per year). Whilst still in Urzhum, I had met political exiles and I soon came under their influence. Later, during my holidays there, these acquaintanceships became closer and had fairly positive results—I read illegal literature in detail and had discussions with the exiles, etc. This elementary political grounding gave me the opportunity for making contacts among revolutionary students in Kazan, and on graduating from the technical school I became a convinced revolutionary, with a leaning towards social democracy.
After completing my studies with distinction at the technical school, I was keen to continue my education. In autumn 1904 I set off for Tomsk in Siberia with the intention of entering the Technological Institute. There I took courses in general education, and also joined with comrades working in the local SD organisation (including Smirnov). I carried out simple preparatory tasks and helped to organise an armed demonstration in protest against the January events in St Petersburg. On 2 February 1905 I was arrested with forty comrades at an underground Party meeting. I spent two or three months in administrative custody and was then freed. From that moment my real revolutionary career began. I was mainly occupied with the distribution of illegal literature and propaganda. I organised small circles and went to workers’ meetings. I joined the small group of Bolsheviks at a time when the majority of the organisation supported the Mensheviks. Then I was introduced to the Tomsk RSDRP Committee (under the pseudonyms ‘Sergey’, ‘Serge’ and ‘Kostrikov’), and directed the underground printing-press. During the 1905 Revolution I was active partly in Tomsk but mainly at the Raiga station, where I led an extremely successful strike of railway workers with Pisarev, who was killed the same year.
At the very beginning of 1906, the Party ordered me to Moscow and St Petersburg to acquire a good printing machine (the normal hand press could not cope with our demands), but on the day of my departure I was arrested in the flat of the organisation’s treasurer, Tsarevsky. I spent nearly a year in Tomsk prison accused under Article 126 of the Criminal Code, and was then released on bail before the trial.
Next I helped M. A. Popov, G. Shpilev and Reshetov to organise an excellent underground printing-press. It was to be located on the outskirts of the town in the house of Doctor Gratsianov, later a member of the Kolchak government. We worked indefatigably and the installation was almost completed. Unfortunately we were all caught red-handed one morning. However, the place where the press was installed was not discovered in spite of a thorough search (between the ceiling of the hiding-place and the floor of the house, which was not yet laid, there was a layer of earth about two feet deep, and the entrance to the hiding-place from the cellar was carefully camouflaged). We were detained for a long time during the investigation, but the gendarmes could find no evidence. The others were released, but I, under the name of Kostrikov, had to remain in prison after forfeiting my bail once. The trial dealing with the earlier case took place soon afterwards and six comrades were in the dock—myself, Moiseyev, Baron and others. The rest were all sentenced to exile, but because I was still a juvenile, I was given three years in a fortress.
Such a precisely determined period of unavoidable imprisonment gave me full opportunity for self-education. The prison library was quite satisfactory, and in addition one was able to receive all the legal writings of the time. The only hindrances to study were the savage sentences of courts as a result of which tens of people were hanged. On many a night the solitary block of the Tomsk country prison echoed with condemned men shouting heart-rending farewells to life and their comrades as they were led away to execution. But in general, it was immeasurably easier to study in prison than as an underground militant at liberty. The authorities apparently even encouraged such a way of life amongst the prisoners—it made life easier, there were fewer prison ‘concerts’ and hunger strikes, etc.
After serving my sentence I moved to Irkutsk. The organisations had been smashed. It soon became known that in the house of Doctor Gratsianov in Tomsk, where the underground printing-press had been installed, and above which some police officials now lived, as fate would have it, the stove had collapsed. The gendarmes remembered past connections with this house, excavated the hiding-place and all was revealed. I had to escape to the Caucasus since Siberia had proved insecure. Popov and others were arrested in various places, but I reached Vladikavkaz. Here there was no organisation, only individual comrades. Whilst living in secret, I collaborated on the local legal newspaper. In 1915 I was again arrested and escorted to Tomsk for questioning on the printing-press affair. I spent a year in prison, was tried, and acquitted ‘for lack of evidence’. In fact, it was not a question of the lack of evidence. A new era was beginning, the Revolution was knocking at the door, and the judges could not fail to hear it.
According to a directive issued by the gendarmerie, I was due to be sent to the Narym region, but this too was not fated to be implemented. I again departed for the Caucasus, where a sort of organisation had begun to be formed by this time. Here I stayed until the 1917 Revolution. I took a direct part in it as a committee member of the Vladikavkaz SD organisation, in which both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks worked. Soon after October, on my return from the Congress of Soviets in Petrograd, the Civil War broke out in the northern Caucasus. I was dispatched by the organisation to Moscow to procure arms and supplies. I was on my way back to the Caucasus via Tsaritsyn in 1918 with a large shipment of arms and military equipment when I met the defeated, retreating Eleventh Army, and was unable to get through. So I was sent to Astrakhan and here collected the remnants of that army. As a member of its RVS, I worked on the defence of Astrakhan and the lower Volga. With the defeat of Denikin, I advanced with the Eleventh Army to the northern Caucasus and then Baku. At the tenth Party Congress I was elected a candidate member, and at the eleventh Congress a full member of the CC of the RKP. After the sovietisation of Azerbaijan, I was appointed the RSFSR emissary in Georgia, and, after some time, a member of the Riga delegation which had talks with Poland. On the conclusion of peace with the Poles, I was sent on Party work to the northern Caucasus where I was CC secretary of the Azerbaijan Communist Party, and a member of the Transcaucasian Area Committee.
Now I am a member of both the CC of the RKP and the TsIK of the USSR.
With the revolver shot that killed Kirov on 1 December 1934, Nikolaev created a myth. When he was assassinated, Kirov did not appear (except in Leningrad and in Party cadres) as distinct from the cohort of Stalin’s immediate underlings. His death itself became a myth: all the major political trials after December 1934 (with the exception of Tuk-hachevsky’s) gave rise to new ‘assassins of Kirov’, and it was supposedly to avenge this abominable act that Stalin struck. The Putilov factory, symbol of the October Revolution, was renamed after him. An entire Soviet generation, whose political awareness dates from the Stalinist era, projected onto Kirov its own features, its own fears, its own conformism and dissatisfaction.
The man who was thought of, especially after his assassination, as Stalin’s heir apparent, was a perfect example of the young Stalinist cadres whose rise coincided with the removal of the great figures of the Revolution and the Civil War. He studied for three years in a small seminary (1895 to 1897), and never came into contact with European workers’ movements. Only twice did he ever leave Russia: from May 1920 to February 1921 as ambassador to Menshevik Georgia; and in the course of this posting he went to Riga, between 4 and 12 October 1920, as a member of the Soviet delegation to the Polish-Soviet Peace Conference.
Up to 1917, he was a militant of no particular importance; the articles he published in the newspaper Terek between 1914 and 1917 do not appear to have any marked political tendency.
After the February Revolution he became a leader of the joint Menshevik-Rolshevik organisation in Terek (northern Caucasia), where the Mensheviks predominated. The president of the United Regional Committee of the RSDRP for the Terek area was a Menshevik, Skrypnikov: and Kirov was the vice-president. His activities during this period remain obscure, and his Soviet biographers (Krasnikov and Sinelnikov) have observed a discreet silence on the matter.
At the end of September 1917, he was elected to the Ispolkom of the Vladicaucasian Soviet, of which the presidency was occupied by a close friend of Stalin, Mamia Orakhelashvili. Kirov went to Petrograd as a delegate to the second Congress of Soviets, and then returned to Terek. He then made the acquaintance of Ordzhonikidze, who was at the time Extraordinary Commissar for southern Russia. In February 1919, Kirov was appointed to the RVS of the disintegrating Eleventh Army, which came under the leadership of Shlyapnikov at that time as part of the Caspian and Caucasus Front; upon the dissolution of which it became part of the Southern Group of the Eastern Front armies, under the group leadership of Frunze, Kuibyshev and Elyava. Kirov was entrusted with the defence of Astrakhan, an SR stronghold, and he spent fourteen months there. Two strange things happened to him during that period: first, Shlyapnikov threatened to sue him for embezzling five million roubles; and a little later, a squad of Cheka came to arrest him on the charge of ‘leading the life of a lord’. These were probably either provocations or misunderstandings but, as Isaac Babel used to say, ‘Stalin doesn’t like spotless lives’.
In April 1920, Kirov was appointed to the Caucasian Bureau of the Central Committee, and at the end of May became Soviet Ambassador to Menshevik Georgia. He used his position to aid the invasion of the country in February 1921, an invasion prepared by Stalin and Ordzhonikidze.
Up to that time Kirov had only participated in the workings of the Party from a distance, except in Astrakhan in 1919 and 1920 when he ran one of the first organised and systematic purges of the Bolshevik Party. He attended a Party Congress (the tenth, 8–16 March) for the first time in 1921. The first congress in which he actively participated, and which marked the start of his rise to power, was the one that resolved to prohibit splinter groups. At this congress, Kirov was elected a candidate member of the Central Committee; on 2 May he was appointed to the Presidium of the Central Committee’s Caucasian Bureau, soon to become the Transcaucasian Regional Committee (Zakkraikom) under the presidency of Ordzhonikidze; and in July he was made First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Azerbaijan Communist Party, a key position for Stalin’s group in the coming struggle against the restless Georgian communists. Kirov was personally connected with the group that gradually coalesced around Stalin: Orakhelashvili, Kuibyshev, Ordzhonikidze, Mikoyan. …
For five years Kirov was the boss of Baku and of the little Azerbaijan party which he had purged twice since his arrival (in August and in October 1921). In December 1922, he was appointed to the VTsIK, then at the twelfth Congress (in April 1923) he became a full member of the Central Committee. In 1924, Stalin presented him with a copy of his book on Lenin with the following inscription: ‘To my cherished brother. With the author’s compliments.’
In December 1925, at the fourteenth Congress, the New Opposition was crushed. Stalin needed a shock brigade to purge the Zinovievist Leningrad machine. He entrusted Kirov with this confidential mission and sent him to the Venice of the north together with Petrovsky and Kalinin. On 5 January, Kirov wrote to his wife: ‘The stiuation here is very difficult.’ He asked for reinforcements: Voroshilov was sent. He went through the factories one by one. A few days later he wrote to Ordzhonikidze: ‘Yesterday, I was at the Treugolnik works. 2,200 Party members. The row was incredible; it even ended in a punch-up.’ The Putilov workers supported the opposition. Kirov asked for reinforcements again, and on 20 January, nine Central Committee members (including five members of the Politburo—Tomsky, Kalinin, Molotov, Voroshilov and Petrovsky) helped him wrest a meagre victory. In the end, he was sent Dzerzhinsky.
In February, the twenty-third Extraordinary Conference of the Leningrad area elected him First Secretary of the Gubkom. Only in January 1927 – after having personally organised 180 anti-opposition meetings – was he able to declare to the Party at its fourteenth Conference that ‘the Leningrad road is blocked for the opposition, definitively blocked’. It was in this rough battle that Kirov earned his stripes, and on 25 July Stalin had him appointed alternate member of the Politburo. He was to become a full member at the sixteenth Congress in 1930.
There then began the most obscure period – the ‘political’ period -in the life of this apparatchik who, like Postyshev in the Ukraine, stood out from the others by his apparent simplicity and approachableness. It seems that this unconditional supporter of Stalin tried to emancipate himself; but in fact very little is known. In September 1932 he was opposed to Stalin’s demand for Ryutin’s execution. (In a secret document, the right-winger had compared the General Secretary to Azev, the agent provocateur.) At the twelfth Congress in January 1934, the anxious delegates greeted Kirov with a massive ovation. He was elected as one of the four secretaries of the Central Committee (the others were Stalin, Kaganovich and Zhdanov). Kirov’s Soviet biographer, Krasnikov, wrote that ‘numerous delegates at this Congress, and especially those who knew of Lenin’s Testament, thought the time had come to remove Stalin from his position as General Secretary and to give him different tasks, because he had become convinced of his own infallibility, had begun to ignore the principle of collegiality and was sinking once again into crudity’. Kirov, who at this Congress referred to Stalin as ‘the greatest man of all times and all peoples’, was doubtless one of, if not the spokesman of, these ‘numerous delegates’. On 1 December, at Smolny, he was shot dead by a young communist named Nikolaev. This assassination, according to Khrushchev, was the start of an era of ‘massive repression’, first of all against the Leningrad militants and Party machine. On 25 September 1936, Stalin and Zhdanov sent the Politburo a telegram in which they demanded the appointment of Yezhov as NKVD Commissar in place of Yagoda, who was, they said, ‘incapable of unmasking the Zinovievist-Trotskyite bloc. The GPU is four years late in this matter’. Four years: that went back to the Politburo meeting at which Kirov had cornered Stalin. …
It is certain that in the period 1931–4 there did exist in the Party a substantial anti-Stalin group. But the correspondents of the Byulleten Oppozitsii who mentioned it always named Molotov as its leader in the Politburo. The first Moscow trial, incidentally, showed up the relative and temporary disgrace of Molotov, who was consistently omitted from the lists of potential assassination victims. It is thus possible that a number of currents of opposition have coalesced around Kirov’s name, which found their actual expression in Molotov, Ordzhonikidze, Kuibyshev, Voroshilov and of course in Kirov himself. The basis for the various hypotheses summed up in the so-called Letter from an Old Bolshevik (written in 1937 by the Menshevik B. Nikolaevsky, from the ‘confessions’ of Bukharin and other Bolsheviks) is the following: considering that the battie for collectivisation and industrialisation was as good as won, ‘Kirov desired the abolition of the terror both in general and inside the Party’, and thus the liberation of the Party from the grip of the police. Kirov appeared, in that light, as the defender of the security of the ‘victors’ against the personal arbitrariness of Stalin: the ‘victors’ being the small, middling and great apparatchiki whom Stalin was to exterminate between 1936 and 1939. The Letter claims that ‘Stalin’s general staff was utterly opposed to any change in the internal policies of the Party for they realised [ … ] that they could not rely on any mercy if the internal Party regime were to change. …’ One of Kirov’s Soviet biographers, Krasnikov, claims today that his hero ‘vigorously condemned the repressive measures’ against the peasants.
Did Kirov defend these ideas which corresponded to the interests of a Party machine threatened by what the Tatar Stalinist Sagidulin was to call a little later ‘the 18th Brumaire’? After the enormous effort he put into winning over the people of Leningrad, including the working classes, did he in fact come to reflect in some way the reactions of the working class of the city that had made both February and October 1917? In any case, Spiridonov remarked at the twenty-second Congress that ‘after Kirov’s death, a continuous wave of repressive measures was hurled for four years against innocent men in Leningrad’. Did Kirov, moreover, express the revulsion felt by old militants turned bureaucrats, whose past lives made it difficult to accept the total submission that Stalin required, and which he only got by a thorough renewal of the Party and by training his own new men?
These hypotheses are but the various facets of an analysis that leads one to suspect that Kirov was killed because he was threatening Stalin in the name of those very interests for which Stalin had himself fought but which he wished, thenceforth, to subject to his own absolute rule. In this case, as Giuseppe Boffa put it, ‘Kirov’s assassination resembles the beginning of a coup d’état’.
J.-J. M.
(autobiography)
I was born in 1889, the son of a Polish worker, and I studied at the elementary school attached to the Sulin engineering works (in the former province of the Don). At the age of thirteen I became an apprentice metal-worker at the same place, but the Sulin works were closed following a strike in 1905 and I was forced to move to the Yuriev factory near Lugansk. This strike made such an impression on me that with the cooperation of my brother who was a member of the RSDRP, I began to carry out technical tasks for the Party and in 1907 was officially received into membership. Within a short time I was arrested, sent into administrative exile, dismissed from the factory and blacklisted. Then I became apprenticed to a shoemaker. This did not interrupt my Party activities, but one year later the police pounced upon the local Party group and I was obliged to leave the area.
In 1909, thanks to old acquaintances, I succeeded in pulling a few strings and was re-engaged at the Sulin works as a clerk. Soon, however, I was arrested and held for six months in the Novocherkassk regional prison, after which I was deported to the Pavlovsk mine in the Donbass where I was due to spend two years under police supervision. Here I made contact with the Yuriev organisation and took part in the preelection campaign to the third Duma. After four months there, I was banished from Ekaterinoslav province to Kharkov. There I initially engaged in work in the trade unions, and then I came into contact with Party members in the town. Our activity was intensified in spring 1914 in preparation for the May Day strike. An agent provocateur called Rudov, however, betrayed us. We were arrested and deported from Kharkov to Poltava. After the declaration of war in 1914, I moved to Kiev, where I met individual Party members and we set up jointly a temporary Bolshevik committee. In 1915 a wave of arrests compelled me to leave for Moscow. There I joined the ‘Central Union’, a group of Moscow Bolsheviks. I tried to gather together the remnants of the shattered Moscow organisation and I attempted to summon a city conference. This was frustrated by fresh arrests. I myself was taken into custody and deported to Irkutsk province for three years.
After the February Revolution, I returned to Petrograd where I at first undertook Party work in the Narva-Peterhof district, and then was elected to the Petrograd Committee and its Executive Commission, remaining there until the transfer of the government to Moscow in 1918. In the same year I left for the Ukraine and clandestinely carried out the functions of Party Committee Secretary on the right bank of the Don. In 1919 I was posted to the Uman sector of the front and in December was elected to the Ukrainian CC. In 1922 I moved to Siberia, where I remained until the fourteenth Party Congress, at which I was elected a CC Secretary of the VKP(b).
The life of this working-class revolutionary who rose to the summit of the Soviet hierarchy is to a certain extent an image of the history of the Bolshevik Party before the Revolution and between the two wars. His part in the 1917 Revolution was much greater than he modestly admits it to have been in this autobiography. At the core of the Revolution in Petrograd, he was an active cadre in the Bolshevik organisation and held posts at various levels of responsibility in the apparatus. He was a delegate at the celebrated seventh April Conference and at the sixth Congress in July 1917. An active participant in the armed uprising of October, he was a commissar of the Petrograd RVS, and in March 1918 he became a member of the bureau of the Revolutionary Defence Committee.
Kossior, who was then at the head of the committee of the Petrograd Bolshevik Party, represented this organisation at the Central Committee meeting on 11 [NS 24] January 1918, where the question of peace negotiations with Germany was discussed. He protested, with all his strength as a left-wing communist and in the name of the Petrograd organisation, against Lenin’s point of view, and called for a revolutionary war. In March 1918 this important member of the left-wing communist group was sent by the Central Committee to the Ukraine, where, with his brother Vladimir, he became one of the leaders of the local Communist Party and an organiser of the struggle against the German occupation.
It was in the Ukraine that he took part in the Civil War, and held various posts in the Party, and the army, as well as carrying out frequent missions, sometimes extremely dangerous ones. For example, he was sent on a secret mission into occupied Ukraine, where he became Secretary of the illegal Bolshevik committee of the Kiev region. A supporter of Pyatakov, Kossior was elected to the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party at its first meeting. He left the opposition and became a central figure in that group of leaders (which also included Rakovsky, Manuilsky, etc.) who remained faithful to the line taken by Lenin and the Moscow Central Committee. For a short period in December 1919 he was Secretary of the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party. At its congress in the spring of 1920, however, the opposition regained control of the Central Committee, and it was dissolved shortly afterwards on Lenin’s orders. Kossior was a member of the new team then imposed by the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party and actively participated in the struggle against the opposition. It is from this time that his collaboration with Stalin can be dated, and he did not go unnoticed by the future General Secretary. His rise was thenceforth closely tied to Stalin’s politics. Kossior became part of the ‘Party machine group’ with an evergrowing influence, on which Stalin relied heavily in his struggle for power. In 1922, Kossior gained a new post: Yaroslavsky had become Secretary to the Central Committee, and he took his place as Secretary of the Central Committee’s Siberian Bureau.
Elected as a candidate to the Central Committee at the twelfth Congress, and then made a member at the thirteenth, Kossior left his Siberian post in 1925 and was promoted by Stalin to the secretaryship of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party. He was elected to the Orgburo by the fourteenth Congress. Thenceforth he belonged to the new team of leaders and in December 1927, at the fifteenth Congress, he reached the pinnacle of the hierarchy: first a candidate member, and then from 1930 to 1939 a full member of the Politburo of the Communist Party. He belonged to the ‘moderate Stalinist’ wing, supporting the General Secretary in his fight against the united opposition and its former allies ‘of the right’, but opposing, in 1932, with Kirov’s group in the Politburo, Stalin’s terror within the Party. Moreover his brother Vladimir, an old Bolshevik from the days of clandestinity who had got Stanislav into the movement and who had been one of the active and indomitable figures in the Trotskyite opposition as well as a CC member, was deported shortly afterwards and died in 1937 in a concentration camp.
Throughout the 1930s, Kossior was the leading figure in the USSR’s second republic, the Ukraine. In July 1928 he replaced Kaganovich as the first secretary of the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party. He applied Stalin’s directives with rigour, both in the struggle against nationalism and in the drive towards collectivisation. In January 1938 he was accused of insufficient vigilance, was transferred to Moscow and given the high rank of Vice-president of the Sovnarkom, and President of the State Control Commission. He was arrested on 26 February 1939, accused by Stalin of being a Polish agent, and was shot without trial. Kossior was rehabilitated at the twentieth Congress, where Khrushchev cited him, in his celebrated report, as one of the most striking victims of the ‘personality cult’.1
G.H.
(autobiography)
I was born on 13 October 1883 in the town of Mogilyov on the Dnieper. My father was a Gymnasium teacher. My parents were Ukrainian, from Chernigov province. Whilst at school, my father had been influenced by the nihilist ideas prevalent in intellectual circles at the time. My mother had been close to the Populists in her youth. Family cares, however, soon compelled my parents to turn their backs on the radical movement: my father became a teacher and government official, my mother a petit-bourgeois intellectual. As a result, my family did not develop any revolutionary feelings in me, but did inculcate the need to be guided by more than personal interests in my behaviour. I went to school at the Vilno Gymnasium, from which I graduated in 1901. Then I entered the Law Faculty of St Petersburg University, taking my degree in 1907, after which I worked as a barrister’s assistant and as a barrister until 1917.
I first became acquainted with the revolutionary movement and its literature during my last years at the Gymnasium through the influence of schoolmates who had personal contacts with Russian and Polish members of the workers’ movement. But I was particularly strongly influenced in this respect by the gymnastics teacher—officer I. O. Klopov, a social democrat.
From the end of 1901,I began to take an active part in the revolutionary movement among students and soldiers. I became a social democrat in 1903 and joined the recently formed Vilno RSDRP organisation, which had not at that time divided into Bolshevik and Menshevik factions. In 1905 I became acquainted with Bolshevik literature from abroad and took the Bolshevik side. From 1903 to 1906 inclusive, I worked in the north-west area in the Vilno, Vitebsk and Kovno organisations, with temporary visits to St Petersburg. Beginning in 1907, I worked in the capital in the Vasilyevsky Ostrov district, then transferred to the trade union movement, worked with the Duma Fraction’ and contributed to the Bolshevik press. At the elections to the fourth Duma, I stood as a Bolshevik candidate.
The first time I was arrested was in Vilno, in autumn 1904, when I was released pending trial. The second time was in St Petersburg in February 1905 during the elections to the Shidlovsky Commission.1 I was again released pending trial and expelled from St Petersburg. Then followed two administrative arrests in Vilno in the summer and autumn of 1905, but I was released as a result of the 1905 strike and both cases were dropped under the amnesty. I was rearrested in Vitebsk in January 1906, released in April of the same year and expelled from the province. I was again arrested administratively at Vilno in August and October 1906, after which I left for St Petersburg. There I was taken prisoner in a trap on the day of the dissolution of the second Duma, being released after a search in my flat. In 1912, I was accused under Article 102 of belonging to a party connected with Pravda and the social insurance movement, as well as the pre-electoral campaign. In 1914, after the declaration of war, I was arrested and deported under an administrative order to the Urals, at first to Ekaterinburg and then to Kungur.
During the first year of the Revolution until December 1917, I remained in the Urals as Chairman of the Ekaterinburg and Urals RSDRP(b) Province Committee. At the sixth Party Congress in July 1917, I was elected in my absence a member of the CC, which I remained until the tenth Party Congress in March 1921. From December 1919 until March 1921, I was also a CC Secretary.
Whilst working in the Urals, I took only a small direct part in the activities of the soviets. I was merely a member of the Ekaterinburg Executive Committee, attended all the regional and area congresses, and was Chairman at the last area congress before October, when the Bolsheviks gained a majority. I was also Chairman of the Ekaterinburg Revolutionary Committee, a temporary organisation with minority SR participation, which preceded the complete transfer of power there to the Bolshevik Soviet. And I was elected to represent Perm province at the Constituent Assembly.
In Petrograd, I joined the Collegium of the People’s Commissariat for Finance as Deputy Chief Commisar for the Narodny Bank. When the Soviet government moved to Moscow, I remained in Petrograd, and was simultaneously Deputy Chairman of the Bank and Commissar for Justice in the Petrograd Workers’ Commune and the Union of Communes of the Northern Region. In August 1918 I was appointed People’s Commissar for Finance and remained in this post effectively until October 1921 and nominally until the end of 1922. From October 1921 I was Soviet plenipotentiary in Germany. I have participated in Party Congresses since the seventh, and in congresses of soviets since the third. Apart from this, I attended the first All-Russian Conference of Soviets in March 1917, and was the delegate from the Ekaterinburg Soviet at the Democratic Conference. I have been a member of the TsIK since its second convocation.
On 27 October 1963, Izvestia published a long article by Maisky entitled ‘A Diplomat of the Leninist School’. The diplomat in question was Nikolay Krestinsky, who had been shot after the third Moscow trial as a Gestapo agent. …
Krestinsky began his ‘career’ not as a diplomat, but as a rather undisciplined Bolshevik militant. At the March 1917 Conference, he criticised the majority Party line of support for the Provisional government, and then, once elected to the Central Committee (August 1917), wrote for the left-wing Menshevik journal Novaya Zhizn. He was a leading member of the Urals Committee; and, like all his co-members, he took the side of the left communists and opposed the Brest-Litovsk settlement. In the end he abstained on the question, like Ioffe and Dzerzhinsky, and like them also he refused to resign from his posts of responsibility. He was re-elected to the Central Committee in 1918, then appointed People’s Commissar for Finance (August 1918 to October 1921). In 1919, he found himself at the centre of the machine, having been elected to one of the five seats on the first real Politburo, to the sole secretaryship of the Central Committee (Serebryakov and Pre-obrazhensky joined him in 1920), and to membership of the Orgburo. ... In 1920 he neglected the secretariat somewhat and in 1921 found himself eliminated from all his positions for having associated himself with Trotsky’s trade union platform.
Then began his career as a diplomat. In October 1921, he was appointed Soviet Minister Plenipotentiary in Berlin. Krestinsky sympathised with the left opposition, then with the United Opposition, though never really becoming involved with their activities, which he repudiated in 1928. He was next appointed People’s Vice-Commissar for Foreign Affairs, a position he held until Fotyomkin replaced him in 1935. He was expelled from the Party in 1937, and appeared among the defendants at the third Moscow trial (March 1938). He provoked a momentary stir when, on 12 March, he declared to Vyshinsky:
I do not recognise that I am guilty. I am not a Trotskyite. I was never a member of the ‘right-winger and Trotskyite bloc’, which I did not know to exist. Nor have I committed a single one of the crimes imputed to me, personally; and in particular I am not guilty of having maintained relations with the German Secret Service.
The next day, Krestinsky withdrew his fleeting resistance:
Yesterday, a passing but sharp impulse of false shame, created by these surroundings and by the fact that I am on trial, and also by the harsh impression made by the list of charges and by my state of health, prevented me from telling the truth, from saying that I was guilty. And instead of saying Yes, I am guilty’, I replied, almost by reflex, ‘No, I am not guilty.’
Order was restored; Krestinsky was sentenced to death and shot.
J.-J. M.
(autobiography)
I was born in 1869 in St Petersburg. My parents, who came from the gentry, were both orphaned at an early age and educated at public expense—my mother in an institute, my father in a military school. On leaving the institute, my mother became a governess; my father graduated from the Military Academy and did his military service. They owned no personal property of any description. Both were soon inflamed with revolutionary ideas, and I saw revolutionaries at home from my earliest years. My father put his revolutionary ideas into practice and for this he was tried, though later acquitted. All their lives my parents had to move from town to town, wherever my father was posted. He died when I was fourteen and after that mother and I lived on various irregular sources of income—copying, lessons, renting out rooms. I went to school in the Obolensky Gymnasium and was awarded a gold medal when I left. For a short time afterwards I became a Tolstoyan.
From 1891 to 1896 I worked in a Sunday school and gave evening classes to workers beyond the Nevskaya Zastava. It was at that time that I became a Marxist, carried out propaganda among workers and helped to found the ‘Union of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class’. During the strikes of 1896 I was arrested, imprisoned for six months and then exiled for three years to the village of Shushenskoye in the Minusinsk region. There I married Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov with whom I had worked earlier in the ‘Union of Struggle’ in St Petersburg.
I spent the last year of exile in Ufa where I also performed clandestine revolutionary tasks. In 1901 I was issued with a passport to go abroad. Arriving in Munich in spring 1901, I became secretary of Iskra, then a member of the ‘League of Russian Social Democrats Abroad’, then, after the third Party Congress, secretary of the foreign section of the Central Committee and the central organ. At the end of 1905 I returned to Russia where I spent all my time working as secretary to the CC. At the very beginning of 1908, I again travelled abroad. In my absence I was tried on three charges under Article 102. Whilst an émigrée, I continued to work as Secretary to the Bolshevik organisation, at the same time studying foreign schools and literature on the theory of education. I contributed articles to Svobodnoye Vospitaniye from abroad and worked on a book entitled Popular Education and Workers’ Democracy.
On my return to Russia, I worked first of all in the CC Secretariat, but was soon elected to the Vyborg district Duma in Petrograd, where I joined the department dealing with popular education and took part in the revolutionary movement. After the October Revolution I became a Collegium member of the People’s Commissariat for Education, where I was first of all concerned with extra-mural education, and was then president of the political science section of GUS. Simultaneously I helped to organise the women’s section, the Komsomol and the Pioneers, as well as writing for newspapers and journals. All my life since 1894 I have devoted to helping Vladimir Ilyich Lenin as best I could.1
Krupskaya was not only Lenin’s wife but also his collaborator in every circumstance; and, especially during the years of exile, was herself an active militant. An efficient but retiring woman, she was above all the confidante of the founder of Bolshevism. One needs only to read her book My Life with Lenin to realise this. But, allowing for the circumstances in which this book was written, it still can be said to give only a relative and incomplete picture of Lenin’s concerns. In particular, the dramatic years of 1921–3 are passed over without a word on Lenin’s fears for the future of the Revolution, or his assessment of his collaborators. Krupskaya, however, was better informed than anyone else on the last wishes of the founder of the Soviet State. She tried, but failed, to carry out the heavy task of executrix. She wanted to read out Lenin’s celebrated Testament at the thirteenth Party Congress, but the Central Committee rejected the proposal by thirty votes to ten. She bowed to this decision out of discipline. She had in fact been routed by her former friends Zinoviev and Kamenev, whose subtle alliance with her enemy Stalin she failed to grasp.
Although Krupskaya was a militant even before she met the young Ulyanov, her political activity only took on its full meaning through him. Her devotion to the revolutionary cause had crystallised in her admiration for her husband, and their many years of collaboration robbed her of any independence. It is therefore comprehensible that she was disoriented by Lenin’s death, despite the authority she enjoyed. Stalin, who was afraid of her at first, certainly went on to threaten and intimidate her; but he also managed to appeal to her feelings, and particularly to her sense of responsibility, of which he displaced the centre of gravity.
After supporting the opposition led by Zinoviev in 1925–6, Krupskaya yielded to her fear of seeing Lenin’s work crumble, of seeing the Party torn asunder by internal strife, and, out of that sense of discipline with which she was imbued, capitulated to Stalin. She was then relegated to the thankless and symbolic role of Lenin’s widow, and was given honorary and minor positions. At the fifteenth Congress in December 1927 she was elected to membership of the Central Committee and re-elected at both the sixteenth and seventeenth Congresses. In 1929, she was appointed Assistant Commissar for Public Education of the RSFSR. She devoted herself to pedagogic research, in which she had always been passionately interested, to her book on Lenin and to publishing Lenin’s work. But there is still much that is unsaid on the drama of her life, on the humiliation she underwent. She had complained to Lenin, earlier on, about Stalin’s brutality, and she knew her fears were shared; and yet Stalin managed to obtain her moral authority, witnessed by the declarations she made in his favour. She was a powerless witness of the liquidation of the entire Bolshevik Old Guard—her friends from the difficult times of the foundation of Bolshevism and from the years of exile.
She died on 19 February 1939.
G.H.
(autobiography)
(Party pseudonyms: ‘Papasha’, ‘Louvinié’, ‘Felix’, ‘Nits’, ‘Maksimo-vich’, ‘Kuznetsov’)
I was born in 1876 into a middle-class family and received my education in a ‘modern’ school. At the age of seventeen I enlisted in the army, and during my service I began to study the social sciences and economics. I became acquainted with Marxism and the history of socialism, and immediately I was discharged in 1898 I embarked upon propaganda in workers’ circles, first of all in the workers’ settlement at Klintsy in Chernigov province. I had to work alone as there was no organisation there. I founded several circles in which, besides giving workers and craftsmen a general education, I taught them about Marxism and political economy. To escape police shadowing, in 1900 I moved to Kiev, where, after spending some time on peripheral work, I was accepted as a member of the Kiev RSDRP Committee. In 1901 I was arrested with the whole committee, and following the revelations of one of the committee members I was in danger of being exiled to eastern Siberia for five years. Whilst in prison, I joined the Iskra organisation, and after eighteen months in custody awaiting trial, I was one of eleven to escape from jail.
I made my way to Switzerland where I helped to edit Iskra, and at the congress of the League of Russian Social Democrats Abroad I was elected with Krupskaya and L. Deich to the administrative board of the League, which at that time was considered the effective centre of Iskra. After the split at the second Congress in London, I joined the Bolsheviks, in whose ranks I have worked ever since. Early in 1903, I returned secretly to Russia where I worked until the 1905 Revolution, at first as the fully authorised agent of the CC for the north-west area, having my headquarters in Riga and being responsible for the frontier.
At the same time, I joined the Riga RSDRP Committee and as its delegate attended the third Party Congress in London. After the split in the Party became official, I was elected a member of the Bolshevik centre in Russia, which then existed under the name of the ‘Bureau of the Committee of the Majority’. I participated in the conference of the northern committees at Kolpino (together with Rykov, Zemlyachka, Vladimirsky, Rumyantsev and others). In summer 1905, on instructions from the CC, I prepared a landing-place on the island of Nargen, near Revel, for a shipment of arms ordered in England by Gapon and due to arrive aboard the John Grafton, which subsequently foundered on the Finnish coast. In autumn 1905 I was summoned by the CC to St Petersburg, where with Krasin I set up the first legal social democratic newspaper Novaya Zhizn. With the onslaught of Stolypin’s repression, in 1906, I was obliged to escape abroad, where I carried out a number of important assignments for the CC, including the purchase and dispatch of a boatload of arms for the Caucasus. (But the boat sank). In 1907 I again returned to Russia and was almost trapped by the police in Bonch-Bruevich’s bookshop in St Petersburg. In the same year I was dispatched by the CC along the Volga to the Urals to organise a regional Party conference. After coming under observation by the police, I was obliged to travel abroad and remained an émigré (in London) for nearly ten years.
In 1907 I was a delegate and secretary to the Russian delegation at the International Congress in Stuttgart. I held the post of secretary in the London Bolshevik group and attended the Berne conference of émigré organisations in 1912. I was also a delegate in the Bolshevik section of the International Socialist Bureau, taking part in its first and second London Conferences.1 At the second conference I delivered a protest against the participation of socialists in bourgeois governments and their support for the war, after which I walked out. I have been arrested in almost all the countries of Europe.
After the October Revolution I was appointed the first ambassador to England. Ten months later I was arrested as a hostage for Lockhart and we were later exchanged. In the RSFSR I was a Collegium member of Narkomindel and Rabkrin, plenipotentiary and trade representative in Estonia, where I was empowered by the Sovnarkom to deal in foreign currency, and was then appointed Deputy People’s Commissar at Narkomindel. I travelled to Sweden and Denmark for negotiations with the bourgeois governments and concluded a series of agreements on the exchange of prisoners of war. I achieved the removal of the British blockade, made the first trade deals in Europe and dispatched the first cargoes after the blockade had been lifted. I was a member of the RSFSR delegation in Genoa and Chairman of the delegation to the Hague. I presided over the Moscow Disarmament Conference in 1923 and signed trade agreements with Germany and Norway.
Litvinov’s autobiography resembles its author: brief, concise, without embellishment—and almost, one might add, too discreet.
He was an excellent organiser, and had been a member of the exiled intelligentsia which, full of initiative and imagination, of foresight and skill, had had the difficult task of managing the Party’s secret funds during and after the 1905 Revolution.
From 1902, the time of his first exile in London, he became a close collaborator of Lenin, and gained the reputation of being one of the Party’s best technicians. In particular, Litvinov was entrusted, in 1906, with the administration of funds accruing from the ‘expropriations’. Money deposited with the secretary of the ISB was used in part to buy arms which Litvinov had to get smuggled into Russia. He was also closely involved in operating the exchange of the 500-rouble notes that were acquired at the ‘expropriation’ in Erevan Square, Tiflis, on 25 July 1907. These funds provoked much discord among Russian socialist exiles, and the whole affair had many stormy vicissitudes which put Litvinov at the centre of attack and controversy. He refused to show to his Menshevik opponents the ‘confidential’ documents concerning this affair, which had been deposited with the secretary of the ISB. On this occasion he proved himself to be not only a reliable conspirator and technician but also a clever diplomat. He managed to establish excellent relations with the secretary of the ISB.1
Litvinov lived in London under the name of Harrison from 1907 on, and was entrusted on several occasions with missions to social democratic parties and the ISB. In June 1914 he took over from Lenin as the RSDRP(b) representative to the ISB. During the First World War he used this position to maintain contacts that he attempted to exploit after the October Revolution.
From that date, his career was mapped out for him: as early as 1918, in Revel, he tried to break the economic blockade of Soviet Russia; after being entrusted with difficult diplomatic missions, he was called in 1921 to preside, at Chicherin’s side, over the fate of Soviet foreign policy. The two men had nothing in common, and relations between them were difficult. Their differences were both personal and political. They were opposed both in character and in method. As Mikoyan has emphasised, Litvinov was cold, calculating, and flexible if not opportunist: ‘… he was no dogmatist. He found it easy to make Western politicians listen to him. [ … ] Stalin and the Central Committee held Litvinov in high esteem. It is no coincidence that he took over from Chicherin. He was unpretentious and had a complete mastery of manoeuvre.’2
With his lively, methodical and well-informed mind, Litvinov soon gained an international reputation and became the central figure in international conferences at the head of the Soviet delegation. It was he who represented the Soviet government at Geneva, at the meetings of the preparatory commission for the Disarmament Conference (1927–30), where he put forward a plan for general disarmament. In 1930 he succeeded Chicherin at the head of the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs.
This was not just a change of face, but a change of policy and staff. From the start Litvinov supported rapprochement with Western democracies and entry into the League of Nations. From 1932, he sought to elaborate a foreign policy which would first and foremost secure allies for the USSR against the rise of Fascism. In order to achieve this he had to overcome strong resistance at the top of the Soviet political hierarchy. At Lausanne, in 1932, a delegation of European socialists told him of their fears, and of the necessity of a common front against Germany. Litvinov replied that he was in disagreement with his government’s attitude but that he did not dispose of sufficient leverage to change it.
Hitler’s coup confirmed his position. Whereas Molotov, at the Sovnarkom session on 28 December 1933, only timidly attacked Germany’s imperialist policy of annexation, Litvinov was far more virulent and threatened that Russia would enter into an anti-German alliance.
Litvinov’s major objective, for which the League of Nations provided him with an audience between 1934 and 1938, while he was the Soviet representative, was to organise a defence system and to block the path of the aggressors, the Fascist states. But he was aware of the obstacles in the way of his anti-Nazi policies. When Léon Blum asked him, shortly before Munich, if France could count on the Soviet Union if the Czech affair deteriorated, Litvinov replied: ‘If I remain People’s Commissar, yes; if I don’t, no.’
When Stalin drew up the policy that was to lead to the signing of the German–Soviet Pact, Litvinov, who was a Jew and Hitler’s bête noire, was succeeded by Molotov on 4 May 1939. Recent Soviet encyclopedias have discreetly given it to be understood that it was not just a change of Commissar, but of a whole policy that could have been fatal to its author. In May 1939, ‘in the condition of the Stalinist personality cult’, he was relieved of his duties as Commissar for Foreign Affairs, and in February 1941, at the Party’s eighteenth Conference, he was ‘arbitrarily expelled from the Central Committee on the grounds that he had not fulfilled his duties as a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party’.1 He had in fact been elected to the Central Committee at the seventeenth Congress and re-elected at the subsequent one.
After Germany’s aggression against the USSR, Stalin brought Litvinov out of the obscurity to which he had been relegated, in order to reassure his new allies, the USA in particular. It was, as it happened, Litvinov who had conducted the 1933 Washington talks with President Roosevelt which were concluded by the establishment of diplomatic relations with the USA.
In 1941 Litvinov became Deputy Commissar for Foreign Affairs, and Ambassador to Washington, where he spent the next two years. The role he was to play in the allied camp was revealed by his presence at the conference of the Foreign Ministers of the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and the United States, held in Moscow in October 1943. He remained Deputy Commissar until 1946, but had no longer much weight in decisions on Soviet foreign policy. He had lost his quiet confidence, his dynamism and initiative; and according to Ehrenburg’s Memoirs, he always had on him a loaded revolver to shoot himself if he were arrested.
Demoted to a subordinate position in the Foreign Ministry, he died on 31 December 1951.
Much ink has been spilled on Litvinov: among other things, on his apocryphal Memoirs, so accurate in its dates as to fool a famous historian into writing a preface. Litvinov’s name still lives, however: his grandson Pavel has recently been sentenced to five years’ ‘exile’ in Siberia for leading a demonstration against the Bukovsky trial, and another in Red Square against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.
G.H.
(authorised biography)
Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov was born in February 1890 in the village of Kukarki, Nolinsk district, Vyatka province. His real name was Skryabin. He was the third son of a member of the Nolinsk petite bourgeoisie, Mikhail Skryabin. His parents devoted much time and effort to providing an education for their children. The latter were sent to the provincial capital to go to school. The brothers were all educated in Kazan, and Vyacheslav went to the ‘modern’ school there. It must be said that the Skryabin family were all very artistic. Vyacheslav played the violin quite well, with great feeling and expressiveness.
All the brothers, living amiably in a small room together, were drawn towards the most radical students. Kazan, particularly at that time, was literally overflowing with leftist intellectuals. When they went home to Nolinsk, the brothers found there either the same type of revolutionary-minded déclassé intellectuals, or political exiles. Coming themselves from a working-class background, the brothers naturally became imbued with the ideas and attitudes rife in this environment. Normally in secondary schools, revolutionary ideas found adherents among two categories of students, and correspondingly were assimilated and understood in two different ways. Firstly there were those elements who sneered at authority; they consisted mainly of the ‘Kamchatka clan’, that is those who sat in the back-row desks and fired peas at the teachers etc. They were mainly good types, free and easy, but not greatly attracted to learning, and they seized upon revolutionary ideas as something that freed them from the need to submit to teachers and other school ‘minions’, and justified their disregard for study. In the second category belonged the studious types, those who were among the best students but not the so-called ‘swats’: they studied out of a thirst for the knowledge that could be acquired at school, albeit in modest quantities. With them, revolutionary ideas provoked deep reflection. Far from distracting them from their school studies, it deepened their interest in theoretical work and made them think for themselves. Thanks to this, although doing schoolwork only in fits and starts while most of the time learning about scientific disciplines which were not taught in schools, a student could still achieve notable success in the ‘official’ curriculum. Vyacheslav belonged to this category.
Revolutionary ideas first reached him in Nolinsk in 1905. It is sufficient to recall that date for it to be clear that the first revolutionary impression on the soul of the 15-year-old boy occurred when it had been made soft, receptive and expectant by events. More eloquently than all conversations and speeches, the students were affected by the bare news of the railway and then of the general strike, the activity of the St Petersburg Soviet of Workers’ Deputies, the blazing landowners’ estates in Samara, Saratov, Tambov and Penza provinces, etc. Just at this time the brother of the well-known artist Vasnetsov was living in exile in Nolinsk. In Molotov’s own words, Vasnetsov was the first man from whom he not only heard commentaries on everything that was happening, but also received a few practical revolutionary tasks. It was Vasnetsov who first asked the young Molotov whom he thought more suitable: the Mensheviks or the Bolsheviks. However, the same question was posed by the whole of life around him. As for the SR party, which was very active and vocal at that time, the question of joining it never arose for Molotov—possibly because he happened to move in an SD environment. Also the fact that Molotov went to a ‘modern’ school was important. At that time and later, it was apparent that Gymnasium students, who had a so-called ‘classical’ education, were drawn to the SR party, whilst ‘modern’ school pupils, budding engineers and industrial managers, mainly joined the SDs. The category of students to which Molotov belonged in his conception of the revolution was again divided into two groups. As they were thoughtful, and attentive to ideas and theory, some of them – and by no means a small proportion – interpreted revolutionary ideas in an abstract, bookish way. Marx was appreciated as a scholar, not a revolutionary. Das Kapital was read only as a theoretical work, not as a call to direct action. For such ‘revolutionaries’, conspiratorial circles were mainly organisations for self-education.
Molotov was one of those who, whilst striving for a scientific understanding of social problems, did not appreciate revolutionary ideas for their scientific, cognitive value alone. They sensed in them a call to action. Moreover, they were overtaken by events, so that besides theoretical learning one had as well to do practical work. That same Vasnetsov in Nolinsk organised a group of irregulars to manufacture explosives,1 with Molotov as a member. So for him, self-education circles were both a school in revolution, a school in conspiracy, which would long remain useful, and a detachment of armed irregulars for which one had to learn about street fighting. In revolutionary circles at that time, particularly in the provinces, there were quite a few immature dogmatists who questioned everyone on the party to which they belonged and why, on the fraction to which they belonged inside the party and why, on what they thought of Martov’s last attack on Lenin or Plekhanov’s on Martynov, etc. Such questioning bewildered very many people and rushed them into a decision as to which group to join.
But Molotov was not confused by such immature insistence. Throughout all the storms of 1905, he would unfailingly answer: ‘I haven’t yet made out which SD fraction I belong to.’ It was only towards the end of 1906 that his sympathies finally began to lean towards the Bolsheviks. Men of older generations were turning their backs in disappointment, but in their place came ‘fresh workers in battle order, ready to do and die’. And as their revolutionary convictions were formed under Dubasov, Trepov, Stolypin and Durnovo, they were few in number, but by their moral fervour, by their fortitude in the ensuing struggle, they proved to be far stronger than many who had joined the Revolution during its romantic period in 1904-5 when its star was rising rather than waning.
From autumn 1906 Molotov worked in the local revolutionary organisation in secondary and higher schools, which disdained all party affiliations. In this organisation, practically the only real, that is convinced, Bolshevik was V. A. Tikhomirnov.1 He and Molotov formed a tight and vigorous bloc which turned the so-called non-party revolutionary organisations into an arena for the contest of ideas between, on the one hand, Tikhomirnov and Molotov, and on the other, many members of the organisation including the leaders of the SRs. The ideological discussions were a good method of developing and strengthening a point of view and of instilling a long-lasting ideological discipline. Those discussions led by the end of 1907 to the defection of many SR members of the organisation, even some of the leaders, to the Marxist camp.
It was in this organisation that Molotov taught himself the craft of a propagandist. The other side of his work was purely practical. Under these conditions conspiratorial technique was essential, that is it was esssential to have a flat for meetings, methods of communication between various circles, a hidden cash-box with its necessary concomitant—a small accounts room. In addition there was a clandestine library. Molotov took the most active part in all this conspiratorial activity, and it was also necessary to increase the numbers in the organisation. He established contact with the Yelabuga group through Bazhanov2 and the Penza group. The idea of founding an All-Russian Revolutionary Union of Secondary Schools and Institutes was mooted, which would of course involve the summoning of an illegal congress. Simultaneously a ‘printer’s’ was set up and the first May Day proclamation was published. It was written by Molotov, and should be considered his first written political statement. But he also put a lot of work into compiling the rules of the Revolutionary Union. He was the main inspiration behind our organisation’s encouragement of the fresh student riots of 1909 in the name of the 1905 slogans of school freedom.
Of course, there was no lack of agents provocateurs. Just at the moment when the SD part of the organisation which had formed around Tikhomirnov and Molotov began its real propagandists and ideological activity, that is between 1907 and 1909, two provocateurs infiltrated themselves into it. In March, Tikhomirnov was the first to be arrested, followed by Molotov and many other members a few days later.
Kazan prison, in which conditions were the same as those of the St Petersburg prisons in 1905, in other words extremely free and easy, was a real university for all the young people held there. Molotov devoted himself to study, and not merely the study of the social sciences. Besides further work on political economy and the history of the revolutionary movement, his attention was drawn by natural history.
In autumn he was deported with other comrades to Vologda province for two years. They were all pupils at secondary schools with the exception of Kitain, a professional Party worker, and Tikhomirnov, who had already graduated from a ‘modern’ school. Molotov, like other exiled ‘modern’ school students, was imprisoned almost the day before his final examinations, when he was in the top (seventh) form. He was confined to the town of Totma by the Vologda governor, Khvostov. There one of his preoccupations was to obtain the minister’s permission to take his exams. No sooner, however, had he obtained permission to sit them in the Vologda ‘modern’ school and had been transferred there from Totma, than he re-established contact with local Party circles and above all with local workers. Consequently, the examinations were in a way pushed into the background. However, he did pass them, and thanks to the forgetfulness of the police authorities, he remained in Vologda. Here he plunged into energetic activity among the railwaymen. He had made contact with them through exiles linked with the Mytishchi workers, who had been expelled from Moscow province and had settled in Vologda, where they were mainly employed on the railway.
Under the eyes of the police in this small town, Molotov still managed, together with other comrades, for example Maltsev, to run an organised Party group, to arrange a few open air mass demonstrations beyond the town limits, and finally to issue a May Day proclamation in 1911, which he composed with other comrades, and which a few of them pasted on walls all over the town the night before without being caught. Soon afterwards, on 16 June 1911, Molotov completed his period of exile. So, too, by this time, had Tikhomirnov, who was allowed to replace part of his exile with emigration. Abroad he met Lenin, and as he had sufficient private means, they discussed the publication of a legal Bolshevik newspaper in Russia. On Lenin’s initiative, Tikhomirnov devoted his resources, his energy and his knowledge to its creation. Of course, Tikhomirnov turned first of all to Molotov and his comrades. In 1911, a conference was held near Saratov to discuss the organisation of the paper. This was just after the end of Molotov’s exile.
Molotov then went to St Petersburg and entered the Economics Department of the Polytechnical Institute. After joining the ranks of the active Bolsheviks there, he became most directly involved in Zvezda, which was then being created and later Pravda. Whilst working in the capital, he did not lose touch with his former comrades and used all possible means to attract the maximum number of them either morally or materially to support the great undertaking that had been launched.
Molotov soon became editorial secretary of Pravda. At the same time he carried on illegal work both as a member of the St Petersburg Committee and as a propagandist. Finally he took an active part in the work of the Duma ‘fraction’. He naturally participated in the discussion of all vital questions of the day, and he was in personal communication with the émigré centre and Vladimir Ilyich.
These functions forced him to pay closer attention to purely governmental questions. It was thanks to the energy, resourcefulness and theoretical training of many Pravda activists, including Molotov, that there existed the closest contact between the paper, the Duma ‘fraction’, the émigré centre, and the mass of the proletariat of St Petersburg, Moscow, Vladimir, Ivanovo-Voznesensk, in fact of the whole of Russia.
It was at this time that Molotov’s first writings appeared in print. His first article was published in Pravda under the signature ‘Akim P-ta’, that is ‘Akim Prostota’ (‘Akim the simple’)—one of Molotov’s Party pseudonyms. He signed his next articles in Pravda with the name ‘V. Mikhailov’. The first publication to which he put his own name was a pamphlet that appeared in Petrograd in 1919: How the Workers Learn to Build Their Economy.
In 1913 the police came to arrest Molotov at the editorial offices, but he jumped out of the window and escaped. He went underground, though without interrupting his revolutionary activity among the St Petersburg workers.
When it became difficult to continue to live in secret in the capital, he moved to Moscow. Moscow, as is only too well known now, was a city of agents provocateurs (at that time we only suspected it). So it was not surprising that Molotov’s days of freedom were ended here through betrayal by an agent provocateur, and he was again imprisoned. This was to mark a change in his inner development from practical to theoretical studies, although a rapidly issued directive on his deportation to Irkutsk province interrupted his reading. The journey took place under the most unfavourable conditions and on arrival in Siberia he was directed to the village of Manzurka. During his exile he met new comrades—Latsis, Pylyaev and others. They all discussed the question of launching an illegal Bolshevik organ inside Russia itself. To implement this idea and continue the revolutionary struggle, Molotov escaped from Manzurka and reached Kazan. There he found shelter just outside the town in a suburb called Chukashovka, in a dacha belonging to the very same V. A. Tikhomirnov. There, too, he discussed with other comrades the re-establishment of the shattered Bolshevik organisation and the creation of an illegal newspaper.
In autumn 1915, Molotov and Tikhomirnov set off for Petrograd where they founded the ‘1915 Bolshevik Group’. It included Boky, Bazhanov, Arosev and other comrades. Its main concern was the formation of a permanent organisational nucleus free from agents provocateurs. Consequently new members could only be admitted on the unanimous agreement of all existing ones. It was this group that took measures towards the setting up of an illegal paper. In the face of greatly intensified government repression, however, the group disintegrated. Molotov began to rebuild it. He managed to trace almost everybody and obtain an assurance of help with the paper. Pylyaev and Comrade Emma, who had escaped from exile, were preparing to install themselves in an underground press and begin printing the paper. At the end of 1916, Shlyapnikov arrived from abroad as an agent of the CC. In Petrograd a CC bureau was established, of which Molotov was a member. He was also extremely active in the Petrograd organisation, which increasingly expanded its activities.
The 1917 Revolution found Molotov and many other comrades in a state of readiness. In October, he became a member of the Petrograd Military Revolutionary Committee.
After the establishment of Soviet power, he became Chairman of the Economic Council for the Petrograd district. In 1919 he was dispatched by the CC to Nizhny Novgorod where he became Chairman of the province Ispolkom. From there, he moved to the Donbass as Secretary of the province’s Committee. Then at the All-Ukrainian Party Conference in 1920 he was elected a Secretary of the Ukrainian CP. In 1921 he was a delegate to the All-Russian Party Congress and there, on Lenin’s nomination, he was elected a member and a Secretary of the CC of the RKP.
A. Arosev.
Molotov was a Bolshevik militant as early as 1906, and subsequently rose with great speed to the highest responsibilities: by 1912, he was the editorial secretary of Pravda. With Stalin and Raskolnikov, he was a ‘conciliator’ and fought against Lenin’s line; but the leader lost his temper with the ‘milksops who are ruining the cause’ and had Molotov replaced by Sverdlov. By the end of 1916, Molotov was on the reconstituted Central Committee’s Russian Bureau, and in this post ran Pravda together with Shlyapnikov for a week before being appointed to the Presidium of VTsIK. Feeling too inexperienced for this position, however, he requested to be relieved of his duties. At that time he was on the Party’s left wing and opposed to Stalin and Kamenev.
In the following period he played a secondary role. Molotov (whom his less friendly comrades called ‘Iron arse’) was basically an apparatchik—an office man and administrator. As the Civil War subsided and buffers replaced cannon, he went to the Central Committee, as an alternate member in 1920, and as a full member in 1921. At this date he also became one of the three Central Committee secretaries to replace the ‘Trotskyites’ Serebryakov, Krestinsky and Preobrazhensky, as well as becoming a member of the Orgburo and an alternate member of the Politburo.
Like his old friend Stalin (whom he had known since 1912, and whom he was one of the first to support), Molotov thus found himself at the heart of the machine. He was appointed to full membership of the Politburo in December 1925, and entrusted with the arrangements for the sixth Congress of the International (July 1928), at the head of which he succeeded Bukharin in 1929. On 18 December 1930 he was appointed in Rykov’s place to the presidency of the Council of People’s Commissars, and appeared to be Stalin’s number two. He supported the leader for all he was worth in 1929 to make the Politburo accept increased rates of collectivisation, but it was often rumoured in Moscow in 1930-2, according to the Byulleten Oppozitsii’s correspondents, that he was the leader of an anti-Stalin group within the Politburo; and, at the same time, that Stalin was throwing the blame on him for the catastrophes of the so-called ‘third period’ policies which made social democracy the main enemy. In any case Molotov’s name did not appear on the list of potential assassination victims at the first Moscow trial in 1936. Whatever disagreements there may have been were then overcome, since Molotov was on the lists of ‘assassination victims’ at the two subsequent Moscow trials; and at the end of 1937, it was he who directed the massive purge of the top cadres of the Ukrainian CP of old members of Stalin’s splinter, such as Kossior and Chubar. …
When Stalin decided on the rapprochement with Hitler, he replaced Litvinow with Molotov at the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs on 4 May 1939, where the latter stayed until March 1949. In May 1940, Stalin took over from him as president of the Council of People’s Commissars. From May 1939 on, he was Stalin’s itinerant diplomat, the man of treaties and conferences where his stubbornness was a subject of wonderment. Appointed First Vice-President of the Council of Ministers in March 1946, Molotov seemed destined, towards the end of Stalin’s life, to fall by the hand of his former comrade. He was not on the new Secretariat which was to replace the Politburo; and in 1949, Stalin deported Molotov’s wife, a Jewish artist, and decimated the ranks of his former collaborators in the Foreign Ministry. At the twentieth Congress, Khrushchev claimed that had Stalin not died so fortunately, Molotov and Mikoyan would probably have been liquidated.
By this time, however, Molotov was already in a bad position. In September 1955 his colleagues on the Presidium forced him to publish a self-criticism in the review Kommunist because he had claimed in a speech the preceding February that the USSR had built ‘the bases of socialism’. He had to admit that socialism was already fully built in the USSR. In June 1957, he was one of the leaders of the offensive against Khrushchev inside the Politburo, and, once beaten, was eliminated as a member of the ‘anti-party group’. At the twenty-second Congress (December 1961), a much more serious offensive was launched against him: he was accused of direct involvement in the murders and provocations that had taken place under Stalin’s rule. The following year he was expelled from the Party, with Kaganovich and Malenkov. He was recalled from the minor diplomatic post he held in Vienna, since when he has spent his time tending his garden and writing his memoirs: and every day, the man whom unimaginative journalists dubbed ‘Mr Nyet’ goes off to the Lenin Library to work on the books he needs for this task.
Molotov was born to play second fiddle. He was certainly Stalin’s ideal ‘number two’ and complemented him. Molotov had no other ambition than to be the leader’s executive, and the very signs of his liquidation in 1952–3 cannot be taken to show him as a potential rival.
J.-J.M.
(autobiography)
I was born in 1877 on a farm called ‘The Companies’ near Taganrog. My father was a farmer, and from my earliest childhood until the age of seventeen I helped him on the farm (ploughing, harrowing, scything and threshing). In winter I learned to read and write—my father, Ivan Anastasevich, had started teaching me when I was six. He was a cultured man. He had spent six years in a classical Gymnasium, had volunteered for the army during the Crimean War, had fought at Balaklava, had been awarded the Order of St George, fourth class, for bravery in battle, shortly before being taken prisoner by the British and spending two years in Plymouth. He had made the acquaintance of Herzen, had become one of his admirers and on his return to Russia had received Kolokol. He was a very widely read man. When he lost his sight, he made people recite to him literature of all types—belles-lettres, history, philosophy, science, natural science, etc.
When I was seventeen, I went away to study, passed the examination for the second year of agricultural school, from which I graduated three years later, and returned to my father. He died soon afterwards. I began my practical work on the estate of a landowner called Plokhovo in the village of Znamenka, Tambov district, but after one season he accused me of familiarity with the workers, we had an argument, and I was engaged as manager of the Meien estate in the village of Nazarov in Moscow province. I attempted to do my military service in Moscow in the Grenadier Regiment. I was accepted as a volunteer, but the all-powerful Trepov would not give me a certificate of political reliability. I had to leave the regiment and return to Taganrog for service there. At call-up time, there was a surplus of recruits, so I was given an exemption and put instead on the first reserve list. After this (in autumn 1899) I went to the town of Maikop in the Caucasus where I became manager first of a distillery and then of a creamery. There I joined a Marxist circle (reading Das Kapital and Iskra), a workers’ circle and a Sunday school.
At the beginning of 1902 I went on holiday to Moscow, when I was arrested and jailed for three months. In the autumn of the same year, I became a member of the Marxist circle in Serpukhov, and I studied zemstvo statistics and zemstvo insurance. In early 1903 I became assistant zemstvo agronomist in the town of Podolsk (Moscow province). It was then and there that I joined the RSDRP(b) Party.
In November 1905 I fought my way out of a Black Hundred1 pogrom with a gun in my hand, rushed to Moscow, and there took part in the December rising. After its suppression (in January 1906), I escaped to farms on the Don. I worked in the Don organisation and in the Taganrog group (a mixed, almost unnatural organisation of Bolsheviks and Mensheviks), where I was responsible for agrarian affairs. I was searched twice, then arrested, held in custody in Taganrog and later Novonikolaev prison. After my release I went to Moscow, then to Tula province, and in 1907 found a job as manager of an estate. In the village of Podmoklovoye, a group of comrades and myself opened a popular tearoom under the flag of the ‘Temperance Society’, where we printed proclamations for the Serpukhov organisation, distributed illegal literature, and read lectures on agronomy and the labour movement.
During the Imperialist War, I was called up into the 215th Infantry Regiment, and was then transferred to a transport regiment, where I remained until the February Revolution. With other comrades, I organised the soldiers’ section of the Moscow Soviet, and in October I was a member of the Moscow RVS and the revolutionary headquarters staff. After the victory over the cadets, I was appointed Commander of the Moscow Military District. On 19 March 1919 I became a member of the Third Army’s RVS. In June I was appointed to the Council for the whole front, in August to the Council of the Twelfth Army, in August 1920 a Collegium member of the People’s Commissariat for Agriculture, on I March 1921 Commander of the Moscow Military District, and in May 1924 Commander of the North Caucasus Military District. In February 1925 I was detached for ‘particularly important’ assignments on behalf of the RVS of the USSR.
Muralov was one of the very few personal friends Trotsky had, one of the two or three comrades-in-arms – others were Rakovsky and Ivan Smirnov – of whom he spoke with feeling. In Trotsky’s own words, they had been tied since 1917 ‘by an indissoluble fighting and political friendship’. Muralov, an intrepid and benign giant of a man, was an agronomist who, unlike most other Bolsheviks, did not write very much; by the force of circumstance he became a ‘fighter’ and subsequently one of the pillars of the Red Army. He was certainly benign: as a member of the Moscow Soviet’s RVS in 1917, he agreed to negotiate with the Provisional government in order to avoid bloodshed. When the defeated party demanded the dissolution of the Red Guard and the arrest of the RVS, he became angry and suspended the negotiations; but since the Whites’ chauffeur had left, Muralov took them off in his own car so that they would not be lynched by the soldiers.
When on 27 February 1917 the Revolution broke out in Moscow, Muralov was a soldier in a motorised company. He led a detachment which overran the radio station, and went on to open the prisons. He was on the Presidium of the Soldiers’ Section of the Moscow Soviet from its inception. A man of simple manners, he retained friendly, man-toman relations with the Moscow Cossack troops, his ‘countrymen’: and in the October battles, the Moscow Cossacks remained neutral. When the military organisation of the Bolshevik Party’s Moscow Committee decided, at the end of September, to make practical preparations for an insurrection without making even the sketchiest of plans, Muralov modestly tried to gather information. He kept a cool head just as he had done during the July days, but he did admit that a cool head could not, in the Moscow insurrection, make up for ‘our small aptitude at leading the fighting masses [ … ] and our total ignorance of street fighting’, made all the worse in his case by an obvious repugnance for bloodshed.
The Civil War brought this professional agronomist to the highest responsibilities. To quote Trotsky again: ‘Straightforward and unpretentious, Muralov carried on a tireless propaganda effort throughout the campaign by making himself useful to everybody: in his leisure hours he gave advice to farmers, harvested the wheat, looked after people and livestock.’
After the Civil War, and as General Inspector of the Red Army, he gave his signature to the so-called ‘Declaration of the 46’ of October 1923, which began the left-wing opposition struggle against the machine. He remained one of the pillars of the opposition until the fifteenth Congress, where he gave a measured but cutting speech which roused the audience to fury. He was constantly interrupted by shouts of ‘Liar! Get him off the platform! Go work in the fields! Down with Muralov! Why doesn’t he respect the Congress? You’re Menshiviks, traitors of the working class! Stop making fun of Congress! Down with the platform!’ He ended his speech thus: ‘If I criticise, then I am criticising my own Party and my own actions—in the interest of the cause and not to toady to anyone.’
Straight after the Congress he was expelled and sent to work in the country, in Siberia. He was one of the four signatories to the letter sent to the fifteenth Congress in April 1930 by the leaders of the opposition, which demanded free expression for all oppositions which advocated the ‘principle of a single party and the methods of reform’.
While many opposition leaders, under the pressure of the Terror, became demoralised and capitulated, Moralov stood firm. Stalin brought him to Moscow, and then let him out of prison in 1934. Muralov worked in Siberia, far from any political activity, but refused to sign the denunciation of Trotsky. After the capitulation of Sosnovsky and Rakovsky in 1934, he was the ‘big name of the left-wing opposition not to have publicly denounced his past.
In 1936 he was arrested by the police, who then announced the forthcoming second Moscow trial, with Pyatakov, Radek, Serebyakov and Sokolnikov as star defendants. A second announcement added that Muralov would also be a defendant. At the trial, Radek gave a sarcastic emphasis to the importance of this fact:
When Nikolay Ivanovich Muralov, the man who was nearest to Trotsky, and who I thought was prepared to die in prison rather than talk, when such a man has made his declaration and justified it by saying that he did not want to die with the idea that his name would become a rallying-point for the counter-revolutionary scum, well then that’s the most profound outcome of this trial.
Muralov himself underlined the importance of the service he was rendering to Stalin: ‘If I had stuck to my guns, I would in a sense have become a rallying-point for the counter-revolutionary elements which unfortunately still exist in the Soviet Republic. I did not wish to be the seed that would grow not into beneficent wheat, but chaff.’ Renouncing his whole past life at one go, he said at the end of his final statement: ‘For more than ten years I was a faithful soldier of Trotsky, the evildoer of the working class, the Fascist agent worthy of all our contempt, that enemy of the working class and of the Soviet Union.’ This last service rendered, the old revolutionary was no more use: he was sentenced to death and shot. Trotsky was hit so hard by this that he hardly mentions Muralov in his account of this second trial.
Muralov was the second Trotskyite to be rehabilitated (after Voronsky). In 1966, Sovietskaya Rossiya hailed him as a ‘courageous and stalwart Leninist, an illustrious statesman and a solid Bolshevik’. It is not known why this official homage should, today, be paid to this obstinate, calm Bolshevik, who had remained unruffled in the harshest difficulties, and who resisted the trials of defeat and terror for seven long years.
J.-J. M.
(authorised biography)
Grigory Konstantinovich Ordzhonikidze was born in 1886 into the family of a minor nobleman in the village of Goresha, Shoropansk district, western Georgia. He received his initial education in the Kharagaul two-year school, after which he went to the Mikhailov Hospital Medical School in Tiflis, graduating in 1905. In 1903 he joined the RSDRP and was a member of the Bolshevik faction until the Party’s name was changed. After leaving school, he worked for some time in western Georgia as a propagandist and agitator. In autumn 1905 he took a very active part in Party and revolutionary activity in the town of Gudauta in Abkhazia.
On 24 December 1905 Ordzhonikidze was arrested with other comrades not far from Gudauta in the village of Bombary, whilst they were conveying arms from Gagra. He remained in prison at Sukhum until the end of April when he was charged under Article 126, part 2, and released on bail. After this he went to Germany for a short while. He returned in 1907 to Baku and engaged in Party activity, at the same time working as a doctor’s assistant at the Shamsi Asadullayev oilfields in Romany.
On May Day 1907 he was arrested at a demonstration on Mt ‘Stenka Razin’ and was held for twenty-six days in Baku prison under the name of Kuchkishvili. On his release, he continued his activities. Working with him were Stalin, S. Shaumyan, A. Dzhaparidze, Spandarian, Mdivani and others. In October of the same year he was again arrested and under Article 102 sentenced to deportation for membership of the RSDRP(b), after which he was brought back to Sukhum to stand trial for the 1905 affair and was sentenced to eighteen months in a fortress.
In spring 1909 he was deported to the village of Pataskuya, Pinchuk district, Yenisey province. After two months’ exile he made his way to Persia via Baku. At this time the Persian revolution was still in progress and Ordzhonikidze took part in it. Whilst there, he maintained permanent contact with the Bolshevik group in Paris, received through Krupskaya our émigré publications and formed groups to advance our cause in Enzeli and Resht. At the end of 1910 he left for Paris.
There he began to work with the Leninist Bolsheviks. In summer 1911 he spent some time at the Party school near Paris which Lenin had organised. After the split in the Foreign Bureau and the creation of an émigré commission to organise the summoning of a Party Conference, he was dispatched to Russia with Rykov, Shwartz and Breslav to organise a similar commission inside Russia.
After visiting a number of towns in the north, the south and the Caucasus, he managed to form this commission. Its first meeting took place in Baku, attended by representatives from the Urals (in the person of S. Schwartz), Kiev and Ekaterinoslav. The Moscow and St Petersburg delegates were arrested on their way there. After this first session, and the collapse of the Baku organisation, the commission moved to Tiflis where it completed it work. Elections for the conference were held, and then Ordzhonikidze left for Paris, later going on to Prague where the conference was to meet. When it was over, he immediately returned to Russia to organise the CC Russian Bureau, and went to Vologda to see Stalin who was in exile there. Stalin had been elected to the CC by the Paris Conference and was a member of the Russian Bureau. He and Ordzhonikidze left for the Caucasus.
They returned together to St Petersburg, where Ordzhonikidze was arrested in April 1912, giving the name of Guseinov. The secret police, however, soon discovered his identity, and he was charged with escaping from exile. After six months in custody, he was sentenced to three years’ hard labour which he served in the Schlüsselberg fortress.
In autumn 1915 he was deported to the Aleksandrov transit jail in Siberia and in spring 1916 he was sent to Yakutsk. Until the February Revolution he lived in the village of Pokrovsky near Yakutsk, and worked as medical assistant in the clinic there. Together with Gubelman (Yaroslavsky), Kirsanova, G. I. Petrovsky and other comrades, he continued his Party activity. After the February Revolution, he and the above-named comrades, as well as some others, worked for the establishment of Soviet power in Yakutsk, and he was a member of the local Executive Committee. In May he left on the first boat from Yakutsk and in June arrived in Petrograd.
Here, on Lenin’s suggestion, he was included in the Petrograd Committee and its Executive Committee. He worked there with Stalin and others until the beginning of autumn when he went to the Caucasus for a brief period, returning to Petrograd on 24 October. After the October Revolution, he and Manuilsky were dispatched to the units fighting against Kerensky near the village of Pulkovo. Then he was appointed emergency Commissar for the Ukraine, southern Russia and the northern Caucasus.
He was at the front throughout the Civil War—first of all at Tsaritsyn and then in the northern Caucasus. After the crushing defeat of our army there and its retreat to Astrakhan, Ordzhonikidze, with A. Nazaretyan, F. Makharadze and a group of hill tribesmen led by B. Kalmykov and Artskanov, withdrew into the mountains of Ingushetiya. In spring 1919 Ordzhonikidze made his way secretly across the Caucasus mountains into Menshevik Georgia, and thence to Baku. There he, Kamo, Varo Dzhaparidze and others took a Turkmen fishing boat and after drifting for thirteen days, reached Astrakhan. After that he went to Moscow.
Next he was sent to see Stalin, at that time a member of the RVS of the Western Front. Ordzhonikidze was appointed a member of the Twelfth Army’s RVS, where he stayed until Mamontov broke through the Southern Front. He was transferred with a Lettish division to that front and made a member of the Fourteenth Army’s RVS. After the capture of Kharkov, he was moved to the Caucasian Front as a member of its RVS and Chairman of the Caucasian Revolutionary Committee. Here he worked with Kirov, Mdivani, Stopani, Tukhachevsky and others. He and Kirov were among those who entered Baku at dawn on May Day, and then in 1920 and 1921 he was actively engaged in the establishment of Soviet power in Armenia and Georgia.
At the present time, Ordzhonikidze is Chairman of the TsKK, People’s Commissar for Rabkrin, Deputy Chairman of the Sovnarkom of the USSR and Deputy Chairman of the Labour and Defence Council. Since the tenth Party Congress he has been a CC member of the VKP(b); he is Chief Secretary of the Transcaucasian Area Committee, a member of the RVS of the USSR and the Red Army Committee, a member of Transcaucasian TsIK, the Georgian TsIK, and a whole series of Soviet and trade union organisations.
Bombin
Ordzhonikidze was an old friend of Lenin, and an even older friend of Stalin—and for a short while, in 1922–3, he was torn between the two ‘faiths’. He chose his countryman, Stalin. True, Lenin was by then bedridden and semi-paralysed. ‘Sergo’ was impetuous, brutal, disorganised and effervescent, quick with his laugh as with his temper. He was half pragmatist, half daredevil—a pragmatist whose political courage was undoubtedly not up to the daredevil’s temerity.
After Kirov, he is the second member of the Bolshevik Party’s Stalinist splinter to have grown into a myth. As a mustachioed agitator, he was one of Stalin’s first companions – they met at Tiflis in 1906, as editors of the newspaper Dro – as well as being one of Lenin’s first ‘pupils’. He was educated in 1911 at the school at Longjumeau, and then elected in 1912 to the officially proclaimed Bolshevik Party’s Central Committee and the Russian Bureau of the Central Committee. His death, though less sensational than Kirov’s, was none the less suspicious; but since it was of no particular use to the ruling clique, Sergo slowly sank into silence, whence he emerged after Stalin’s death: he then appeared to the survivors as a witness of the good old days of ‘communism’.
Like Stalin, Ordzhonikidze was both a Georgian and a member of the Baku Committee; and he rose through the Party machine at about the same time as Stalin. Both came into the Party leadership for the first time in 1912. Like Stalin and all his group, Sergo did not appreciate intellectual dispute, and Voznesensky, no doubt unconsciously, reflects this in his poem Longjumeau when he shows Sergo asleep. …
On the other hand, Sergo was no mere ‘internal revolutionary’: he was in Berlin from August 1906 until January 1907; in October 1910 he left for Iran, and in November he went on to Paris. Lenin sent him to Russia, and he was back in Paris the following October. He took part in the Prague Conference, but after it went back to Russia, which he never left again.
The February Revolution found him in Yakutia, whither he had been deported in 1915. He remained in this desolate region as a member of the Yakut TsIK until the end of May, and with Petrovsky and Yaroslavsky brought out a newspaper, Sotsial-Demokrat, which defended the union with the Mensheviks and a policy of critical support for the Provisional government. On his return to Petrograd he played only a minor role in the Revolution and Civil War. He held various posts on the Southern Front and in the northern Caucasus (Extraordinary Provisional Commissar for the Ukraine Region, then for the Southern District). Having presided over the dislocation of the Eleventh Army, out of hostility for ‘specialists’ and centralisation, he bombarded Trotsky with attacks in his letters and cables to Lenin: ‘All we do is to feed the army with the promises of Trotsky and Shlyapnikov—but that won’t beat Denikin.’ ‘Where is Trotsky’s order, discipline and regular army? How can he have let things degenerate this far? [ … ] Where did anyone get the idea that Sokolnikov could command an army? [ … ] It’s an insult to the country. Do we have to humour Sokolnikov’s pride so far as to let him play around with a whole army?’
This attitude could not but strengthen Sergo’s links with Stalin. It was with Stalin that he plotted the invasion of Georgia, which took most of the Politburo by surprise in February 1921. Sergo was the military head of the invasion. As Secretary of the Party’s Caucasian (later Transcaucasian) Bureau, and the representative in Georgia of the Russian Republic, he was Stalin’s instrument in the country for his russification policy. Many Georgian communists rebelled against this policy and against the draft Constitution in which it was embodied. Unused to discussion and offended at being put in a minority in his homeland, Ordzhonikidze lost his temper, called meetings, dismissed men, moved about, threatened—in short, behaved like a proconsul in a conquered territory. One day, he slapped Kabanidze, a Georgian communist. Lenin was informed of Sergo’s conduct and of the methods used to apply a nationalistic policy he himself disliked, and from his sick-bed exclaimed in anger: ‘If things went so far as to make Ordzhonikidze so lose his temper as to use physical violence, as comrade Dzerzhinsky tells me, then one can imagine what a morass we have got ourselves into.’ Lenin stigmatised Ordzhonikidze’s ‘exploits’ in the use of force, and demanded that he should ‘be punished in exemplary fashion (and I say this with regret, all the more since I belong to his circle of friends, and since I worked with him abroad in the emigration)’. Lenin wanted Ordzhonikidze expelled from the Party, but illness prevented him from letting off the ‘Georgian bombshell’ at the twelfth Congress.
Stalin had his own way of replying to this: three years later, in November 1926, he appointed Ordzhonikidze to the presidency of the Central Control Commission, and entrusted him thereby with the expulsion of the opposition. He carried this out hesitatingly, seeking to slow the rate of expulsions and to reach a compromise, then fell ill when Stalin, a lot less sure of things than he appeared to be, impatiently demanded that the abscess should be lanced before the fifteenth Congress. Ordzhonikidze was even less happy about waging the infinitely less harsh struggle against the right wing. From then on, it seems, he played some kind of double game, no doubt inspired by fear at the rise of Stalin, to whom he nevertheless remained faithful in all public utterances. Zinoviev gave this evidence to the Central Control Commission, presided over by Sergo: ‘In 1925, Ordzhonikidze told me to “Write against Stalin”.’ Three years later, Bukharin told Kamenev that ‘Sergo was disloyal. He came to my place, insulted Stalin in the worst possible way, and at the critical moment betrayed him.’
The ‘treason’ paid off: Sergo was appointed an alternate member of the Politburo in 1926, and a full member in 1930. In 1932, he became Commissar for Heavy Industry. His deputy, Pyatakov, organised the work of this key commissariat during the Five Year Plans, while the disorganised Sergo took all the credit for it.
His position was then threatened: an unseen conflict brought him up against a pure product of Stalinism, Beria. In 1931, Kartvelishvili, First Secretary of the Transcaucasian Bureau and one of Sergo’s underlings, tried to stop Beria’s rise. He was deported for his pains and succeeded by Beria himself. In November 1936, Sergo’s deputy, Pyatakov, was denounced during the Novosibirsk trial, and found himself one of the accused at the second Moscow trial, where he was sentenced to death. Sergo tried to save him, but, according to Sergo’s Soviet biographer, Dubinsky-Mukhadze, Stalin made a cruelly ironical reply: ‘Sergo is making his last attempt to explain to his old friend Stalin that the darkest forces are now abusing his traditional and pathological suspicion, and that the Party is losing its best militants’. The net was tightening inexorably around Sergo. Papulya, his elder brother, was shot after torture. Alyosha Svanidze was sentenced to death—Alyosha Svanidze, with whom he had often shared his last crust of bread. Alyosha’s sister was Stalin’s wife, the mother of his son. … Shortly before that, a search had been made of Ordzhonikidze’s flat. Offended, and disenchanted, he telephoned Stalin all night long. In the small hours Stalin answered: ‘The NKVD is a body that can come and search even my flat. Perfectly in order.’
On the morning of the 17th he had a talk with Stalin, a few hours of face-to-face conversation. Then a second talk on the telephone after Sergo had returned home. It was a very heated exchange, with insults flying in both directions, in Russian and in Georgian.
Sergo died. In the words of Dubinsky-Mukhadze: ‘… shortly afterwards, the Commissar for Health, Kaminsky, was arrested and shot. He had been a Baku militant and a friend of Sergo; and it was with extreme reluctance that he signed the official death “certificate”.’
If this means anything, it must mean that Kaminsky found Sergo’s death suspicious. It is said that during the furious conversation with Stalin alluded to by Dubinsky-Mukhadze, Sergo had threatened to denounce the General Secretary before the Central Committee Plenum in February and March 1937. And according to Krivitsky, the NKVD encouraged Ordzhonikidze’s ‘suicide’, for he had become, in all evidence, an embarrassing witness for the man whom he had helped gain absolute power.
J.-J. M.
(autobiography)
I was born on 6 August 1890 at the Maryinsky sugar refinery in Cher-kassk district, Kiev province. My father, Leonid Timofeyevich Pyatakov, was an engineer and the director of the refinery. In 1902 I entered the third form of the St Catherine ‘modern’ school in Kiev. In 1904 I joined a revolutionary student circle of a vaguely social democratic nature. In 1905 I instigated a student ‘disturbance’, was a member of the student liaison committee, and participated in street demonstrations and meetings. I was expelled from school for leading the ‘school revolution’, and took the sixth-form examinations externally.
At the same time, I began to associate with anarchists and in summer 1906 spread their propaganda among young peasants and workers. I was the leader of a group of fifty which banded together with another group, headed by Iustin Zhuk, to form an ‘expropriation’ party led by him. After carrying out the ‘expropriations’, the groups dissolved. In 1906–7 I re-entered the school but was again expelled for an insolent argument’ with the school chaplain. In 1907 I sat the school-leaving examination as an external student. [ … ] In the autumn I joined a completely autonomous terrorist group which aimed at assassinating the Kiev military governor, Sukhomlinov. At this time, however, I began to undergo a serious, inner crisis. Anarchist practices sickened me, and anarchist ideology (I belonged to the Kropotkin type of anarchistic communists) no longer satisfied me. I engaged in a wide and careful study of revolutionary literature. I was particularly impressed by Plekhanov’s The Development of a Monistic View of History (even before this I had been a materialist and a Darwinist), and Lenin’s The Development of Capitalism and What Is To Be Done?. After that I broke completely with anarchism and took my place as a Marxist.
It was at this time that, after passing the Latin examination as an external student, I entered St Petersburg University. The years 1907–10 I devoted to purely theoretical work, in particular the study of Marx and Marxist literature, the classics of political economy (Quesnay, Adam Smith, Ricardo), contemporary economic literature, the Russian economy, statistics (particularly mathematical statistics), and philosophy (Spinoza, Kant, Fichte, Hegel and contemporary movements). By 1910 I had developed as a fully convinced, orthodox Marxist. I became linked with the university social democrats and joined the Party. At the end of 1910 disturbances took place in the university (the ‘Tolstoy’ and ‘Sazonov’ days). I was arrested for participating in them and kept under strict surveillance for three months, after which I was expelled from the university by the Minister of Education, Kasso, and banished from St Petersburg to Kiev.
The SD organisation there had collapsed, and on my arrival I made contact with E. B. Bosch, Ya. Shilgan and other comrades. We formed a group to explore the possibilities of resurrecting the underground organisation. We traced the remnants of the Kiev RSDRP Committee and together summoned a city conference which officially set up the organisation, elected a committee (which included E. B. Bosch, D. Schwartz, V. Averkin and Pigosyants), and delegated D. Schwartz to attend the All-Russian Bolshevik Conference in January 1912, at which the RSDRP CC was re-elected.
Our illegal work was accompanied by a furious struggle with the ‘liquidators’. The Lena tragedy gave us the opportunity of making ourselves known publicly with a strike and meetings, which led to the downfall of the Committee and the organisation. A few of us remained at liberty and we had to recommence all our work; at one and the same time I personally had to be Secretary of the Committee, store illegal literature, manage the underground printing-press, write proclamations and print them, re-establish contacts and lead study groups; in a word, do too many things for conditions of secrecy. In June 1912 I was arrested with some other Committee members, and in November 1913 came my trial. I was accused under article 102 and condemned with five comrades to deportation. In April 1914 I arrived at my place of exile in Irkutsk province, but in October escaped abroad via Japan. I did so because I wished to make up my own mind about the international outlook following the collapse of the second International, for from the first days of the war I had adopted a firmly internationalist and anti-war position.
I reached Switzerland just in time for the Berne Bolshevik Conference, whose decisions I wholeheartedly approved. Then Lenin, Zinoviev, Bukharin, Bosch and I combined to publish the journal Kommunist, producing the first two editions. In late 1915 a conflict arose between Lenin on the one side, and myself, Bukharin and Bosch on the other, about the nationalities question and the future direction of Kommunist. We all followed an incorrect line and the journal closed. The three of us moved to Stockholm where we played some part in the preparations for the Congress of the Swedish left, after which the Swedes were arrested. The same fate befell Bukharin, and later myself, Surits and Gordon.
After our arrest we were all sent to Oslo, which is where the February Revolution found me. Immediately Bosch and I left for Russia, but at the border I was arrested for being in possession of a forged passport, detained in Torneo jail for three days, and then sent under escort to Petrograd. From there I went to Kiev and without more ado joined the Bolshevik organisation, becoming Chairman of the Kiev Committee and a member of the city Soviet Ispolkom. In September I was elected Chairman of the latter, and in October became Chairman of the Revolutionary Committee. I was arrested by cadets and Cossacks, but was released by the rising of workers and soldiers. Then I was summoned to Petrograd by Lenin to take over control of Gosbank, which I did with Osinsky. Until the Brest-Litovsk treaty, I was Assistant Chief Commissar and then Chief Commissar of Gosbank. I disagreed with the CC over the treaty, however, and left for the Ukraine to fight against the advancing German and nationalist forces.
I joined Primakov’s detachment in which I performed various functions: I carried out political work, published a news-sheet with Lebedev called K Oruzhiyu! , administered justice and inflicted punishment, was a scout and a machine-gunner. By April 1918 we had been driven back to the line Taganrog-Rostov. Here a group of comrades was formed to summon a conference of the Ukrainian CP(b), and the TsIK of the Ukraine formed an underground Government of Workers and Peasants. I was included in both organisations and until the end of 1918 I participated actively in illegal Party and insurrectionary activity in the Ukraine. In summer 1918 I helped suppress the left-wing SR rebellion, and in December, after the German revolution and the start of the Ukraine rising, I became President of the Provisional Workers’ and Peasants’ Government of the Ukraine.
During the Denikin attack I was appointed to the RVS of the Third Army, and later became Commissar of the Forty-second Division in the same army. When the tide began to turn against Denikin, I was recalled to Moscow where I was briefly Commissar of the General Staff Academy, and then Trotsky and I departed for the Urals with the First Labour Army. But the Polish war broke out and in May 1920 I was posted to the Polish Front as a member of the RVS of the Sixth Army, where I remained until autumn 1920. After the conclusion of peace with Poland I was transferred to the Wrangel Front as a member of the RVS of the Sixth Army. Following Wrangel’s defeat I was appointed Chairman of the Central Board for the Coal Industry in the Donbass, since when I have been permanently engaged in economic work, for example as head of the Main Fuel Directorate, Deputy Chairman of Gosplan, Chairman of Glavkontseskom, and, since the summer of 1923, Deputy Chairman ofVSNKh.
Pyatakov was a brilliant and gifted man, possessing not only a solid education as an economist and a broad Marxist culture, but also, thanks to his social background, a considerable training in music. Despite their frequent political divergences, Lenin thought of him as one of the younger generation’s bright hopes. He saw him as a leader of the top administrators of socialist industry. But Lenin knew Pyatakov well, and although he mentioned him in his Testament as one of his six ‘heirs’, he was aware of the younger man’s limitations, and in particular of his lack of political stature.
With his strong personality and volatile temperament, Pyatakov distinguished himself by his great revolutionary zeal and energy, and remained for a long time on the Party’s extreme left wing. This explains the positions he took up and which later made him for many years one of the pillars of the opposition. Trotsky, not entirely without malice, said that Pyatakov usually joined every opposition, only to wind up as a government official.1 In fact, he was consistent: he was always in the left-wing opposition, and always argued as a technocrat. He was marked just as much by the contradictions of his family origins – the upper bourgeoisie with a passion for industry (his father was a sugar manufacturer) – as by his youth, spent among non-conformist, extremist libertarian Russian anarchists. Pyatakov bowed to no authority, not even Lenin’s.
As early as 1915, and with his inseparable Eugénie Bosch and his friend Bukharin, Pyatakov formed the ‘left communist’ group. He was an extreme internationalist, and described Lenin’s position as a ‘pacifist illusion’. Taking Bukharin’s neo-Marxist theory of imperialism as a basis, he was opposed to Lenin’s principle of self-determination, and came out in favour of a socialist United States of Europe, to be forged by the international revolutionary proletariat.2 During the revolution and the years following it, Pyatakov waged a forceful campaign to put over his principles.
In the 1917 Revolution, Pyatakov was the leader of the Ukrainian communists. For a young theorist, he proved himself to be a considerable man of action. After the October victory, Lenin brought him to Moscow to help sort out the mess of the economy. During the differences over Brest-Litovsk, at the beginning of 1918, Pyatakov was President of the State Bank and one of the main inspirers of the left-wing communists who supported a revolutionary war. He considered peace negotiations with Germany to represent a capitulation to German imperialism. When, on 22 February 1918, the terms of the peace with Germany became known, Pyatakov, with other left-wing communists, resigned from all official positions. He considered Lenin’s point of view to be a reflection of populist peasant ideology, and accused him of diverting Bolshevism onto the path of the lower bourgeoisie. When in March 1918 the left communists and SRs accused Lenin of betraying the revolution and decided to unseat him, it was Pyatakov who was designated as his successor at the head of the government.
He was consequently removed from Moscow, and sent to his native Ukraine, where the situation was extremely critical: the Germans were in virtual occupation and had set up a puppet government with Skoro-padsky as president. Pyatakov showed himself to be efficient and enterprising. With Eugénie Bosch, he founded the first Soviet government and the Communist Party of the Ukraine, of which he became the leader. He acquired great authority, and the Ukraine, of which he was for a short time President, became to all intents his fief and the bastion of left-wing communism. He virtually eliminated Skrypnik and his supporters. The Central Committee of the Ukrainian CP, elected in March 1919, was made up of Pyatakov’s followers who shared the opinions he had been propagating since 1915: the watchword of self-determination was qualified in the Ukraine as ‘counter-revolutionary’, and, putting the proletariat before the nation, Pyatakov demanded that the workers’ movements of all the nations of Russia should be subordinated to the central control of the Communist International.1
His views were the subject of a major debate at the eighth Congress of the Russian CP. He was violently attacked by Lenin, who accused him of taking a chauvinistic Great-Russian position. But even criticisms from a man of such great authority failed to shake Pyatakov’s influence in the Ukraine.
In 1920, the Central Committee of the Ukrainian CP was regained by Pyatakov’s supporters, elected by the Congress. Lenin cancelled the elections, dissolved the Central Committee by decree, and replaced its members with supporters of Skrypnik. Despite his differences with Pyatakov, Lenin bore him no grudge—unlike Stalin, whose task it then was to take over the Ukrainian CP and to rid it of Pyatakov’s influence.
At the time of the Civil War, Pyatakov was one of the group of Red Army Commissars who followed Trotsky’s line. In May 1919 he was appointed President of the Military Tribunal, and then to membership of the various Revolutionary Councils for the army, as he mentions in his autobiography. At the start, he belonged to the ‘Military Opposition’, opposed to the use of specialists, that is former officers of the Tsarist army, and in favour of the principle of electing leaders and abolishing military hierarchy and discipline, and so on. But Trotsky was able to soften him up rapidly by giving him responsibilities that ‘obliged him to go from words to deeds’. He distinguished himself in particular in the Crimean expedition, which he led, according to Clara Zetkin, in a manner ‘as brilliant as it was brave’.
After the Civil War, Lenin put him to work in a vitally important sector where his talents could be used to the full: in the economy. He rapidly gained a reputation as a clever, though sometimes over-zealous, economist and administrator. At the tenth Congress, in 1921, he was elected for the first time to candidate membership of the Central Committee, and he was re-elected at the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth Congresses. He was entrusted with various difficult tasks: in 1922, he was appointed President of the Supreme Tribunal, and it was he therefore who was in charge of the trial of the SRs in July of that year; and in the autumn of 1923 the Communist International sent Pyatakov and Radek to Germany to prepare an insurrection with the top leadership of the German CP.
Despite his panache, Pyatakov was an eternal second-in-command. In 1923, he was appointed Vice-President of the Supreme Sovnarkhoz, and he continued in this post even after Dzerzhinsky was appointed President over his head. Despite their political differences, Dzerzhinsky was glad to have such a valuable deputy. Pyatakov belonged to the left opposition and was a signatory, in October 1923, of the ‘declaration of the 46’. He was violently opposed to the economic policies of the ‘rightist bloc’. He was wholeheartedly for industrialisation, but considered the NEP a temporary necessity; like Preobrazhensky, he thought it was indispensable to put pressure on the peasantry in order to accelerate industrialisation. He defended his views in the great debates on industrialisation between 1924 and 1927. As one of the leaders and chief spokesmen of the Trotskyite opposition, and subsequently of the United Opposition, he signed and helped draw up all the programme documents and declarations of these oppositions. When they were dismantled by Stalin in 1927, Pyatakov was expelled from the Party (at the fifteenth Congress) and sent away to Paris as head of the Soviet Trade Legation. He went through a serious crisis, at that time, as a convinced communist, and declared to Valentinov, ‘For me there is no life outside the Party, and in disagreement with the Party.’ His quarrel with Stalin over the NEP was not so much a political issue as a question of economic policy. Indeed, ‘Pyatakov was more concerned with the proper economic policy than with the conditions of Party democracy’.1
When Stalin broke his alliance with the right in 1928 and launched into industrialisation and collectivisation, Pyatakov left the opposition and requested readmission to the Party. He became, first, President of the Soviet State Bank, then in 1930 Ordzhonikidze’s deputy at the Commissariat for Heavy Industry, which was responsible for the implementation of the Five-Year Plan. It was Pyatakov who actually ran the Plan, and his contribution to the first two Five-Year plans of super-industrialisation was very great indeed: he turned away from politics and put all his passion and abilities at the service of the Plans. At the seventeenth Congress in 1934 he was re-elected on to the Central Committee. Remaining faithful to the Party line, he wrote an article for Pravda on 21 August 1936, in which he approved the execution of Kamenev and Zinoviev, and described their views, as well as Trotsky’s, as anti-Leninist; and he paid public hommage to ‘our great Stalin, upholder of the general line mapped out by Lenin, and creator of its new development’. A few days later he was arrested by the same NKVD he had glorified in Pravda for having ‘annihilated the carcasses’ of Kamenev and Zinoviev. He was the main defendant in the second great trial, known as the ‘trial of the Trotskyite anti-Soviet centre’, which took place in Moscow in January 1937. Convicted of counterrevolutionary activities, of sabotage and espionage, he was sentenced to death and executed.
G.H.
The absence of Podvoysky’s life from the Granat Encyclopedia is as amazing as it is inexplicable. It is easy to explain why it is amazing: Podvoysky was a member of the Petrograd Committee from March 1917, then President of the Party’s Military Organisation, set up in April 1917, then a member of the Bureau of the Petrograd Soviet RVS, of which he was appointed President on 27 October. He was one of the three entrusted with the organisation of the storming of the Winter Palace (the other two were Antonov-Ovseyenko and Chudnovsky), then on the 28th he replaced Antonov-Ovseyenko as Chief of Staff of the RVS, and was put in charge of the defence of Petrograd. Finally, in November 1917, he was made People’s Commissar for War. The man John Reed referred to as ‘this thin and bearded civilian who was the strategist of the uprising’ played a determining role in the October days, in their preparation and in their consolidation. His absence from the Granat is inexplicable because Podvoysky was, at the time of publication, a member of the Central Control Commission and a solid supporter of the majority against the ‘Trotskyites’. He did then cease, it is true, to have any political importance; but this ubiquitous figure of the October Revolution, who had already told his life story in numerous memoirs of some value, could hardly have been forgotten.
Nikolay Ilyich Podvoysky was born on 16 February 1880, in the village of Kunochevsk in Chernigov Province. His father had been a teacher originally, but had become a priest. The young Podvoysky had three brothers and three sisters. He began his studies at the small seminary at Nezhin, and then at the Chernigov Seminary, from which he was expelled for revolutionary activity in spring 1901. He enrolled in the Law Faculty at Yaroslavl, and in the same year joined the RSDRP. Under the assumed name of ‘Mironich’ he soon became one of the leaders of the Yaroslavl circle. He was arrested in 1904, but was soon released. At that time his collaborators in the Yaroslavl circle included Yaroslavsky, Nevsky, Menzhinsky and Kedrov. ... He was arrested in 1905 for his involvement in the strike of the city’s railway workers, but was again soon released. He was wounded in a demonstration, and sought treatment in Germany and Switzerland; on his return in 1906, he campaigned with the St Petersburg organisation. He was arrested in 1908, then released in 1910 in order to go into hospital.
He left St Petersburg to militate in Kostroma and then Baku, where he stayed from January to June 1911, spreading propaganda among the oil-workers. Upon his next return to St Petersburg, he helped set up Pravda; and early in 1913 he settled down in Pargovo, near St Petersburg, to organise the smuggling of clandestine Bolshevik literature into Russia; he seemed for a while to be leaving the life of a militant. From February 1915, he was editor of the only legal Bolshevik newspaper, Voprosi Strakhovaniya. He was arrested in November 1916, but saved by the February Revolution. He was co-opted on to the Petrograd Committee, and elected on to its Executive Commission, where he represented the left wing and opposed support for the Provisional government. He was appointed to the Military Commission of the Petrograd Committee, and made President of the Party’s Military Organisation, which was created on 31 March 1917. He then ran Soldatskaya Pravda, the first issue of which appeared on 15 April, and which was banned after the July days.
Podvoysky’s role shrank considerably after the October uprising. He seems to have been an excellent insurrectional strategist, but not to have had any real military talent. In the Ukraine he put himself in a bad light, according to a letter of Lenin, by conniving in acts of ‘abusive and illegal confiscation, and corruption’, and for his incessant and arbitrary interference in the life of the Republic. After 1919 he was mainly occupied with general military instruction and with writing his memoirs. After the struggle against the left opposition he was retired for health reasons in 1934, and died in bed in 1948.
Trotsky, who had no reason to flatter Podvoysky, drew a portrait which appears to be very accurate, particularly if one remembers that, apart from his activity on the Petrograd Committee, Podvoysky never had any real political office and was never a member, either candidate or alternate, of the Central Committee:
Podvoysky was a brilliant and strange figure in the ranks of Bolshevism, with his traits of the old-style Russian revolutionary, educated in a seminary; a man of great stature, though of undisciplined energy, gifted with a creative imagination which, it must be said, often meandered into fantasy. ‘That’s a Podvoyskyism,’ Lenin used to say with circumspect irony and good nature. But the weaker sides of this effervescent character were to come out especially after the conquest of power, when the multiplicity of possibilities and means gave too much scope to Podvoysky’s unrestrained energy and to his passion for decorative enterprises. In the conditions of the revolutionary struggle for power, his optimistic resoluteness, his abnegation and untiringness made him an irreplaceable leader of the awakened mass of soldiers.
J.-J. M
(autobiography)
I was born in 1886 into a priest’s family in the town of Bolkhov, Oryol province. I learnt to read at a very early age and when only four, I read the tales in Tolstoy’s Alphabet. As a child, I was very religious. [ … ] I went to the Oryol Gymnasium [ … ] and at the age of fourteen I came to the conclusion that God does not exist. From that moment I began my stubborn struggle inside our family against going to church and other religious ceremonies. This aversion for religion was reinforced by the fact that I could observe all the religious quackery with my own eyes from the wings. [ … ]
It was when I was in the fifth form at the Gymnasium that illegal literature initially came into my hands. Of these first works, I remember Amfiteatrov’s hectographed serial The Obmanov Family which had previously been printed in the newspaper Rossiya, the proclamation of the revolutionary students of the Ekaterinoslav Mining Institute, descriptions of Cossacks beating students, and a few revolutionary poems such as the ‘Marseillaise’, ‘Dubinushka’, ‘Firm, Boys, Stand Firm’, etc. [ … ] In Bolkhovo that summer, the only revolutionary ‘cell’ consisted of myself and a childhood friend, the son of the local merchant, Ivan Anisimov, who later became a Menshevik and who, I think, emigrated with the Whites. The two of us would set off for the most solitary places outside town and there we expressed our protest against the autocracy by singing the ‘Marseillaise’, but in such a way that no one could hear us. Whenever we passed the Bolkhovo town jail, a pitiful, old-fashioned, tumble-down building which usually housed a couple of dozen petty thieves and horse-stealers, our thoughts went out to the Kresty and Butyrki, where the heroic enemies of the autocratic regime were languishing.
Returning to the Gymnasium after the holidays, I decided to devote the minimum of time to school work necessary to avoid being given a mark of less than 3.1 At night I concentrated eagerly on reading foreign works printed on cigarette paper, whilst during the day I read books on the history of culture, on both general history and the history of the revolution, and also on the rudiments of political economy. In addition, Ivan Anisimov and I began to spread our propaganda among the students: we started a couple of circles, and came into contact with some people living under police supervision in Oryol. During this period, I developed a mystical passion for multiplying illegal literature. I had already abandoned as politically useless the hand-written journal School Leisure, which I had founded and run with Aleksandr Tinyakov, the poet who later went mad. Hectographing a few small things did not satisfy me either, although from one master sheet we could obtain a hundred copies. I dreamt of a printing-press. [ … ]
When I moved up into the seventh class, I could no longer remain a vague, wishy-washy revolutionary. I had to choose between the socialist revolutionaries and the social democrats. I was decisively influenced by two works: The Communist Manifesto, and The Development of Scientific Socialism by Engels. After long meditation over them, I decided that the Populist outlook was untenable and unscientific, and that only Marxism could show me the correct path. This watershed in my beliefs produced certain practical consequences. Previously I had distributed to students not only SD literature which reached us from the Oryol SD Committee through Valeryan Schmidt and Pyotr Semyonovich Bobrovsky (both later Mensheviks,) but also SR literature which was provided by the SR Nikkeleva, although she lived under supervision in Oryol. I recall with what sombre resolution I announced to her that I could no longer help her distribute SR literature because I had become a social democrat.
Of the comrades who at this time were engaged in our revolutionary student organisation, I can remember particularly distinctly Aleksandr and Evgraf Litkens who were both tragically killed (although Evgraf was to become Deputy People’s Commissar for Education), D. Kuzovkov, N. Mikheyev, Ledovsky and E. M. Kotina. Among seminarists, I remember Romanov and M. Fenomenov. [ … ] In the autumn of the same year, 1903, we stepped up our activity in educational establishments and constituted ourselves as an SD Party cell.
I consider I have really been a member of the SD Party since the end of 1903, although Litkens, Anisimov and myself were only officially received into the Party two or three months later.
In early 1904, when the Russo-Japanese War began, the Oryol Party Committee issued a proclamation against the war and instructed the three of us to distribute it in large quantities at the Gymnasium. We accomplished this in the following fashion. During one lesson the three of us simultaneously left our respective classes, went to the changing-room where all the students’ coats were hung, and, picking the right moment, stuffed 150 or 200 proclamations into the coat pockets of the older pupils. The operation was a great success, and when the pupils were putting on their coats to go home, they were all astonished to find these circulars from the Oryol Committee. A huge scandal followed, the administration frantically hunted for the perpetrators and the gendarmes made an investigation, but nothing came to light. After this, our organisational début, the Oryol Committee agreed to admit us formally to its group of propagandists, which was done after an undemanding interview in 1904.
In spring of that year I was entrusted with a small circle of two workers from the Khrushchev engineering works. I explained the Party programme to them at some length, but not very convincingly. In summer, when I moved up into the eighth class in the Gymnasium and after consultations with the Party, I gave lessons at the Dyadkovo factory in the Maltsev industrial centre, Bryansk district, to the son of the local police chief. I converted my pupil, Nikolay Mikhailovich Zolotov, who now lives in France, to the SD faith. Whilst officially I was teaching him Latin, we devoted our main effort to distributing propaganda among workers at the Dyadkovo, Ivot and other Maltsev factories. It was here that I first met Fokin, who subsequently played a major part in the building of our organisations of Soviet power in the Bryansk district. My pupil’s father, the police chief, made great efforts to catch the Dyadkovo cell which distributed proclamations and mimeographed literature. We stored the mimeograph machine and illegal literature in a rather original way. My pupil complained to his father that he had nowhere to keep his books and exercise books, and asked him for a drawer in his father’s desk which could be locked. His father readily agreed and we kept our material there, whilst father Zolotov conducted searches through Dyadkovo. Similarly, whenever we needed to organise mass meetings in the forests at individual factories, we asked the police chief for his pair of horses, saying we wanted to go hunting. Without suspecting a thing, he willingly gave them to us and we rode round the organisations in our area. All this only came to light a year later.
In April and May 1905, our group led a general strike in educational establishments in Oryol. Yet despite this and the fact that we had spoken in public at student meetings, I was not arrested and I even received my school-leaving certificate. In summer 1905 I left for Bryansk and there directed the activity of the local committee with two other comrades. With no bed in my room, I slept on newspapers on the floor, lived on smoked sausage and bread, spending no more than twenty kopecks per day, and every evening I walked eighteen versty1 to Bezhitsa and back to attend workers’ circles at the Bryansk locomotive plant. In October 1905, on the suggestion of Olimpy Kvitkin, I was co-opted onto the Oryol Committee, which at the time was a ‘conciliatory’ organisation. After Kvitkin had departed, its leader, Ponomaryov, would laugh and say to the other Committee members: ‘We have two solid Bolsheviks, Mikhail Ekaterinoslavsky who is twenty, and Evgeny Preobrazhensky who is nineteen.’ Despite these sallies, I stuck to my guns and defended the position adopted at the third Party Congress. Before this a curious thing had happened in the Oryol organisation. It sent Olimpy Kvitkin as its representative to the third Congress. He left as a Menshevik but returned a convinced Bolshevik and did everything to support Mikhail Ekaterinoslavsky and myself in our Bolshevik views.
In October, after the publication of our famous manifesto, I was involved in a struggle with the pogrom thugs in Oryol and then I was sent to the Bryansk plant. I remained there until the middle of November, when on the suggestion of N. M. Mikheyev, who was working in Moscow, and with the agreement of the Moscow Committee, I moved to Moscow where I was made propagandist for the Presnya district. I worked here permanently until the rising and during it attended District Committee meetings, which directed the Presnya insurrection and gave command of our forces to Sedoy. My functions consisted mainly of organising meetings of strikers at their factories even when under artillery fire from the Vagankovsky cemetery. When Presnya was ablaze and surrounded by the Semyonovsky Regiment, I hid my Browning in the water-closet of my room, slipped through the soldiers’ cordon at night, went to Oryol for a few days and then returned to Moscow to put myself at the disposition of its Central Committee, which was led at that time by Rykov.
A. I. Rykov offered me the choice between the two organisations which had suffered the greatest losses—Kostroma, or Perm in the Urals. I chose the Urals, and within five days I had reached there and been introduced to the Perm Committee. One of the permanent workers on its staff was Klavdiya Timofeyevna Novgorodtseva, and we were also visited from time to time by Yakov Mikhailovich Sverdlov who was patching up the whole Urals Party organisation after the January defeat. After working in Perm for two and a half months, I was denounced by an agent provocateur called Votinov and on 18 March was arrested with other comrades. This was the first time I had been in prison. After five months and a four-day hunger strike, I was released for lack of evidence with Bina Lobova, Liza Kin and others, but we were kept under police supervision. When I came out of prison and set off through the town with a little bundle of things under my arm, I was met by Aleksandr Minkin, who brought me up to date with Party affairs and suggested that I resume work. The very next day I took part in discussions with SRs on the other bank of the Kama, and the usual routine of underground work was under way again.
In view of the collapse of the regional organisation, I set out for Ekaterinburg, Chelyabinsk and Ufa to re-establish contacts, and arranged a regional conference for the autumn in Vyatka. I myself was not able to attend. Having been sent to St Petersburg by the Perm Committee to buy Brownings to arm detachments of workers, I was betrayed by the agent provocateur Foma Lebedev (whom I recognised by chance in Oryol in 1919 and who was later executed in Perm). I was arrested at the Kazan station and sent back to Perm. For the second time I was put in prison there, and then I spent eight months in the notorious penal battalions. When, however, the case concerning our group was transferred to the Kazan Court of Justice, I was again released for lack of evidence.
I went to the southern Urals where I worked mainly in Ufa at the Sima plant and in Zlatoust. We succeeded in re-forming the Urals regional organization, one of whose most prominent activists was Nikolay Nikandrovich Nakoryakov (pseudonym ‘Nazar’). At the excellent clandestine printing-press in Ufa, we renewed publication of our local paper Uralsky Rabochy, and in addition brought out the Krestyanskaya Gazeta and the Soldatskaya Gazeta. In 1907 I represented the Urals at the All-Russian Party Conference in Finland, where I first met Lenin. My activity in the Urals continued until March 1908 in ever worsening conditions, amidst growing arrests and intensified repression. In March I was arrested at the Chelyabinsk town conference, swallowed the agenda and coded addresses, and escaped the same night from the police station. I was now a marked man in the Urals, but I could not tear myself away from the area and I escaped from Chelyabinsk to Ufa dressed as a student. I had to summon a regional conference which was due to meet in Zlatoust, but I delayed in Ufa a little while and did not reach the conference. I was arrested in the street at the end of April and immediately identified. [ … ]
I was held for a short time in Ufa prison and then sent to Chelyabinsk where I was tried in autumn 1909. During the trial, as I expected a sentence of hard labour, I made a vain attempt to escape from my escort, who savagely beat me. In fact my sentence turned out to be very light—we were all merely deported. After this I was tried for a second time under Article 102 in Perm and again sentenced to exile.
I reached the Aleksandrov transit centre near Irkutsk, and remained there till summer when I was settled in the area of Karapchanka, Kirensk district. The deportees there lived like a happy family in a commune and included the late Artem Sergeyev, Pyotr Kovalenko and Anatoly Galkin. Apart from daily work with peasants, my main occupation was hunting. In winter 1911 the Ekaterinburg Party Committee made the suggestion that I should escape from exile and represent them at the Party Conference arranged for the following year in Prague. I joyfully accepted their offer, especially as I was corresponding with Krupskaya and had received a brief coded letter from Vladimir Ilyich. Shortly before my escape, the police department made arrangements for me to be searched, and sent Captain Tereshchenkov, later notorious for his massacre of the Lena workers. As the Angara was closed by ice, however, he could not cross the river and returned empty-handed to Kirensk. Then on Christmas Day, the Nizhny-Ilimsk district police officer, who was responsible for us, received a telegram ordering my immediate arrest, as the Ekaterinburg organization had already been uncovered and my links with it had come to light. Since it was Christmas Day, the police officer was blind drunk and it was his secretary who opened the telegram, later blabbing about it to exiles in the town. They immediately dispatched a messenger who galloped over fifty miles through the night to warn me, and less than thirty minutes after his arrival I was sitting on a peasant’s cart racing to the railway station at Tulun. When the police officer woke up, read the telegram and set off to arrest me, I had already passed through Nizhny-Ilimsk and was near Tulun.
From there I made my way to Novonikolaevsk where I contributed to the legal Marxist paper Obskaya Zhizn, writing several articles defending the Bolshevik position on fundamental questions of the day. In addition I exchanged letters with Zinoviev, asked him to contribute to the paper and received an article which appeared with the signature ‘G.Z.’. Vladimir Ilyich also promised to contribute but did not manage to send anything. In autumn 1912 the whole of the Novonikolaevsk organisation was denounced. Pyotr Kovalenko, one of its activists, had been arrested even earlier. I was captured the day before my departure abroad, where I had been invited by Krupskaya to take part in a conference. From Novonikolaevsk I was transferred to Ekaterinburg prison and en route met L. Serebryakov, Zelensky, Kuzmenko and others who were being deported.
In Ekaterinburg, I was tried with Semyon Schwartz, E. Bosch, A. N. Trubina, A. Paramonov and others. As a result of the stupidity of the procurator who confused me in his opening speech with another Evgeny, our defence lawyers, who included N. D. Sokolov, A. F. Kerensky and N. M. Mikheyev, gained my acquittal, to the astonishment of all.
From Ekaterinburg I was sent back to exile after six months in jail for my escape. I remained there for only a short while and in 1915 I was allowed to move to Irkutsk. I joined the local Party organisation, which soon collapsed. After that, to avoid further betrayals, we organised a group of the most ‘reliable’ comrades, that is Zavadsky, Rom, Dzyarsky, Krut, Samsonov and myself, equipped a printing-press and planned to begin publication with an anti-war proclamation which I had written. It soon became apparent that there was still an agent provocateur in our midst, so we dissolved the group, and it was only after the February Revolution that on the basis of the archives of the Irkutsk Department of Gendarmes we were able to establish who had betrayed us. It was David Krut, who was brought to trial for this in Moscow in 1926. During my stay in Irkutsk, I contributed two articles against the war to the SD paper Zabaikalskoye Obozreniye. After Irkutsk I went to Chita, and whilst I was there, the February Revolution began. In April I left Chita as a delegate to the forthcoming first Congress of Soviets, stopping on the way in the Urals to work with old friends there. After the Congress, I was elected to the Urals Regional Committee and was a Urals delegate to the sixth Party Congress, where I was chosen a candidate CC member.
In Zlatoust, where I had returned to work, our Party was in the minority amongst the workers, even during the October Days. The majority supported the SRs. In October I took part in an armed demonstration by the Party under the slogan ‘All power to the Soviets’, and urged workers so vehemently at the Zlatoust works to support us that I lost my voice. Yet we were only partially successful. In the Sima district, however, where I arrived on 26 October, we managed to take control everywhere and to nationalise all the mines in the area. After the October Days, all the remaining comrades, myself included, concentrated on establishing Soviet power in the Urals and on strengthening our Party organisations.
From spring 1918 we in the Urals had to endure the Czechoslovak onslaught and then create a front against Kolchak. In summer 1918, in my capacity as delegate from the Urals to the Fourth Congress of Soviets, I took part in the suppression of the left-wing SR rising, was slightly wounded in the left temple during the storming of the central telegraph office which was occupied by the SRs, and was then dispatched by the RVS to the Kursk area for a few days to maintain discipline among troops on the Ukrainian border. From Moscow I set off back to the Urals, where Ekaterinburg had already been taken by Kolchak and our forces were retreating northwards. At this time I was Chairman of the Urals Regional Committee, which had taken upon itself the functions of political section of the Third Army. When Kolchak’s troops advanced on Perm and bombarded the town, our Revolutionary Committee was evacuated together with the last detachments of Mrachkovsky’s division and we then fell back in strength towards Glazov and Vyatka. Afterwards, when the Urals Regional Union had in fact lost almost all its territory, it was dissolved on the orders of the CC, and I was recalled to Moscow to work on Pravda. I was a delegate to the eighth Party Congress and a member of the Commission charged with drawing up the Party programme. Then I was sent by VTsIK to deal with trouble in Oryol province.
On returning to Moscow, I was present at the bomb explosion on Leontiev street. After the liberation of the Urals, I was again dispatched for Party and Soviet work in Ufa. I was selected by the Ufa Party organisation to attend the ninth Party Congress where I was elected to the CC, and the CC elected me one of its three secretaries. After the tenth Party Congress I was appointed Chairman of the Financial Committee of the CC and Sovnarkom and directed its work on the adaptation of money circulation and financial control to the conditions of NEP. I then presided over the Main Directorate for Professional Training, was one of the editors of Pravda, and performed a number of other functions which it would be tiresome to enumerate.
Of my literary work, apart from small pamphlets and many articles in Pravda and journals, I will name: Anarchism and Communism, The ABC of Communism written with Bukharin, Paper Money during the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, The Causes of the Decline of Our Rouble, From NEP to Socialism, On Morals and Class Norms, V. I. Lenin, The Economy and Finances of Contemporary France, On the Economic Crises under NEP, and finally the first volume of the still unfinished work The New Economics.
With his harsh face and goatee beard, Preobrazhensky looked like an academic. Indeed, the first version of his New Economics appeared in 1924 in the journal of the Communist Academy, but that is where the resemblance ceases. Preobrazhensky could no doubt have had a first-class ‘academic career’, but he was a militant: when the revolutionary in him was broken, he was nothing.
In the days that followed the February Revolution, Preobrazhensky was one of the few ‘Old Bolshevik’ cadres who did not adopt the policy of critical support for Prince Lvov’s Provisional government, and was therefore one of the first to accept the April Theses. The region for which he was responsible, the Urals, quickly became a left-wing stronghold (in 1917–18, the Urals Committee was led by Preobrazhensky, Krestinsky, Beloborodov, Spunde and Sosnovsky). At the sixth Congress of the Bolshevik Party, at which he was elected to alternate membership of the Central Committee, Preobrazhensky came into conflict with Stalin in a prophetic manner: Stalin read a report on the political situation which contained a resolution declaring the task of the Russian people to be ‘the seizure of power and, in alliance with the revolutionary proletariat of the advanced countries, its direction towards peace and the socialist reconstruction of society’. Preobrazhensky objected to this formulation and proposed the following version: ‘… its direction towards peace, and, in the event of a proletarian revolution in the West, towards socialism.’ Stalin refused this version, saying that one ‘cannot rule out the possibility of its being precisely Russia that will open the path to socialism’.
A man whose feelings always appeared subordinated to analysis, Preobrazhensky sided with the hardest left-wing communists from the very start of the Brest-Litovsk negotiations. On 28 December, he asked in Pravda whether one can ‘wage a revolutionary war’, and replied with arguments almost entirely in the future and conditional tenses. Ten days later he changed tack, and set against each other ‘peace’ and ‘socialist war’, in which the volunteers’ enthusiasm and the low morale of the German soldiers was enough to offset the disintegration of the old Russian army, the disorganisation of transport and the invincible problem of supplies.
That was not the only originality of this rigorous economist. The future (short-lived) secretary of the Party, the future ‘inventor’ of ‘primitive socialist accumulation’ (which the soft Bukharin thought a ferocious theory), always cared deeply for democracy. When in 1918 workers’ control over the railways was abolished and replaced by the dictatorial powers of the Commissariat for Communications, Preobrazhensky protested: ‘The Party will soon have this problem on its plate—how far should the dictatorship of individuals spread from the railways and other branches of the economy to the Russian CP?’ In 1920, as one of the three secretaries of the Party and a member of the Orgburo, he drew up a paper on bureaucracy which was circulated, with amendments, as a Central Committee circular. In January 1922 he claimed that ‘the possibility of extending the freedom to criticise is one of the revolution’s victories’. When Zinoviev, in November 1923, celebrated the anniversary of the Revolution by opening a rather demagogic campaign on Party problems, Preobrazhensky waged a struggle for démocratisation (the ‘New Course’) on behalf of the left opposition, and fired his first broadside in Pravda on 28 November 1923.
It was strange, but indicative of the nature of the Bolshevik Party after the Civil War, that Preobrazhensky was elected one of the three secretaries of the Central Committee, to membership of the Orgburo and to the Central Control Commission. In this last task he was soon replaced by one of Stalin’s friends, Solts, who was much more at ease than Preobrazhensky in dealing with purges.
Preobrazhensky was a victim of the Party’s sickness. As Serebryakov and Krestinsky were ill for almost the whole of 1920, Preobrazhensky ran the secretariat and the Orgburo almost single-handed—that is to say, set up the Party machine which up to then had grown in bits and pieces, by chance of circumstance. Zinoviev chose this occasion to renew his image by launching a major campaign for internal Party ‘democracy’ (except in the Petrograd organisation controlled by … Zinoviev); the butt of this campaign was the secretariat, above all the Orgburo, and therefore Preobrazhensky. In November 1920, he had a majority of only four against the ‘supporters of democracy’—Stalin, Zinoviev, Rudzutak, Kalinin, Tomsky and Petrovsky!
In the union conflict which began at that time as well, Preobrazhensky, with the other two secretaries, Serebryakov and Krestinsky, supported Trotsky’s line. The Party machine juggled the votes somewhat, but not in aid of its secretaries’ positions. Since the Congress that brought in the ban on splinter groups elected its Central Committee on the basis of attitudes towards the union question, Preobrazhensky disappeared from the Central Committee, never to return.
He was one of the signatories of the ‘Declaration of the 46’. In Pravda, on 28 November, he denounced the internal regime of which the result had been to reduce the Party to a mere executive function for decisions taken at the top. Stalin replied: ‘Preobrazhensky is recommending a return to the past.’ It was he who led the left opposition’s struggle in the Moscow organisation (December 1923) and at the thirteenth Conference (January 1924). Defeat moved him away from active struggle. and he then devoted himself to The New Economics, in which he developed the ideas he had sketched in articles on the need for industrialisation, collectivisation, and planning. A sharp polemic sprang up between Preobrazhensky and Bukharin, whose new slogan for the peasantry was at that time ‘Get rich!’ Bukharin considered the policies put forward by Preobrazhensky certain to antagonise the peasantry against the regime. In July 1928, when Stalin moved timidly towards collectivisation, Bukharin declared in fright to Kamenev, ‘It’s the same thing as Preobrazhensky’.
In 1926, Preobrazhensky was one of the main figures in the United Opposition, of which the three fundamental demands (for planning, industrialisation and collectivisation) were the three pillars of his New Economics. He was expelled from the Party in October 1927, then deported to Siberia after the fifteenth Congress in December. Agreeing with Bukharin’s phrase quoted above, he was one of the first of the opposition leaders to reconcile himself with Stalin. On 12 July 1929, he signed a declaration of realignment with Smilga and Radek. The first Five-Year Plan and collectivisation signified, in Preobrazhensky’s view, a turn to the left which granted the main body of the opposition’s demands.
Thenceforth Preobrazhensky was only a shadow. He was readmitted to the Party, when expelled again in 1931, readmitted the following year. ... He had an obscure office job. He was allowed to write a short study on the decline of capitalism, but at the seventeenth Congress in January 1934 he was obliged to make a painful self-criticism: ‘My theoretical works, including The New Economics, have served as weapons against the Party [ … ] Events have completely invalidated my claims [ … ] Had I foreseen collectivisation? I had not foreseen it.’ A joke went around the former opposition circles in Moscow at that time: ‘What is Preobrazhensky doing? He’s drinking jam tea and playing the guitar.’
All this did not prevent him from being expelled from the Party in 1935, arrested and imprisoned. He was released and in August 1936 served as prosecution witness at the Moscow trial, launching into Zinoviev and once again renouncing his past. A few months later he was arrested again. He was to be among the defendants at the second Moscow trial, but did not appear. The hunched ghost whom Serge had briefly seen two years before and who had told him, ‘They are not allowing me to breathe. I expect the worst’, had no doubt refused to play the last act of the farce. Preobrazhensky died—somewhere, some time. Official Soviet biographies state that he died in 1937 after being ‘convicted’. It is unlikely that Stalin set up a trial in camera for him. He was no doubt killed for obstinacy. His family was purged.
J.-J. M.
1 The Russian expression real’noye uchilishche is a translation of the German Realschule. The nearest English equivalent is the secondary modern school.
1 Roughly eight acres.
1 The author is here no doubt alluding to the incident which, according to Svetlana Stalin, affected the sanity of her uncle Fyodor Alleluyev who had joined Kamo’s men: ‘One day Kamo simulated a White Guard raid: the huts were razed to the ground, and all the Red Guards captured and tied up. On the ground lay the bloodstained body of a commander, and by his side was his heart, like a blood-red ball. Kamo waited: how were his captured soldiers going to react?’
2 See S. F. Medvedeva, A Hero of the Revolution—Comrade Kamo (1925).
1 See A. Melchin, Stanislav Kossior (Moscow, 1964).
1 This was a mixed commission set up at the end of January to examine workers’ grievances. It consisted of officials, employers, and delegates elected by the workers.
1 Krupskaya wrote numerous works on education which are listed in two bibliographies: E. P. Andreyeva, N. K. Krupskaya, Bibliografichesky Ukazatyel (Moscow, 1959); N. I. Monakhov and others, Pedagogicheskoye Naslediye N. K. Krupskoy, Ukazatyel’, in Narodnoye Obrazovaniye no. 2 (1964).
1 In 1913 and 1915.
1 See G. Haupt, ‘Lénine, les Bolcheviques et la IIe Internationale’, in Cahiers du Monde Russe et Soviétique no. 3 (1966), p. 388.
2 Z. S. Sheynis, ‘V Genne Gaage’, in Novaya i Noveyshaya Istorya no. 3 (1968), p. 55.
1 Sovietskaya Istoricheskaya Entsiklopediya, vol. 8, p. 704.
1 The so-called ‘chemical’ group.
1 This in many ways remarkable comrade was a Collegium member of Narkomindel from 1917 to 1919, when he died suddenly in Kazan.
2 Now a Presidium member of the RSFSR Gosplan.
1 Black Hundreds were bands of semi-organised, usually anti-semitic, right-wing extremists.
1 L. Trotsky, My Life (New York, 1960), p. 439.
2 He published articles under the pseudonym of P. Kievsky.
1 See Yuriy Borys, The Russian Communist Party and the Sovietisation of the Ukraine (Stockholm, 1960), pp. 128ff.
1 R. V. Daniels, The Conscience of Revolution. Communist Opposition in Soviet Russia (Harvard, 1960), p. 371.
1 In Russia, school marks go from 0 to 5.
1 Roughly eleven miles.