(autobiography)
I was born on 28 January 1892 in Bolshaya Okhta on the outskirts of St Petersburg. Until 1900 I was brought up by my mother, but in the autumn of that year I was sent to the Prince of Oldenburg’s Orphanage which had the status of a ‘modern’ school. It was a ghastly institution with the customs of an old-fashioned seminary; pupils were made to kneel in front of the whole class for bad marks, and the chaplain, Lisitsyn, boxed boys’ ears in public. I was obliged to spend eight years there as a boarder, leaving in 1908. By this time I was sixteen. In the seventh form, I had become an atheist, and in the same year became acquainted with the works of Maksim Gorky, Leonid Andreyev and others, which further strengthened my atheism. In 1909 I entered the Economics Department of the St Petersburg Polytechnical Institute.
At this point, I must briefly describe the formation of my political views. As early as 1905–6, in the fifth and sixth forms, I had twice participated in strikes, and moreover had once been elected to a student delegation which went to see the headmaster with a demand for improvements in living conditions. For this I was nearly expelled. My interest in politics and my sympathy for the revolutionary movement were first aroused by the 1905 Revolution, but as I was then only thirteen I could understand nothing in the disagreements between separate parties.
I called myself quite simply a socialist. My sympathy for the oppressed and exploited was maintained by reading the works of Sheller-Mikhailov, amongst which the novel An Omelette Needs Broken Eggs made a particular impression. In this way my political experiences in 1905 and an acute awareness of social injustice led me instinctively to socialism. This inclination found an all the more ready, heartfelt response, as the material conditions of our family were very difficult.
In 1907 my father died, and mother was left with two sons. Her pension of sixty roubles per month only covered day-to-day expenses, whilst an education had to be found for myself and my younger brother Aleksandr (who now works in the Party under the name of Ilin-Zhenevsky). For lack of resources, the latter had to be transferred from the ‘modern’ school, where he was a boarder, to the Vvedensky Gymnasium. By running into debt, however, mother managed to let me finish secondary school and also, for a while, to pay for me at the Polytechnical Institute. During subsequent terms, in view of our difficult financial position, the board of professors sometimes exempted me from tuition fees.
During my first year there I had occasion to read Plekhanov’s works, which made me a Marxist. In summer 1910 I made a thorough study of Das Kapital, and in December of the same year I joined the Party. After publication of the first edition of the legal Bolshevik paper Zvezda, I went to its offices, declared my full agreement with the paper’s line, and offered my services to the editorial staff. The godfather of my literary work for the Party was K. S. Eremeyev. From this moment, I became a very close collaborator on Zvezda and Pravda. After beginning with the diary of events, I graduated to articles, the first of which was printed in spring 1911. During this period I also worked with V. M. Molotov in the Bolshevik group of the Polytechnical Institute and maintained contact on its behalf with the St Petersburg Committee.
When Pravda appeared on 22 April 1912, I became editorial secretary. But I only lasted one month in this post since on the night of 21/22 May I was arrested and taken into custody. I was accused under Article 102 of membership of the RSDRP. After solitary confinement lasting four and a half months, I was condemned to three years’ exile in Archangel province, but this was replaced by an exit visa. On 9 October I reached Germany, but not far from the border, at Insterburg where I had stopped to rest for twenty-four hours, I was arrested by the German police and accused of espionage on behalf of Russia. The main evidence was a sketch of the émigré quarters in Paris which Eremeyev had drawn for me before my departure. After a few days I was released and made my way back to Russia with a view to working underground, but at Verzhbolov, on the frontier, I was arrested and deported to Archangel. At Mariampol, however, I fell ill and was confined to bed. By this time, the nervous shock of imprisonment was making itself felt and I was soon given permission for treatment in a sanatorium near St Petersburg.
On 21 February 1913 I benefited as a student from the amnesty and so reacquired the right to reside in St Petersburg. Naturally, I immediately resumed my collaboration on Pravda, which for censorship reasons was appearing under various, frequently changed names. With the arrival of L. B. Kamenev from abroad in spring 1914, my participation increased. By then long articles which I wrote to order for the editorial board were appearing as commentaries. I visited Pravda almost daily, and from time to time the offices of Prosveshcheniye, which also printed articles of mine. With the outbreak of war, Pravda was suppressed. I escaped arrest only by chance since on that day I had finished my work earlier than normal and gone home just before the police arrived.
From the first days of the imperialist war I adopted an internationalist, Leninist position. I helped compose the collective reply to Vandervelde. The war turned me, like other contemporaries, into a military man. Having long been attracted by the elemental life at sea, I joined the navy, and despite the lack of a certificate of political reliability, I enrolled for individual classes for naval cadets. During these years I managed to sail on two cruises to the Far East, visiting Japan, Korea and distant Kamchatka. The February Revolution found me sitting my final cadetship examinations.
I immediately made contact with the Petrograd Committee and with the newly reappeared Pravda, which had arisen like a phoenix from the ashes. In it I wrote a series of articles until, at the end of March, I was sent by the editors of Pravda to Kronstadt to take charge of the local Party organ Golos Pravdy. In ‘red’ Kronstadt I could not limit myself merely to editing the paper, and I threw myself into the thick of Party and Soviet activity. We formed a friendly, tightly knit group which included S. G. Roshal, Kirill (Orlov), P. I. Smirnov and myself, and a little later on were joined by Smilga, Deshevoy, Bregman and Flerovsky.
I was soon elected Vice-Chairman of the Kronstadt Soviet (the Chairman was a non-Party man, Lamanov, who during the subsequent Kronstadt rebellion in 1921 revealed his White Guard views). After the July demonstration, in which I and other people from Kronstadt took an active part, I was arrested, imprisoned in the Kresty and accused of being involved in ‘the case of the Bolsheviks’. On 13 October I was released and a few days alter was ordered by the Party to Novgorod and Luga to prepared the October Revolution.
During it I was directly involved in the Pulkovo battles. After the defeat of Kerensky’s and Krasnov’s bands, I was sent as leader of a detachment of sailors to the aid of the revolutionaries in Moscow. I was soon summoned from there and appointed Commissar of the Naval General Staff, then member of the Collegium of the Naval Commissariat and, in 1918, Deputy People’s Commissar for Naval Affairs. In June 1918, I carried out a secret mission in Novorossiysk for the Sovnarkom, scuttling the Black Sea Fleet to prevent it from falling into the hands of the imperialist powers. In July 1918 I was directed to the Czechoslovak Front as a member of the RVS of the Eastern Front, and on 22 August I was appointed Commander of the Volga Naval Flotilla, which actively assisted in the capture of Kazan on 10 September, and then pursued the White Guard flotilla with daily engagements up the Kama river, finally driving them into the Belaya river and obliging them to take refuge in Ufa.
We succeeded in clearing the Kama of White Guard bands beyond Sarapul as far as Galyan. Then ice started forming and our flotilla was forced immediately to make for Nizhny Novgorod to winter there. I returned to Moscow where, as a member of the RVS, I took part in all its sessions and directed the Naval Commissariat together with the late Vasily Mikhailovich Altvater.
In late December 1918 I set off on a reconnaissance trip to Revel on board the destroyer Spartak. We came across a greatly superior British squadron of five light cruisers with six-inch guns. Whilst beating a retreat back to Kronstadt, our vessel suddenly ran aground, smashing the propeller. So, after being captured by the British, I was taken to London and put in Brixton jail. After five months’ captivity I was exchanged for nineteen British officers imprisoned in Russia. The exchange took place at Beloostrov on 27 May 1919. Immediately on my return from England, I was appointed Commander of the Caspian Flotilla. Soon it was joined by the Volga Flotilla which had returned from the Kama, and the combined river and sea-going forces were called the Volga-Caspian Naval Flotilla. Our vessels had to operate in separate units over a huge area from Saratov on the Volga to Lagan and Ganyushkin on the Caspian. The most bitterly fought battles were near Tsaritsyn and Chornoye Yaro. In both cases our ships were subjected to almost daily aerial attacks. However, the combined actions of the Red Army and the Red Flotilla saved Astrakhan which had been encircled by White Guards, holding out only thanks to the one railway line linking it with Saratov. Finally, in 1920, the capture of the Aleksandrov fort and the remnants of the White Guard Ural Cossacks, as well as the expulsion of the British from Enzeli, completed the flotilla’s campaign.
During the Civil War I was twice awarded the Order of the Red Banner. In June 1920 I was appointed Commander of the Baltic Fleet. In view of our advance on Warsaw, Kronstadt was put on a state of alert to receive British ‘guests’. But to our great disappointment Lloyd George did not send a single British ship into Kronstadt waters.
In March 1921, with the end of the Civil War and the transition to peaceful construction, I demobilized myself and was appointed Ambassador to Afghanistan. In December 1923 I returned to Moscow, becoming editor-in-chief of Molodaya Gvardiya, Krasnaya Nov and the publishing house Moskovsky Rabochy. In spring 1926 I returned to Afghanistan as head of our delegation in a combined Soviet-Afghan Commission.
Raskolnikov was a deeply contradictory character. He was a man of action, convinced of the efficacity of his own will, and a fighting, flailing man with a passionate taste for literature and ‘proletarian’ culture and writing; he also wrote some lively memoirs and a mediocre play entitled Robespierre. He was married to the ‘Revolutionary Pallas’, Larissa Reisner, and they made a spectacular couple. Raskolnikov, finally, was so totally alien to theoretical problems that he openly displayed his boredom during the long, general discussions of which the Bolsheviks were so fond until Stalin invented his sharp-edged tool of ‘criticism and self-criticism’.
This lack of interest, not so much for political ideas as for any general conception going beyond the immediate struggle, often led Raskolnikov into error: in 1912–13, for example, he was the first secretary of the editorial board of Pravda—the editorial board of which Lenin had said, ‘They’re a bunch of milksops, ruining the cause. … They must be got rid of.’ In March 1917, Sukhanov thought him ‘an agreeable man, upright and well thought of. A convinced socialist and extreme Bolshevik, he is, unlike many others, completing his socialist education’—this no doubt because he paid attention to Sukhanov’s volubility. But the smell of gunpowder excited him: he was Vice-President of the Kronstadt Sailors’ Soviet, which, thanks to his courage, verve and eloquence, he managed to dominate; during the July days, he was given the task of securing the defence of the Bolshevik Party’s headquarters in the Kseshinskaya Palace, but he took such glaringly military measures that they appeared to justify the idea that the Bolsheviks were preparing an insurrection. That, and his leading role in the ‘Kronstadt Republic’, as his opponents called it, led him to Kerensky’s prisons.
After the October Revolution he played an important role in the Red Army. As Vice-Commissar for the Navy, he commanded the Volga-Caspian fleet, then the Baltic fleet, and in May 1920 led the attack on Enzeli which enabled the Red Navy to recapture the ships Denikin had abandoned in his retreat. On the other hand, Raskolnikov did not become a political figure and held no important post in this field.
In 1920–1 he supported Trotsky on the union question, but it seems this was not really out of any conviction, but more out of sympathy for the man whom he had seconded during the entire Civil War. Thenceforth, moreover, he followed the leadership’s line faithfully, and in 1921 left as Ambassador to Afghanistan. In Kabul he waged a vigorously anti-British policy; he was recalled in 1923 when it appeared to be appropriate to tone down anti-British policies. He was appointed under the name of Petrov to the directorship of the Comintern’s Eastern Section. He was bored in this post and seemed content to sign his subordinates’ reports and circulars.
An Asian communist leader who met him at that time recalls him thus: ‘A handsome man, with blue eyes and hair close-cropped more like an English student than a Russian Bolshevik [ … ] He was a natural man of action, quick, direct, incisive [ … ] He had no interest in theoretical problems [ … ] His theoretical talents had never commanded much respect [ … ] Nevertheless, he had a sharp, active mind, though at that time he was more interested in literature than politics.’ He was, moreover, at that time a member of the College of the Commissariat for Public Education (headed by Lunacharsky), for a short while president of the Glavrepertkom, chief editor of the publishing house Moskovsky Rabochy, editor of the review Molodaya Gvardia, and head of Glaviskusstvo. All these activities could only serve to diminish Raskolnikov’s authority over the new-style Comintern cadres, to whom art and literature were not serious matters. At the end of 1926 he was relieved of his responsibilities in the Comintern.
It was then that he wrote his Robespierre, and adapted Tolstoy’s Resurrection for the cinema. In 1934 he became a member of the Writers’ Union. In 1930, he had resumed his diplomatic career, and was ambassador to Estonia, then to Denmark and finally Bulgaria. In 1937, on tour in Sofia, he noticed on a list of forbidden books to be burned his own memoirs on Kronstadt and Petersburg in 1917. He was recalled to Moscow in 1938; dismissed before crossing the border, he decided to seek exile in France. From Paris, on 17 August 1939, he wrote Stalin a violent ‘Open Letter’. The man who had vehemently denounced Trotsky and Trotskyism from 1924 on suddenly declared: ‘You have destroyed Lenin’s party, and on its corpse you have built a new “Leninist-Stalinist party” which acts as a cover for your personal power. ... On the eve of war, you are annihilating the conquests of October. … “Father of the people”, you have betrayed the Spanish revolutionaries.’ This declaration appeared in Dni, Kerensky’s newspaper. On 12 September 1939, Raskolnikov died in Nice in suspicious circumstances.
In 1963 a volume appeared in Moscow devoted to the Heroes of the Civil War. A certain Tikhomirov contributed a long article to it on Raskolnikov, and concluded in the following terms: ‘Fyodor Fyodorovich remained to the end of his days a true Leninist, a Soviet patriot and a fearless fighter for the Bolshevik Party.’ The author of an article on Raskolnikov in Voprosy Istorii KPSS (issue 12 of 1963) mentioned the existence of the ‘Open Letter’, and wrote that it ‘unmasked Stalin’s arbitrariness, the discredit which he cast on Soviet democracy and on socialism. Raskolnikov accused Stalin of massive repression of innocent people [ … ] He accused Stalin’s Handbook of the History of the CPSU of robbing those the General Secretary himself had killed and calumnied, and of ascribing their achievements to himself.’
This radical rehabilitation of Raskolnikov is surprising. Although the old figurehead reminds us that ‘I’ve fought all oppositions on the ideological front’, he none the less ended his letter with a stroke that went beyond Stalin:
Feverishly seeking support, you spend yourself in hypocritical compliments to ‘Bolsheviks without a Party’, you are creating, one after the other, groups of privileged persons, you heap favours on them, you feed them on alms, but you cannot guarantee these new ‘one-hour sultans’ not just their privileges, but even their right to live.
J.-J. M.
(autobiography)
I was born in 1890 in Samara. Our family consisted of father (an engineering worker), mother, and six sons. Father had to wander from one town to another in search of work. At the age of nine, I was with our family in Ufa where we lived in difficult material conditions as a result of father’s absence, and I was forced to take a job at the Vedenev brewery, earning one rouble twenty kopecks per week. Father soon found a vacancy at the Harriman locomotive plant in Lugansk, where the family joined him. Here my elder brothers worked by his side, and as I now had the opportunity of not working, I entered the town primary school. But school studies do not last long, and when I left, I continued my self-education. In 1904, when I was fourteen, father found a new job in Baku, but my brothers and myself remained in Lugansk. Now I had to think about work on my own account. I was too young to become a worker at an engineering works, but the date of birth entered in my papers was 1887, and thanks to this I was allowed to work at a lathe. At the same time, I became acquainted with the illegal literature which my brothers carefully hid in lofts and sheds. When they noticed that their younger brother was interested in the labour movement, they and their comrades began to entrust me with the distribution of literature, and within a year, by 1905, I was a member of the Lugansk RSDRP(b) Committee.
In 1905 one could not work for the Party with impunity. I was arrested, but the period of ‘freedoms’ arrived and I was released. In 1906 and 1907 I was subjected to frequent searches and arrests, as well as dismissal from work. In 1908 came a two-year exile to Vologda province. I lived in Ust-Sysolsk with a number of comrades (including Dogadov, Kameron, Kaganovich). I existed on State charity – six roubles twenty kopecks per month – and continued my Marxist education. On completion of my exile, in late 1910 and early 1911, I was ordered by the Party to travel throughout Russia and spread propaganda whilst earning the money for it by factory work.
Without staying for long in any one place, I spent a longer period in Nikolaev, preparing for the Prague Conference with a group of comrades (including Sergo Ordzhonikidze and Semyon Schwartz). On returning from the Conference, I was entrusted with a mission in the Volga region. In 1912 the Samara organisation collapsed and I was sentenced to three years’ exile in Narym with Zelensky, Kuchmenko and others. In 1913 I escaped from there to St Petersburg and here I was instructed by the CC Bureau to organise a strike in Baku. After one and a half months there I was obliged to leave, following intensified shadowing and an attempted arrest. I travelled first to Tiflis, then to Sukhum, Nikolaev and finally Odessa, where I was arrested immediately on disembarking and sent back to Narym. In 1914 I again escaped, helped to organise the May Day demonstration in Moscow, was swiftly arrested and again exiled in Narym. In mid-1915 I made another attempt at escape, but in 1916, on completion of my sentence, I settled in Tomsk where I carried on Party work in a military organisation. In late 1916 I moved to Petrograd, participated in the demonstration of 9 January, and at the end of that month, I went to Rybinsk to put my papers in order. There I was called up for military service and ordered to report to the 88th Reserve Infantry Regiment in Kostroma. I continued my Party activity within the ranks and on 1 March led a mutiny. Then with Danilov, Yazykov, Kaganovich and others I organized the Kostroma Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies where I worked until mid-1917. At that point I moved to Moscow as a member of the regional Party Committee, attending congresses and conferences in preparation for October.
From October, I was a Presidium member of the Moscow Soviet and Secretary of the regional Party Committee. I was then elected a Presidium member and Secretary of VTsIK. In 1919–20 I was CC Secretary of the RKP(b), Head of the Southern Bureau of the Central Trade Union Council, a member of the RVS of the Southern Front, chief of its political directorate, and then in late 1921 became Commissar for Transport. Since May 1922 I have been Deputy People’s Commissar for Transport, carrying out the duties of Commissar, and at the present time am a Collegium member of the same Commissariat.
Serebryakov was a quiet, withdrawn man who scarcely attracted the attention of the writers of memoirs and historical portraits. He was elected to the Central Committee in 1919, and in the following year went on to the Secretariat and the Orgburo. He was ill for much of this time, but distinguished himself in these positions for his desire to smooth over rather than to exacerbate internal conflicts. The ‘tact and subtlety’ which he manifested at that time did not prevent him from being dismissed in 1921 for having supported Trotsky’s platform on the union question. He was never again elected to the Central Committee.
In 1923 he signed the ‘Declaration of the 46’, and in 1926 played a decisive part in the rapprochement between the Zinovievites and the Trotskyites, and subsequently in the internal cohesiveness of the United Opposition. Meanwhile, Stalin sent him, like almost all the other opposition leaders, on diplomatic postings abroad, as a Minister Plenipotentiary to Vienna, where Victor Serge met him in 1924 and described him as ‘fair and fat, in good humour’. In August 1927 he was expelled from the Bolshevik Party with Mrachovsky, Preobrazhensky and the rest of the group that had run the opposition’s clandestine printing-press. He was exiled to Siberia and according to Trotsky ‘he capitulated to the ruling clique in a more honourable way, it is true, than some, but no less decisively’. In 1930 he was readmitted to the Party and appointed to a high official position in the Commissariat for Communications, then sent on a mission to the United States. As an old friend of Abel Enukidze, he escaped the vicissitudes undergone by most of the former opposition at that time, who were successively expelled and readmitted. In August 1936, however, the defendants at the first Moscow Trial implicated Serebryakov in the ‘terrorist’ activities, and he was expelled from the Party immediately after the trial. He was among the defendants at the second Moscow Trial in January 1937, where he confessed to amazing acts of sabotage. He was sentenced to death and shot.
Serebryakov was a good-humoured man of action, and wrote very little; his friends had little influence in the Party, and his articles were infrequent. Thus historians have accorded him little importance. Neither a littérateur nor an orator, Serebryakov will have to wait until the Soviet archives are opened before he can regain his rightful place in the history of the Russian Revolution.
J.-J. M.
(autobiography)
I was born in Murom in Vladimir province. My father came from the lower middle class and had practised many trades: he had been a miller, a labourer, a carpenter and a clerk. My mother was the daughter of an engineering worker at the Dostchatoye plant. My father was drowned when I was only two, leaving my mother with four small children, the youngest of whom was only a few months old.
It was a hard life to be a widow without income or means of support. All the members of the family learnt to do some kind of work from their earliest years so as to be useful and help mother in her struggle to scrape a living. Yet despite all this, she insisted on bringing up her children herself in accordance with traditional customs and the Old Faith. Both my parents’ families were Old Believers, belonging to the Pomory sect, which was persecuted by police and clergy. From early childhood I knew what religious persecution meant. My education was greatly influenced by the adults arguing, fighting and brawling on the high street of our remote town.
For all mother’s kindness, we were left to our own devices for a large part of our childhood. The harsh struggle to earn even a crust of bread for her children compelled her to seek work wherever she could find it. Some days we did not see her at home from early morning until late at night. There were evenings when, alone in the house without anyone to mind us, we children were particularly worried for her safety. On winter evenings, when she would go and do other people’s washing in the Oka, we often hurt ourselves whilst she was away and came home with our feet frozen to our shoes. We would collapse into bed with various ailments for months on end, causing her new worry and expense.
As I came from a family of Old Believers, my date of birth was not registered precisely. In the old town records I have been given three different dates of birth, 1883, 1884 and 1885. This is easy to explain. When I finished primary school, I had to look for work straightaway. This meant increasing my age, and a couple of kopecks slipped to one of the secretaries or clerks in the registry was enough to put one’s age up by the desired amount.
At the age of eight, I entered primary school. I left three years later, having learnt to read and write. School was no mother to me, and it was not the teachers who educated me. The divinity teacher, knowing my Old Believer background, persecuted me in all sorts of ways. During these three years, he punished me on the day after each holiday for not having gone to church by making me kneel and do without dinner until five o’clock in the evening. The teachers were young and very rude, and they often meted out justice to their young charges with their fists. Even during these years, life taught me that there is no justice in this world. After reading all manner of religious writings, I was ready to do battle for the truth of the Old Believers’ faith in God. As soon as I learned to read, my mother often made me recite The Lives of the Holy Martyrs and the Psalms of David, many of which I learnt by heart. The religious bigotry, the persecutions of street and school, the poverty and deprivation in our family—all this turned my childish dreams and inclinations towards struggle and martyrdom.
As soon as I finished school, I immediately began to look for work. At that age there was no job that I thought beneath me. I picked fruit in orchards. I dried sand in foundry shops. I did other manual labouring jobs, earning from fifteen to twenty kopecks for a twelve-hour day. My contact with factory life and artisans of the old school gave me the idea of setting up as an independent artisan myself. I dreamt of being a lathe operator and did my best to become one. In the end, I found a job in the village of Vacha at the engineering works belonging to the heirs of D. D. Kondratov. I began my apprenticeship on a planing machine, and then in 1900 moved to Sormovo where I graduated to a lathe. After a few months there, I went further afield, to St Petersburg. Then followed the long ordeal of looking for work in the capital, but finally I was taken on as an apprentice fitter at the Neva shipbuilding yard. I was not yet eighteen, and despite attempts to change the age on my passport from 15 to 17, I still could not raise it to the one necessary for work on machine tools.
In spring 1901 a large-scale strike broke out in St Petersburg, which was followed by the notorious massacre at the Obukhov factory. Working at the Semyannikov plant, I was very active for my age in the strike, inciting apprentices from all the workshops, shipbuilding as well as joinery, to drive out workers who did not want to join us. We stuffed our pockets with screws and all sorts of scraps of iron, and made for the docks and workshops. Those who went against the general strike decision were pelted with iron fragments, nuts and bolts, and were forced into line. We flocked about the yard of the Semyannikov factory and clustered outside the Obukhov works. Policemen on foot and horseback threatened us with their whips, but this only strengthened our youthful readiness to fight. For such active participation in the strike, I was dismissed from Semyannikov’s and blacklisted.
All my attempts to find work at another factory ended in failure. With the help of some workers, I was given a job at the Obukhov works, but was dismissed as a striker after a couple of weeks. Other attempts had the same result. The impossibility of finding a job in a large factory turned me to work in small workshops. The pay there was so paltry that it did not even cover the rent, and I was reduced to spending the night at the town baths which I was supposed to be repairing during the day. After a year of hardship in the capital, I had earned enough money for the fare to Sormovo, and from there I made my way home.
It was during the strike in St Petersburg that I came across revolutionary propaganda in the shape of several pamphlets. I do not remember their titles, but I was not surprised by their contents since they only described what I myself had experienced and realised in these early years. On my way back from St Petersburg to Sormovo, the local social democratic organisation supplied me with a whole series of pamphlets, leaflets, and a few issues of the social democratic newspaper which was coming out at that time in Nizhny Novgorod. With this literature I returned home to Murom. There I soon found work as a stopgap lathe operator cum craftsman. This enabled me to carry out propaganda among workers both at that factory and elsewhere in the area.
In 1903 the Nizhny Novgorod Committee of the RSDRP began to take an interest in our work and to send their own people and literature. A Party Committee was created in Murom to be responsible for the Vyksa and Kulebaki mines, as well as for local textile and other enterprises. But there proved to be agents provocateurs in our midst: one was a postal worker called Moshentsev, the other a worker named Moiseyev. Both of them soon aroused suspicion by their behaviour and were expelled. This, however, saved only a part of the organisation, for the nucleus had already been betrayed. At the beginning of 1904 arrests had been carried out in the region. In all, about ten people were detained, among them the writer of these lines. The gendarmes compiled a whole dossier on our organisation, but the case was never brought to court as the agents provocateurs had been unmasked by us during the investigation. After being held in custody longer than anyone else – nine months in solitary confinement – I was released under police supervision. This allowed me to find work in a factory again.
In our area the events of January 1905 provoked a wave of strikes and protests in which we were actively involved. In July 1905 we called a mass meeting in memory of the massacre of workers on ‘Bloody Sunday’. Intervention by the police turned the meeting into an armed demonstration which set upon policemen and roamed about town for the whole evening. A week later, I was arrested and incarcerated in the Vladimir Central Hard Labour Prison—the Murom jail not being considered strong enough.
The strike of October 1905, which led to an amnesty for political prisoners, also brought about my release. I immediately rejoined the ranks of the revolutionary social democrat workers. On the day of my release, a gang of the Vladimir Black Hundreds beat me up in the street, and I returned home with marks all over my face to prove it. Following the example of the St Petersburg workers, I tried to organise a local soviet of workers’ deputies and local trade unionists, whilst the Party organisations turned to legal activity.
It was in the month of October that I became due for military service. My date of birth had been referred to a special commission, which had determined my age by external appearance and had fixed my call-up for 1905. The recruitment campaign of that year took place in an atmosphere of revolutionary fervour among the young. Demonstrations broke out here and there. A significant proportion of the recruits were, as was said at the time, infected with revolutionary propaganda. I personally refused to take the oath of allegiance to Tsar and country, but the authorities did not dare arrest me, since they feared that this would provoke the recruits into riots both at the army offices and in jail.
I did not, however, have to serve in the Tsarist army. Two months after my release from the Vladimir prison, the Governor of the province issued a new order for my arrest. The police made several attempts to take me into custody, but I was saved by the threat of armed resistance. Nevertheless, I was taken by surprise in a barber’s shop where I had gone for a shave on Christmas Eve. I was held in prison until the beginning of 1907. In January of that year I was sentenced to a further two years’ detention in a fortress, and then released on bail of 300 roubles until my sentence could be served. After this release, I was arrested once more in Moscow during a police drive against SRs at a technical institute. I spent only one month in jail, however, and was still not sent to a fortress.
In 1907 I was active in the Party organisation in the Lefortovo district in Moscow, and then moved to St Petersburg. There I worked as Party organiser for the Peskov (now Rozhdestvensky) district, was a member of the St Petersburg Committee, and participated in various Party conferences until the beginning of 1908. Then I went abroad, where I stayed until 1914, wandering from factory to factory in France, England and Germany.
In April 1914 I returned to Russia with a French passport in the name of Noè. I worked at the Lesner and then the Erikson plant as a lathe operator. I carried out several tasks on behalf of the Duma ‘fraction’ and the St Petersburg Committee, besides taking part in strikes and mass meetings. At the end of September, the St Petersburg Committee sent me abroad with various messages to liaise with the CC. In 1915 I was in Sweden, Denmark and Norway, I worked in England, and then returned secretly to the Russian capital in November. There, as I had been instructed, I founded a CC bureau to direct the work of the Party inside Russia. At the beginning of 1916 I again went abroad. During all these years, I remained in the closest possible contact with the émigré section of the CC, including Lenin and Zinoviev, and from 1915 I was a co-opted member of the Central Committee myself. In 1916 I went to America to raise funds for Party activity. By this time, too, the CC bureau which I had formed had been partly arrested and partly penetrated by the secret police, so I had to set about the creation of a new one.
During the winter of 1916–17, the work of our Party organisations brought the revolutionary struggle of the masses with Tsarism to a head. In the period preceding the February Revolution, the RSDRP was the only revolutionary party calling the working masses to an armed uprising. As for myself, I was a member of the group which took the initiative of forming the Petrograd Soviet, and on 27 February I was elected to its Executive Committee.
The latter entrusted me with the task of arming the workers, and I equipped the first elements of the Workers’ Red Guard with weapons. On the instructions of the Petrograd and Vyborg Party Committees, as well as the Vyborg district Soviet, I drafted the regulations of the Red Guard and the plan of its organisation, as well as improvising the means of procuring its arms. I also helped to organise the return of our émigrés from abroad, and the reception for Lenin and the others on 3 April 1917.
During a propaganda drive at the beginning of April, I suffered concussion when my car collided with a tram, and had to spend two weeks in hospital. On my discharge, I returned to Party work, the activities of the Executive Committee, and also the organisation of trade unions in Petrograd. The metal-workers there had elected me their President during April and when, three months later, the All-Russian Union of Metal-Workers was founded, I was voted Chairman of its provisional Central Committee. I took part in the first Congress of Soviets, and in all the events connected with those days. I was also elected a member of the All-Russian TsIK.
It was in the latter capacity that, during the events of 3–5 July,1 I toured the barracks rescuing Bolshevik comrades from arrest and ill-treatment. As a trade union leader, I was a delegate to various social bodies at that time: I took part in the Moscow Conference and the Petrograd Democratic Conference, and I was elected Vice-President of the conference of factories in the Petrograd industrial district.
As a Party worker and the President of the largest union of metal-workers, I participated in various conferences organised by the CC dealing with preparations for the October Revolution. During the Revolution, I mobilised Red Guard detachments and enlisted the active support of trade unions to ensure its success. I attended the second Congress of Soviets, where I was elected a member of the Sovnarkom and People’s Commissar for Labour. In this post, I drummed up trade union support for the struggle against organised sabotage and a strike by employees. I directed the work of the People’s Commissariat for Trade and industry until its abolition. I helped to organise the Council for Workers’ Control, and took part in the first Trade Union Congress in January 1918. By a decree of the Sovnarkom and the Petrograd Soviet, I was then appointed Chairman of the Commission supervising the evacuation of the capital in view of the German threat.
The summer of 1918 I spent as special envoy with emergency powers to ensure the supply of bread to the industrial areas of Russia. In the process, I became embroiled in the spreading civil war in the Caucasus. I was cut off from Central Russia for several weeks by White Guards, and escaped from their encirclement along secret, hidden paths. In the same year, I was dispatched by a decree of the CC to join the RVS of the Southern Front, and then became President of the Council for the Caspian and Caucasus Front. From 1919 to the beginning of 1920, I was on the Western Front.
These are the outlines of my work up to 1920. To go into greater detail would mean enumerating a considerable number of revolutionary events in which I took part. To enlarge on my activities since 1920 would mean recounting a tiny fragment of the social and political history of our Soviet land, for which I have at present neither time nor opportunity.
Brought up in an atmosphere of religious strictness, Shlyapnikov had a tendency (which some might consider ‘naive’) to deal with political problems in terms of moral categories: devotion, sacrifice, sincerity … to which was added, even more naively, a pride in his horny hands, in his genuine industrial and proletarian origins. Lenin teased him on this during discussion of the trade union question in 1920-1: ‘As always, comrade Shlyapnikov harps on his authentically proletarian character’. Shlyapnikov was a somewhat empirical analyst of a particular period, and limited his arguments to the Russian situation during this dispute. He constantly accused Lenin, at this time, of trying to ‘terrorise’ him, which Lenin described as childish imaginings.
He is one of the best representatives of the hundreds of party cadres who had risen from the Russian proletariat and who formed the backbone of the Party, allowing it to survive the collapse of ‘social patriotism’ in 1914; and to whom the long, clandestine struggle against Tsarism had given a taste for freedom of speech and freedom to criticise.
The deportation of the leading Bolsheviks in Russia (the deputies in the Duma, Kamenev, Sverdlov, Stalin, Spandarian, Ordzhonikidze, Olminsky, etc.), and the dismantling of the Party were the circumstances which put Shlyapnikov at the head of the Russian Bureau of the Central Committee, which had been reorganised at the end of 1916. When war broke out in 1914, Shlyapnikov was at first overcome by the wave of chauvinism which swept the Russian and European workers’ movements. According to Krestinsky, he declared in August 1914, ‘If I had been in Jules Guesde’s shoes, I should have done as he did, and, to speak the truth, if I were now in France I should volunteer for the Foreign Legion.’ This patriotic fervour did not last long, and when the February Revolution broke out, Shlyapnikov was Lenin’s faithful liaison agent inside Russia. As a leader of the Russian Bureau of the Central Committee, he was, like his colleagues Molotov and Zalutsky, overtaken by events.
Between 1924 and 1928, Shlyapnikov published his memoirs of 1917, in which he presents himself honestly, as he was: an attentive observer, following events with only one idea in mind: to oppose the arming of the workers which the leaders of the Vyborg district (Kayurov, Chugurin) were demanding. He himself feared that it would alienate the soldiers from the revolutionary cause.
Shlyapnikov attended the constituent assembly of the Petrograd Soviet on the evening of 27 January. He gave no clearly defined political line, and deserved entirely the assessment which Kayurov made of his actions: ‘Comrade Shlyapnikov was incapable of giving directives for the next day.’
Immediately after the Revolution, Shlyapnikov was on the left wing of the Party. He was hostile towards the Provisional government, and favoured the extension of the imperialist war into a civil war, as well as a merger with the anti-defencist Mezhrayonka; but from mid-March he was ousted by the Kamenev-Stalin-Muranov bloc. At the Bolshevik Party Conference in March, he took no part in the debates, which saw the emergence of a left wing in opposition to the rightist policies of Kamenev-Stalin, in favour of an alliance with the Mensheviks. He was content to preside at the meeting on 2 April, and to go to greet Lenin at Byeloostrov, on the Finnish frontier, on the evening of the 3rd.
Absent from the April Party Conference because of an accident, Shlyapnikov was not elected to the Central Committee. From then on he moved towards trade union work: he was elected President of the Petrograd Metal-Workers Union in April, and in July he became President of the All-Russian Metal-Workers Union, which he won over to Bolshevism; in June he was delegated with Ryazanov as the Bolshevik representative on the newly elected All-Russian Central Union Council. Faced with the prospect of open insurrection presented by Lenin and Trotsky, Shlyapnikov exhibited both the conservatism of trade unionism in a revolutionary era, and the hesitation of the masses before engaging in an action which put their future at stake. At the enlarged meeting of the Central Committee on 10 October, he declared that ‘in the Metal-Workers’ Union, Bolshevik influence predominates, but the idea of a Bolshevik uprising is not popular; rumours about it have even created panic’. In the October days he played no role whatsoever. Appointed People’s Commissar for Labour, he allied himself to the right wing, which sought a coalition government (Bolsheviks, Mensheviks and SRs). On 4 November the rightists resigned from their positions. Shlyapnikov associated himself with their declaration, but considered it ‘inadmissible to renounce responsibilities and duties’. Then he withdrew and remained silent over the Brest-Litovsk crisis.
After that, he was occupied by military missions. In June 1918, he was sent by the Central Committee to the south of Russia together with Stalin, to control supplies. Stalin stopped at Tsaritsyn, while Shlyapnikov went on his way to the Caucasus. In October, he was appointed to the Southern Front RVS, and then in December found himself in command of the newly formed Caspian-Caucasus Front, centred on Astrakhan. The Front covered the Eleventh and Twelfth Armies which soon crumbled. In February 1919 (and not 1920 as he stated) he was called back to Moscow, and replaced in Astrakhan by Mekhonoshin. Elected to candidate membership of the Central Committee at the seventh Congress, he began, in early 1919, to develop the ideas which were to form the Workers’ Opposition from September 1920. He was unable to defend these ideas at the eighth Congress since he had been sent by the Sovnarkom on a lengthy mission to Norway. At the same time, he was replaced by Goltsman as President of the Metal-Workers’ Union, and he was succeeded by his comrade Medvedev.
In the theses he distributed before the ninth Congress, he stated that the trade unions constituted the only ‘responsible organiser of the economy’. The union dispute which broke out at the end of 1920 allowed him to fill out his views, which formed the basis for the Workers’ Opposition which he led with the Metal-Workers’ Union leaders, Medvedev and Lutovinov, as well as Alexandra Kollontai and the President of the Mine-Workers’ Union, Kiselev. The Workers’ Opposition united the lower union cadres who were hostile to ‘specialist’ control and to the growing state control of the economy. Shlyapnikov proclaimed: ‘Let us finish with state bureaucracy and economic bureaucracy.’ The means to this end? ‘An All-Russian Congress of producers must elect the economic leadership’, or variants on the theme, such as an All-Russian Production Congress, tripartite organisms (Party-soviets-unions) responsible to the unions. In all cases it was the Party’s role that was substantially restricted. At the same time he wanted the trade unions to take over the leadership of working-class discontent ‘while combatting with all their strength the tendency to foment strikes’. His proposals found an obvious audience in a Party weary of excessive centralism created by the Civil War, while the exhausted, disorganised, fragmented working class was incapable of facing up to the tasks of production.
The Kronstadt revolt and the NEP made the tenth Congress put a provisional ban on splinter groups. Lenin, moreover, had the Workers’ Opposition specifically condemned, although two of its leaders, Shlyapnikov and Kutuzov, were elected to the Central Committee. From then on, Shlyapnikov waged a struggle against the subordination of the unions (and in the first instance, of the Metal-Workers’ Union) to the central Party machine. This struggle, and the criticisms Shlyapnikov made of Party policy, led Lenin in August 1922 to request his expulsion from the Central Committee; Frunze threatened to convince him ‘with a machine-gun’. The Central Committee refused to comply. In February 1922, Shlyapnikov signed the declaration of ‘the 22’ by which the Workers’ Opposition appealed to the International against the sanctions taken against it. Threatened with expulsion, he made a cutting, ironical speech to the eleventh Congress (March 1922), in which he claimed that the Party was as demoralised as it had been in 1907, that it was in full reactionary spate, that the NEP was anti-working class; he stigmatised the pro-peasant direction of the Party and its refusal to engage on a policy of industrialisation. The Congress gave him a stern warning.
From this point the decimated, demoralised Workers’ Opposition, overtaken on the left by clandestine groups such as Workers’ Truth, the Workers’ Group, etc., began to collapse. At the beginning of 1924, at the height of the battle between the left opposition and the Party machine, Shlyapnikov declared that there was no difference between the two sides, for neither gave a fig for the fate of the working classes. He then drew up, with Medvedev, a programme document known as the ‘Baku Letter’ which at the time remained secret. Then he was sent by the secretariat to Paris as a councillor in the Soviet legation: diplomatic postings were customary at that time for members of the opposition. He remained there during 1924 and 1925, and drafted his memoirs of 1917. On his return to Russia, in the middle of the fight between the United Opposition (which for a time he joined) and the Stalinist leadership, Pravda published (on 30 July 1926) an article which denounced the ‘Baku Letter’ (which the GPU had known about for at least a year) as an expression of ‘the ultra-rightist views [ … ] of capitulators to international financial plutocracy’. On 29 October 1926, Medvedev and Shlyapnikov sent a letter to the Politburo and to the Presidium of the TsKK in which they stated their withdrawal from opposition and ‘condemned any organised expression of opinions contradicting Party decisions’. Shlyapnikov then devoted himself to the third volume of his memoirs of 1917, which was published in 1928. In 1930, the Party secretariat forced him to publish a public confession of his ‘political errors’. He was expelled from the Party in 1933 as a ‘degenerate’. Imprisoned in 1935, he died in 1937, a forgotten witness of another age.
J.-J. M.
The fate of Kayurov (forgotten by the Granat Encyclopedia) complements that of Shlyapnikov. While Shlyapnikov, in February 1917, tried in vain to rise to the responsibilities imposed upon him by his de facto leadership of the Bolshevik Party, Kayurov, a member of the Vyborg Committee (which had taken over, effectively, from the Petrograd Committee which had been under arrest since 26 February), with his comrades Chugurin, Khakharev, etc., was in day-to-day control of the Revolution in the streets. Shlyapnikov belonged to the leadership of the Bolshevik Party. Kayurov remained in the ranks, and his life is obscure.
Born in a working-class family in 1876, Kayurov joined the RSDRP in 1900, and allied himself to the Bolshevik faction in 1903. At the outbreak of the Revolution in February 1917, he was a worker in the Erikson factory at Vyborg (Petrograd suburb) and a member of the Vyborg District Committee. After the Revolution, he was elected to the Executive Committee of the Vyborg District Soviet. In the early summer of 1918, he was sent on a mission to Siberia. Upon his return, Lenin sent him to Petrograd with an open letter to the workers of Petrograd, in which he asked his ‘old friend’1 Kayurov to invite the starving workers of Petrograd to leave en masse for the countryside, to find food and put down the Kulaks (letter of 12 July 1918). Eight days later, Lenin called Kayurov to other tasks: the Kazan Front was in a state of collapse. The regiments of the Fifth Army were fleeing before the Czech legions, Kazan fell. Trotsky moved back to Sivyazhsk, the stop before Moscow. To turn around an army reduced to pulp, where mess sergeants and porters were being armed to hold the front, they needed communists, Petrograd communists, the sort Lenin referred to in his letter of 12 July 1918—’In all Russia there are no workers more revolutionary than the workers of Petrograd’. On 20 July 1918, Lenin wrote to Zinoviev, Lashevich and Stasova: ‘We must send down there the maximum number of Petrograd workers: (1) a few dozen “leaders” (like Kayurov); (2) a few thousand militants “from the ranks”.’
A few days later, Kayurov and Chugurin led a detachment of several thousand Petrograd communist militants to the Kazan Front. It was the first of the detachments of militants who, after having fought February, then October, went to perish on one of the eight or nine fronts of the Civil War. Kayurov and Chugurin were included in the General Staff of the reconstituted Fifth Army, the Fifth Army of Smirnov and Tukha-chevsky which was to shake Kolchak in 1919 and 1920, and enthusiastically win over Siberia to the Soviets. Kayurov was in charge of the political section of the Fifth Army. He remained in Siberia from 1920 to 1922, in various posts concerned with the economy; in 1921–2 he was President of the Siberian Regional Committee of the TsKK for the purging of the Party. He returned to Petrograd in 1923, wrote a few pages of his memoirs (on the February Revolution, on his meetings with Lenin). When the struggle between Stalin and the United Opposition arose after the disintegration of the triumvirate, he supported Zinoviev, but remained in the background. Already he appeared a man of the past.
In 1932 the right-winger Ryutin drew up a political platform which denounced Stalin as the ‘evil genius of the Russian Revolution’, and compared him to the police agent provocateur Azev, who had led the SRs’ terrorist section between 1902 and 1909; he also declared that the Trotskyites were right about the problems of internal democracy, while the right-wing was correct on the questions of agricultural policy. Among Ryutin’s contacts was Kayurov, who gave his assent to this platform. He was expelled from the Party with all Ryutin’s supporters. Stalin requested the execution of Ryutin, who had claimed it was necessary to remove the leader from his post as General Secretary. When in 1936 the wave of terror swept over the Party, stalinised but still an annoyance to its General Secretary and to the NKVD, Kayurov refused to confess to the list of crimes he was required to sign. Yagoda’s policemen shot him down.
J.-J. M.
(autobiography)1
My father was a railway employee—at first a telegraph operator and then an assistant station-master. My parents, simple and uneducated people, had a vaguely hostile attitude towards the existing system of political and economic repression. In the early 1850s my father had been acquainted with Sunday school workers, and he had been educated by them after the emancipation of the serfs, whilst my mother had performed some services for revolutionaries during midwifery courses, which she took in the late 1860s and early 1870s. They both retained from this time a sense of respect for revolutionaries and dissatisfaction with the prevailing conditions, which to some extent they passed on to me.
I was born on 13 January 1872 in the village of Yasinovatoye in Ekaterinoslav province. My early life centred on the railways and stations, my father being transferred from one to another almost every six months, although always in the Ukraine. My first school was the two-year village one at Barbenkovo, Izyum district, Kharkov province, and then I went to the Izyum ‘modern’ school, from which I was later expelled for propaganda among peasants. I attained revolutionary consciousness without any external influence because in Izyum there was there not a single revolutionary, there was not even one liberal-minded person. The starting-point of my development was a study of Ukrainian history and literature. I was also influenced by family legends about ancestors who had been Cossacks, one of whom had been impaled for his participation in the Zaliznyak and Gonta rebellion against the Poles in the eighteenth century. The poems of Shevchenko led me to read history—Ukrainian history in general, and in particular the history of the period of uprisings, war and destruction. In this way I came across the Chornaya Rada (the ‘Black Band’) and the class rebellions by the oppressed against the Cossack leadership, which strengthened my objections to the rule of the wealthy and stimulated me to read about economic and historical problems. On the other hand, my interest in Ukrainian literature led me to study in succession folklore, linguistics, early history, anthropology, geology and the theory of the evolution of the universe.
Thus I developed along a path very different from that of revolutionaries who originated from the Russian intelligentsia. My beliefs were formed through the painful resolution of many inner contradictions. I tried to obtain books from everywhere, for example from a railway worker and former Polish rebel, and from the library of the old Decem-brist, Rozen. For a long time I did not see a single illegal book, and I extracted information on revolutionary events from reactionary publications, for whose explanations I substituted my own contrary interpretation. With four or five other comrades whose thoughts were developing in the same direction, I spread propaganda among the peasants and craftsmen in Izyum district whilst ostensibly collecting Ukrainian folk-songs. Looking back now, I must say that the information we conveyed was as confused as our own opinions. After a long time, however, I met two peasants who received their revolutionary baptism in my circle. My first contacts were with Ukrainian radicals in Galicia who supplied me with illegal literature. My conversion to Marxism was very difficult. I had to hammer out a definite set of views and renounce indeterminate revolutionism. Although I had read Ziber’s book Ricardo and Marx and Kautsky’s articles in Seventy Vestnik, it was not until I came across a Polish translation of the Erfurt Programme that I became a Marxist, broke with my earlier views, and seriously studied Kautsky and Das Kapital. From 1897 I carried out propaganda as a Marxist and social democrat and it is from this time that I considered myself a member of the Party.
My Marxist views were, however, still fairly eclectic. An acquaintance with Russian Marxist-literature, and particularly Plekhanov’s The Development of a Monist View of History, helped me in 1899, when I was living in Kursk, to purge my opinions of many misconceptions. One may therefore date my adherence to the Party as starting in 1899 or even 1900, when I parted company with a few, to my mind insignificant, influences of the German revisionists. But this constant inner development is still not completed. As for my membership of the Party, it was indeed determined at that time by my acceptance of Marxism and the social democratic programme (which in Russia at that time was the same as the German social democratic Erfurt programme), and by my personal SD underground work. That is why the year of my joining the Party in reality was 1897.
In 1900 I was an external student1 at Kursk ‘modern’ school (I had not graduated from the Izyum school as I had been expelled for organising a circle, after which I worked in Ekaterinoslav, Novgorod and Kharkov provinces), and I entered the Technological Institute in St Petersburg. I could not come to terms with the ‘Union of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class’ in the capital as it was infected with ‘economism’ at that time, and so I joined the St Petersburg Committee of Rabocheye Znamya. On 4 March 1901 I was arrested like many others at the demonstration on Kazan Square and banished to Ekaterinoslav. The local committee there also shared the inconsistent, revolutionary, semi-’economist’ views of the paper Yuzhny Rabochy. Therefore I could not be in full agreement with it and I organised associated, but distinct, workers’ circles with another comrade, Kokorin, who had just been exiled to Ekaterinoslav from Simferopol, and a few other revolutionary social democrats (including Kalyaev, still an SD at that time).
I was soon back in St Petersburg. Most contributors to Rabocheye Znamya had been arrested, and the remainder were leaning towards those views of Sotsialist which most closely corresponded to those of the future SRs (as can be seen merely by recalling some of their names, for example Rutenberg and Savinkov). With the arrival in the capital of the Iskra representative, I joined the St Petersburg section of Iskra and founded circles in various parts of the city. Arrests in late 1901 severed contact with the central organisation, but with the arrival of a new representative, our section became more secure and we began discussions with the St Petersburg ‘Union’.
Early in 1902, however, I was arrested and charged with planning a demonstration. I was soon deported for five years to Yakutsk province. On the way to Krasnoyarsk, the prison doctor, Kheysin (now a Menshevik but then an Iskra man), informed me that I was to be tried in the Iskra case, and I decided to escape. I succeeded in this only after leaving Irkutsk on the way to the Lena. The comrades closest to me in the Party then were Uritsky, Dzerzhinsky and Lalayants, as well as some Moscow students and future prominent Mensheviks and SRs, including Tseretelli, Budilovich and Khovrin.
By mid-1902 I had reached first Tsaritsyn and then Saratov, where I made contact with the local committee and the Iskra representative, E. V. Barmzin. The committee was following a very indeterminate line and still had not fully eliminated the ‘economist’ influence of Rabocheye Delo. I had many arguments on this score at large committee meetings. I carried on propaganda among workers and students, as well as organising circles. Simultaneously I worked for the final split of the SDs from the ‘Union of SDs and SRs’ which still existed in Saratov. The committee there published scarcely any printed propaganda and I arranged for printing to be done with rubber letters purchased in large, variable assortments. The letters were springy and difficult to keep in place. Nevertheless we managed to progress from hectographed sheets to printed proclamations. Later we managed to obtain print through pedlars and our technical problems were eased. By then I had already devoted myself to propaganda work and had travelled to Volsk for a short time to organise a circle of mill-workers there.
In Saratov I was called ‘Ivan Vasilich’, and I earned money by giving lessons and doing technical drawings. When the police began to follow me, I left for Samara where the Iskra representatives were G. M. Krzhizhanovsky, Z. P. Krzhizhanovskaya and V. P. Artsibushev. After handing over to Krzhizhanovsky 1,000 roubles which I had received in Saratov for revolutionary purposes from a former fellow student of mine at the Technological Institute, Aposov (now serving in the Intelligence Service of the Ukrainian High Command), I went to Kiev for literature which I brought to Kharkov and then went on to Ekaterinburg via Samara.
At that time there was no SD organisation in Ekaterinburg. There was the ‘Urals Union of SDs and SRs’ from which the SDs had to be disentangled so that they could form an Iskra group. It transpired, however, that in the Ekaterinburg branch there were no SDs, only SRs or indeterminate revolutionaries. There were a few people in the town who had been tried in SD cases, but they were apathetic and hostile to the Iskra movement. I was obliged to take a job at the power station. Having organised a circle among the electrical workers, I made contact through them with workers from the textile mill, the Yates works and other factories. There was no support from the intelligentsia whatsoever—only later did two comrades arrive from abroad and join the committee together with several workers.
We succeeded in winning over most of the workers’ circles from the Ekaterinburg Union, particularly when the majority of the SRs had been arrested. After a visit to Perm, I formalised the split of the social democrats with the SRs, and with that the Union was officially buried. In Nizhny Tagil and other places I managed to form groups and link them together. Then I sent a series of articles and letters to Iskra which were signed ‘Glasson’.
At that time, the end of summer 1903, Ekaterinburg had become so hazardous for me that once I only evaded the police by slipping through a bawdy-house, so close had the shadowing been. I was even arrested, but I escaped. I was compelled to make a hasty departure from the town.
After interrupting my journey in Kiev to see Krzhizhanovsky who had been elected to the Party Central Committee at the second Congress, I reached Odessa and worked there from autumn 1903 to February 1904. On the Odessa Committee at the time were K. I. Levitsky (a permanent member from 1903 until 1907), Lalayants (‘Aristotle’), Max Hochberg (later a Menshevik), Alekseyev (also a future Menshevik—he had controlled SD publications in Odessa during 1905–6), and Dr Bogomolets (who later left the Party and went to Argentina or Brazil). When I took my seat on the committee, its members discussed the split between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, and all definitely sided with the Bolsheviks. Thus when Innokenty Dubrovinsky, a ‘conciliator’, arrived in late 1903, we refused to allow him to join the committee, particularly as Alekseyev also had by this time declared himself a ‘conciliator’. ‘Max Hochberg began to lean towards Menshevism, and Bogomolets also began to show faint ‘conciliatory’ tendencies, although he only broke with Bolshevism much later.
I was organiser for the district of Moldavanka-Kamenolomny-Peresyp, and later for the port as well. The organisation had at first very few contacts but they gradually increased to the point where there was a group in almost every factory. I myself established contacts in Peresyp where I found work as a labourer. Our activity was particularly intense in Kamenolomny, where during the winter I succeeded in organising mass demonstrations of up to several hundred workers. In the port I distributed large quantities of literature among steamship crews in late 1903 so that they could pass them to the soldiers leaving for the Far East, obviously in anticipation of the war with Japan. I left Odessa in January 1904 when the police began to show much greater interest in my movements.
I went to Kiev and arrived in the aftermath of wholesale arrests. Following a meeting with the Krzhizhanovsky’s, I noticed that the police were on my heels, and I set off for Ekaterinoslav, arriving on the day when war was declared with Japan. There, too, arrests had decimated the committee before my arrival and our activities were hindered by lack of funds. The liberal bourgeoisie, which until then had contributed material support, now took up the patriotic cause and gave money to the official Red Cross instead of the revolutionary one. But the workers willingly made collections, the organisation was re-established and the publication of anti-war proclamations went on apace. We fought a hectic struggle to prevent the Mensheviks from spreading their propaganda among the workers, but by means of discussions and debates we were able to paralyse their attempts. In view of the fact that Lenin was isolated abroad and had been forced to concede the editorship of Iskra to Plekhanov and Martov, we decided to summon a conference of southern Bolshevik committees. I was elected to attend but was arrested on my departure from Ekaterinoslav. Our initiative only bore fruit later when the southern and northern conferences of Bolsheviks formed the BKB (the Bureau of Bolshevik Committees, which summoned the third Party Congress in May 1906).
From Ekaterinoslav I was exiled for five years to the Kem area of Archangel province, since exile to Yakutsk had been temporarily halted by the war. On the way to Kem I again escaped, this time from Snega. But neither in Yaroslavl nor in Moscow could I communicate with the local organisations as a result of arrests.
I returned to Odessa and found many new faces on the committee. There were also many new Party members who were grossly underworked, and on the periphery there was strong dissatisfaction with the leadership. In my district I managed to weld all the available members into a single, effective, amicable unit. But soon I was sent by the Odessa Committee as a delegate to the third Party Congress (my pseudonym in the record was ‘Shchensky’).
After the Congress, I was directed by the CC to the St Petersburg Committee, where I was firstly organiser for the Nevsky district, then Committee Secretary, and finally I was entrusted with the establishment of an organisation of armed workers.
A resolution of the third Congress had ordered ‘the preparation of an armed rising’ and ‘the arming of the workers’. In fact, preparations for an armed struggle remained on an ideological, propagandistic and agitational plane. No actual preparations had taken place. Following my report, the St Petersburg Committee recognised the importance of practical steps. The organisation was to consist of detachments of armed workers with as many members from all the factory circles as there were arms—that is the whole organisation was to be put on a military footing. I ensured that each district had its own organiser, its own basic combat unit of eight to ten men and its own cache of weapons, in addition to the central arms dump. A series of lectures was arranged on the techniques and tactics of barricade-building and street-fighting. But our preparations came up against an insurmountable obstacle. Having burst through the dykes of police control, the mass of the workers would only listen to words of revolution and demanded that the Party should respond. Agitation was the most vital question of the day, and it drew all our strength. The St Petersburg Committee gave way to their demands and subordinated everything to agitation. I considered that this would wreck our preparations for an armed rising and after many heated arguments announced my resignation from the committee, handing over my work to Bur (the elder Essen).
All this occurred immediately before the Manifesto of October 1905. The CC had just received news from the Riga Committee that a rising was planned in the Ust-Dvinsk fortress with the aim of seizing it. In view of this, the CC directed me to Riga with instructions to verify the state of affairs. On closer examination, the whole idea turned out to be merely the product of revolutionary impatience. At the end of December 1905 I was compelled to leave Riga during the White Terror to avoid the intensive searches being carried out for me after a lecture which Mark had arranged for me to give on the tactics of street-fighting to armed workers. The building where the meeting was being held had been surrounded by troops. Mark and a large number of workers were caught, but I and some others managed to escape by the skin of our teeth. I was later told that I had been sentenced to death in my absence for my part in this.
From Riga I went via St Petersburg to Yaroslavl, where I was arrested quite by accident. The police found on me my resolutions for the planned conference of northern committees and I was exiled for five years to the area of Turukhansk. On the way, after leaving Yeniseysk, I escaped and remained to work in Krasnoyarsk. Here, incidentally, I led an electoral campaign for the second Duma, and after the last meeting, I was arrested in the street. The authorities failed to bring the case to court and I was again exiled to Turukhansk for five years. This time I did not escape until reaching Turukhansk, whence I had to cover nearly 800 miles up the Yenisey by boat and on foot.
Arriving in St Petersburg in October 1907, I found the committee there in a crisis. To all intents and purposes, the split with the Mensheviks had already happened, but in November 1907 there still took place a joint Party Conference in Helsinki, at which I represented the Siberian Union. Already there were indications of the intelligentsia’s drift away from the movement, as well as other signs of a new phase. I worked as organiser for the Rozhdestvensky district and, ‘to exploit legal opportunities’, as a member of the administrative board of the ‘Truzhenik’ co-operative, I edited trade union journals and attended legal All-Russian Congresses on co-operatives and factory medicine (under the name ‘G. G. Ermolaev’).
In summer 1908 I was driven abroad by the increased attentions of the police and I spent one and a half months in Geneva. Amongst Bolsheviks there had appeared the tendencies of ‘otzovism’ and ‘ultimatism’ which, like ‘liquidationism’, had to be overcome, and so I was dispatched to Moscow. After a short time as district organiser, I was arrested with the Central Trade Union Bureau, on which I sat as the Moscow Committee’s representative, and we were all put under administrative detention for three months. On my release it felt strange to have acquired through my arrest legal validity for my illegal passport.
After this, the struggle with ‘otzovism’ and ‘ultimatism’ became more difficult. I worked first as district organiser and then as Committee Secretary. Conditions continued to deteriorate with the hasty desertion of the intelligentsia—not a week went by without an activist or two deserting the cause, moving to another town, returning to study for a diploma, etc. etc. The workers held fast, but provocations thinned their ranks. Every day it became harder to find a room to use as a hideout or as a secret address, now that the ‘intelligentsia’ to a man was refusing assistance. The printing of appeals became extremely difficult for lack of funds. The students and young people who had stored and distributed material had scattered at the first puff of wind. The organisation was maintained only through the superhuman efforts of remaining militants.
Besides carrying on the struggle for Bolshevism in Moscow and campaigning in the elections for the Bolshevik Conference, I toured the Urals and gave reports. I did not succeed in arranging a Urals conference; nor was there a chance of drawing any local Party workers to the full Conference. I myself, therefore, received a mandate to represent the Urals at the Conference on condition that I should return afterwards to make a report on its proceedings. As is well known, at the Paris Conference of Bolsheviks the otzovisty and ultimatisty (Bogdanov, Aleksinsky and Volsky) parted company with us. The practice of exploiting both legal and semi-legal opportunities was officially approved. However, I could not pursue those tactics personally: during my tour of the Urals I barely escaped arrest and on arrival in St Petersburg I was soon betrayed by the agent provocateur Serova.
I was again administratively exiled, this time to the Vilyuisk area of Yakutsk province, whence I returned only at the end of 1913 to St Petersburg where, at the suggestion of the Party publishing house Priboy (Krestinsky, Stuchka, Donskoy, etc.), I accepted the editorship of the insurance journal Voprosy Strakhovaniya and the leadership of the ‘Workers’ Insurance Group’. After the CC Plenum of December 1913 and the removal of Bogdanov from the editorial board of Pravda, I took his place, joining Olminsky and K. N. Samoylova. With Kamenev’s arrival, the board was reconstituted to consist of Kamenov, Olminsky and myself. From mid-June 1914, after the departure of Olminsky and Kamenev, the editorship fell on me alone during the crucial days of the growing general strike in Petrograd. In early July the strikers took to the barricades. I was arrested in the offices of Pravda on, I think, 8 July 1914, when the government smashed all workers’ organisations and publications on the eve of war. A court case was planned but the authorities were evidently reluctant to exhibit the absence of ‘social peace’ at home in wartime (this was before the arrest of our Duma deputies). Therefore the Pravda case was settled administratively: I received a sentence of five years (or until the end of the war, I cannot remember exactly) in the Angarsk area, which was changed to exile in Morshansk, Tambov province.
From the very beginning of the imperialist war I adopted a resolutely revolutionary position. For the first months I was housed in a communal cell in the Spasskaya Chast in Petrograd with several dozen workers, leading militants and other comrades: amongst them I can now recall I. I. Kiselev and A. S. Enukidze. At our numerous meetings we elaborated our tactics and attitude towards the war. They were expressed in public by the Duma ‘fraction’ of the Party and were identical with Lenin’s own theses which we subsequently received. Hostility towards the war and both warring coalitions, the position of a ‘third force’ making deals with neither imperialist camp, the goals of a proletarian rising, the overthrow of bourgeois power and a socialist revolution: these were the main points of the resolution which I elaborated and saw adopted by roughly 150 revolutionary activists, who were later scattered throughout the country by the government and obviously served as propagandists for such ideas.
In Morshansk I lived under police supervision throughout the war until the Revolution. With the help of an old comrade from the Odessa Committee, K. I. Levitsky, I managed to find work in a bank, first as a ledger clerk and than as assistant book-keeper. During the war I did not succeed in making contact with the workers, apart from a few individuals, and only in the last months before the Revolution did I organise two small circles on the railways and in a textile factory.
My work after February, like that of every Party member who participated in all the events of the revolutionary struggle, was so closely bound up with the Revolution that if I were to describe it, I would have to write about the Revolution itself. Consequently, I will mention only a few of the tasks that devolved upon me.
In June 1917 I travelled to Petrograd. The CC directed me to work on the Petrograd Central Council of Factory Committees, and I was elected by them to the VTsIK of the first and second convocations, as well as to the ‘Pre-Parliament’. At the sixth Party Congress I was one of the delegates of the Petrograd organisation and was elected a candidate CC member.
During the ‘Kornilov days’, I was a member of the ‘Defence Committee’ and supervised the distribution of a large number of arms to the workers. At the time of the October Revolution, I had a seat on the Military-Revolutionary Committee and, incidentally, took part in the battle at Pulkovo.
After October I joined the commission entrusted with the organisation of VSNKh and the formulation of its first statutes. I was summoned to the Ukraine by the first All-Ukrainian Congress of Soviets, where I was elected People’s Secretary for Labour, and then also Secretary for Trade and Industry. In January 1918 I arranged the first All-Ukrainian Conference of Peasants’ Delegates in Kharkov. After the seizure of Kiev by German troops, the Conference of Soviet Representatives in Poltava elected me President of the Government of Workers and Peasants of the Ukraine, and People’s Secretary for Foreign Affairs. This was confirmed at the second All-Ukrainian Congress of Soviets in Ekaterinoslav in March 1918. At the last session of the Ukrainian TsIK in Taganrog in April 1918 I was elected to the People’s Insurrectionary Secretariat, and at the Party Conference there I was elected a member and Secretary of the KPU Orgburo which was created to summon the first Party Congress. At the latter, I was elected candidate CC member, and in December 1918 I entered the CC as a full member. Also in 1918, the CC directed me to work in the Vecheka where I became a Collegium member and Head of the Department for the Struggle against Counter-Revolution. In January I rejoined the Ukrainian government as People’s Commissar for State Control. I was a Ukrainian Party delegate to the first Congress of the Comintern. Then I was given special plenary powers by the Defence Council to deal with the insurrectionary division of the Ataman Zelyony on the right bank of the Dnieper. After the retreat from Kiev I was at first Head of the Political Department of the Gomel fortified district, and then, during Party mobilisation, Head of the Special Section of the South-Eastern (Caucasus) Front.
In April 1920 I returned to the Ukraine and was elected People’s Secretary for Rabkrin. Then I became People’s Commissar for Ukrainian Internal Affairs, and Presidium member of both the All-Ukrainian and AU-Union TsIK. Since the beginning of 1922 I have been People’s Commissar for Justice in the Ukraine. At the present time, I am a candidate CC member of the VKP, and a Politburo member of the Ukrainian Party.1
As a Ukrainian Communist, Skrypnik was one of the major figures in that group of old Bolsheviks who waged a bitter fight during the 1920s against the tendency towards centralisation and russification. His seniority in Bolshevik ranks and his knowledge of theory gave him great authority in the Party. Having joined the revolutionary movement at a young age, he remained convinced all his life that only communism could bring about the social and national emancipation of his native Ukraine.2 A professional revoluntionary and a comrade of Lenin from earliest times, he had been arrested fifteen times and sentenced in all to thirty years’ prison and seven years’ administrative exile.
Skrypnik possessed great intellectual curiosity and acquired by his own efforts a considerable knowledge of Marxism. He was a member of the editorial board of Pravda in 1914, and after 1917 turned out to be a prolific publicist, propagandist and writer. The bibliography of his works contains some 270 titles of books, brochures, and articles on the most diverse subjects. His complex personality also found expression in political activity. He was sent to Petrograd by the Central Committee and got there early in June 1917. He was on the Bolshevik general staff and played a substantial part in organising the armed insurrection.
At the historic meeting of the Central Committee on 16 [NS 29] October 1917, Skrypnik was an ardent supporter of Lenin’s resolution on the immediate seizure of power by the Bolsheviks. He opposed Kamenev in violent terms: ‘We are spending too much time talking when action is called for. We are responsible to the masses, they know we are committing a crime if we give them nothing. The preparation of an insurrection and an appeal to the masses are necessary.’1
He was an active participant in the uprising, and was a member of the Petrograd RVS. After that he found himself entrusted with extremely diverse tasks, among them the establishment of the repressive machinery of Soviet power, and took an active part in suppressing the left-wing SR insurrection in Moscow in the summer of 1918. He was a political commissar in the Army, the Ukrainian Defence Committee’s plenipotentiary during the Civil War, one of the artisans of Soviet power in his homeland, and, up to January 1919, the head of the first Bolshevik government of the Ukraine.
Skrypnik was a founder member of the Ukrainian Communist Party and leader of the faction which demanded that Lenin’s principle of self-determination should be applied to ensure the independence of a socialist Ukraine. For several years he was obliged to wage a fierce, often desperate struggle against the left-wing communists, who supported Pyatakov, had a majority in the Central Committee, and were utterly opposed to his position. Skrypnik and his friends, removed from power by the left-wing communists in 1919–20, only gained control of the Ukrainian party after a struggle full of dramatic twists, and thanks to Lenin’s support and the intervention of the Moscow Central Committee. During this period Skrypnik, who had to hold his position against the left communists, drew closer to Stalin. From 1921, he sat once again on the Ukrainian Communist Party’s Central Committee, and enjoyed an influence well beyond the power of his nominal position. From January 1919, he was People’s Commissar at the State Control Commission, then at the Rabkrin, and from July 1921 Commissar for the Interior; from 1922 to 1927 he was both Commissar for Justice and Director of Public Prosecution for the Ukraine. From 1929, he was also on the Ukrainian Politburo. He also took part in the work of the Comintern, of which he could consider himself to be one of the founders. He was a delegate at all its congresses, and was elected in 1928 as a member of IKKI.
Skrypnik was a convinced communist and a ceaseless defender of the Ukraine’s national rights. In 1922, during the great debate that preceded the creation of the USSR, he came into open conflict with Stalin. Together with the head of his government, Rakovsky, he rejected Stalin’s concept of a centralised State, which he considered alien to communism, and demanded the application of confederate principles.1 Skrypnik became the leader of the faction opposed to the centralising tendencies, and waged his battle inside the Constitutional Committee, on which he was the Ukrainian representative, and then in the Council of Nationalities of the USSR, where he was a deputy before becoming President in 1927. This battle resulted in a temporary victory, for in 1923 there was in fact a Ukrainianisation of the State machine, of the Party and of cultural institutions. At the start of NEP, Skrypnik collaborated faithfully with the Moscow leadership. In the Party’s internal conflicts, he first adopted a neutral position, and then moved to the support of Stalin in the struggle against the left opposition and then the United Opposition.
After the appointment of Kaganovich as secretary of the Ukrainian CP in 1925, the policy of russification recommenced. A whole group of Ukrainian communists, headed by the People’s Commissar for Education, Shumsky, were eliminated in 1927: they were accused of nationalism, having fought against the predominance of Russian communists in the Ukrainian party. Kaganovich’s policy, inspired by Stalin, gave rise to sharp objections—but Stalin, eager to gain the support of the Ukrainian communists in his struggle against the right-wing allies he wanted to get rid of, had Kaganovich dismissed. According to Bukharin, Stalin managed to ‘buy the Ukrainians’, including Skrypnik, by this manoeuvre and in October 1927 the latter was appointed People’s Commissar for Education of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic. Remaining faithful to his beliefs, Skrypnik made great efforts to develop a national Ukrainian culture: with skill and energy he fought for his policy of Ukrainianisation on two fronts—against russification on the one side, and against the Ukrainian nationalists on the other. He adopted Stalin’s line on a culture national in form but proletarian in content. This he considered to be a Leninist and internationalist principle. His policies in the field of education resulted in the eradication of illiteracy and a raising of standards at all levels. He carried out his policies with caution and realism. His work gained the approval of the eleventh Congress of the UCP (1930), which none the less demanded, on Stalin’s instigation, the strengthening of the struggle against local Ukranian nationalist tendencies. In conditions that became thenceforth extremely difficult, Skrypnik continued in his efforts against the policy of russification.
In February 1933 he was stripped of his post as Commissar for Education and appointed Vice-President of the Council of People’s Commissars and President of the Ukrainian Gosplan. This was but the prelude to a vast campaign against him and against his policies. Stalin’s suspicions manifested themselves, and Skrypnik was accused of nationalism. He became a kind of scapegoat for the difficulties created in the Ukraine by forced collectivisation. In despair, Skrypnik committed suicide on 7 July 1933. This act wrought havoc within the Party, but gave the press a pretext for launching a massive campaign against Skrypnik. Pravda commented on his suicide in very harsh terms, declaring that ‘comrade Skrypnik has fallen victim to bourgeois nationalist elements which gained his confidence and exploited his name for their own nationalist and antisemitic ends’. Within a short while, the accusations were even more direct: he was termed a ‘degenerate nationalist’, and considered the leader of a broad nationalistic deviation.
He was rehabilitated after 1957 and Mykola Skrypnik became once again the ‘Party’s soldier’.1
G.H.
(autobiography)
I was born in 1892 in Livonia into an enlightened family of land-owning farmers. My parents were both highly intellectual. I can remember my father’s endless tales from Greek mythology, which he greatly admired. In his political convictions, he can be classed as a democrat.
My revolutionary consciousness was awakened in 1901 by Karpovich’s shot at the Minister of Education, Bogolepov. The years 1901–3 were a watershed in my development. However strange it may seem, despite the extremely liberal and free-thinking atmosphere at home, I held strong religious and monarchist views until the age of nine or ten. I remember that after Bogolepov’s assassination, it was like a holiday in our family, to which I alone was impervious. The murder of a minister by students seemed to me quite insane. But as I had been an extremely rational being from birth, and was subject to the influence of social democratic students at the time, I soon discarded the beliefs inculcated in me by a few booklets I had read. By 1904–5 I was already a convinced atheist and a supporter of revolution. Events in our area and our family considerably hastened my further evolution. My father moved further to the left at the same time as the rest of society and played an extremely prominent role in the revolutionary events. At the end of 1905, during the abolition of the rural administrative boards, he was elected Chairman of the Revolutionary Administrative Committee for our district. In 1906 he was executed by a punitive expedition of the Tsarist government. In January 1907, whilst a ‘modern’ school pupil, I joined the Social Democratic Party. It was during my student years (ending in 1909) that my Marxist outlook was finally formed.
My first clash with the police came in 1907 when I was searched and detained for a few hours in connection with the celebration of May Day. I was arrested for the second time in 1910 on Theatre Square in Moscow at a student demonstration against the death penalty on the occasion of the death of Leo Tolstoy. After one month in custody, I was released. In spring 1911 I conducted underground Party work in the Lefortovo district. In July of the same year I was rearrested, and after three months in custody I was deported to Vologda province for three years. Returning from there in 1914, after the outbreak of war, I immediately joined the Petrograd RSDRP(b) Committee and was active until May 1915 when I was again arrested and exiled to the district of Yeniseysk for three years. I returned from there only after the February Revolution.
Almost five years of exile were for me a real university. While in exile, besides studying the history and tactics of our Party, I mainly applied myself to political economy and philosophy. At that time I conceived of my future Party work in terms of propaganda. In fact, things turned out completely differently. At the Party Conference in April 1917 I was elected to the CC, where I remained until 1920. During the October Revolution I was Chairman of the Regional Committee of Russian Soviets in Finland, and in this capacity took the most active part in the overthrow of the Provisional government. In early 1918 I participated in the Finnish revolution.1 With the outbreak of the Civil War, I was entrusted with military work by the CC.
As a member of the RVS, I commanded armies and fronts in the struggle against the Czechs, Denikin, the Poles and Wrangel. At the end of the Civil War, I moved to economic work. From 1921 to 1923 I was Deputy Chairman of VSNKh and Head of the Main Fuel Directorate. In Autumn 1923 I was appointed Deputy Chairman of the Gosplan of the USSR.
The youngest of the leaders of the 1917 Revolution, Smilga was already an ‘Old Bolshevik’ at that date, despite his youth. At the age of twenty-five, in April 1917, he was elected to the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party. He played a big part in preparing the October insurrection: he was President of the Finland soviets, a member of the restricted Central Committee formed in August 1917, the Central Committee’s delegate (with Uritsky) on the Petrograd committee, and, most important of all, the Party organiser in the vital Baltic fleet, all the vessels of which came under his control. Within the Central Committee he belonged to the small group of Lenin’s men of confidence, who supported the leader in all circumstances and with no reservations. A confidant of Lenin one the eve of the insurrection, and convinced of the need for immediate action, Smilga incited Lenin towards it and assured him of the determination of the sailors in the Baltic fleet and of the Finnish army. His Red sailors played a decisive role in the overthrow of the Provisional government.
In 1918 his loyalty to Lenin remained absolute in the debate on Brest-Litovsk. He was a man of action who helped lead the revolution in Finland, and gained distinction in the various posts he held during the Civil War.
At that time he was one of Trotsky’s most hostile opponents, and the subjects of disagreement were numerous. In December 1918 there was a violent conflict between Smilga and the Commissar for War. With Lashevich, Smilga carried the accusations of the left-wing communists –that Trotsky had given commands in the Red Army to former Tsarist officers, that he had put communists and commissars before the firing squad – to the Central Committee. A few months later, he supported the appointment of Sergey Kamenev as commander-in-chief—as did Stalin, and against Trotsky’s will. In May 1919 he replaced some of Trotsky’s friends on the reorganised Revolutionary War Council. As the situation on the Western Front grew more serious, and the conflict between Trotsky and commander-in-chief Kamenev took on larger dimensions, the Politburo supported the latter and sent Smilga and Lashevich to the Ukraine. Smilga drew closer to Stalin for a time, but the Vistula débacle precipitated a fundamental change in their relationship.
During the Polish campaign of 1920, Smilga was on the Council for the Eastern Front, and was political commissar for Tukhachevsky’s army—while Stalin fulfilled the same role in the other army under Yegorov. At the end of this disastrous campaign he declared himself openly to be an enemy of Stalin. Seeking to justify his own acts and the fatal delay of the First Cavalry Army, Stalin had tried to make Smilga the culprit of the defeat. At the tenth Congress of the Russian CP Stalin accused Smilga of having deceived the Central Committee by ‘promising to take Warsaw on a given date’ and by thus falsifying the entire picture. Smilga gave his riposte at the Congress in two printed documents on the situation. Trotsky came to his help, accusing Stalin of being responsible for the defeat by his failure to carry out directives from the commander-in-chief. The Congress did not clear up these questions. Smilga had been demoted to candidate membership of the Central Committee at the ninth Congress, and at the tenth, despite his prominence at the time, he was not re-elected at all.
Banished from the political scene, Smilga devoted himself to a new field, the economy, in which he rapidly won a high reputation. He was re-elected to candidate membership of the Central Committee at the eleventh Congress, then at the fourteenth Congress in 1925 to full membership, occupying positions of high responsibility in the Plan Commission, of which he became Vice-President. He became Secretary to the Supreme Sovnarkhoz, then Rector of the Plekhanov Institute for Economics; he wrote several technical works on economics which were notorious at the time.
Smilga took an active part in the Party’s internal struggles. He belonged to Zinoviev’s group, then became one of the heads of the United Opposition. On the eve of the fifteenth Congress in 1927 he helped draw up the economic part of the opposition platform, and together with Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev started agitation in the working-class areas of Leningrad and Moscow. Smilga was violently opposed to Stalin and Bukharin, whom he termed ‘political bankrupts’. He wrote a long letter concerning the ‘Declaration of the 83’ to the Politburo and to Pravda refuting the allegations that the Trotskyite opposition was disintegrating and claiming that ‘the opposition is a mass movement within the Party’.1 One week after the opposition demonstration on 7 November, for which he was mainly responsible in Moscow, he was expelled from the Central Committee. This ‘fair-haired intellectual… with spectacles, goatee, and thinning front hair, ordinary to look at and distinctly the armchair sort’,2 was also a fighter, a first-class agitator and mass leader: he showed these qualities on many occasions. A determined and indomitable opposition leader, he was rightly considered by Stalin to be one of the most dangerous men in the United Opposition. When it was dismantled in December 1927, after the fifteenth Congress, Smilga was removed to Khabarovsk in eastern Siberia, on the right bank of the Amur river. When he was exiled, thousands of oppositionists demonstrated outside the Yaroslav station in protest against this administrative exile: that was ‘Smilga’s farewell’.
When Stalin broke with the right wing and changed his economic policies, Smilga joined Radek and Preobrazhensky at the head of a conciliation group which repudiated Trotsky and requested readmission to the Party. Returning from Minusinsk, where he had been exiled, Smilga, who had devoted himself entirely to economic issues, was arrested in 1932, refused to confess to anything, was sentenced to five years’ prison and disappeared in a concentration camp: according to some sources, he may have died in 1937.
G.H.
(autobiography)
I was born into a peasant family in Ryazan province. When I was roughly two, our family was ruined by a fire. My father went to work in Moscow and died there a year later. Then my mother went to Moscow to work as a domestic servant. I was eight years old before I was taken to join her there. In Moscow I went to a municipal school and then found work on the railways and in a factory. In 1898 I first became acquainted with SD literature and began to meet a few students who engaged in propaganda, whilst at the factory I came across the two or three workers who remained from the organisation smashed in 1896. We formed a workers’ self-education circle with roughly fifteen members, of whom three to my knowledge have remained in the Party.
In 1899 I was arrested for the first time, held for roughly two years and then deported to Irkutsk province for five years. After eight months, however, I escaped. The CC Party Bureau, which at that time was in Pskov, sent me to work in Tver province. The local committee directed me to Vyshny Volochek where there were roughly 10,000 workers with whom it had no contact, and I found a job as a labourer at the Pros-kuryakov tannery. I worked there for nearly six months. I managed to establish a following in the Prokhorov and Ryabushinsky works, both large factories, but just when the work was beginning to go well, I was denounced by Sladkov, a worker dismissed from the Ryabushinsky factory. I was arrested, and the man sent by the Tver Committee to take my place was also quickly caught. Nevertheless, on May Day 1904, proclamations were distributed in Vyshny Volochek and a small strike took place.
I spent two years in prison. Then I was tried for spreading propaganda (this was already 1905), and, moreover, our case was heard in Moscow two days after the massacre in St Petersburg on 9 January. I was sentenced to one year in a fortress, but the court took into account my preliminary detention and set me free. Since my administrative exile was still not completed, the police made a search for me. At this time I began to work for the Moscow Committee as organiser for the Lefortovo district. In March I was rearrested. It was intended that I should go back to exile in Irkutsk province, but the Trans-Siberian railway was fully occupied with ferrying troops for the Russo-Japanese war, and I was sent instead to Vologda province. On the way I contracted typhus and arrived in exile three months before the strike of October 1905. The amnesty that followed this strike freed me from the rest of my sentence.
I returned to Moscow and resumed my activities. During the armed insurrection I was organiser for the Blagusha sub-district in the Lefortovo district. But as I heavily compromised myself during these days, I had to leave Blagusha once the rising had been crushed, and I moved to the railway district.
I remained in Moscow until 1909 when I was again accused of organising the distribution of banned literature—at this time I was working in the Moscow Committee’s bookshop. The charge could not be substantiated with evidence, however, and it was dismissed. In 1909 I was banished from Moscow and went to St Petersburg. I worked for the Committee there as organiser for the Peterburgskaya Storona district. In June 1910 I was betrayed by the agent provocateur Bryandinsky and after a short spell in custody I was deported to the area of Narym, where I remained for eighteen months. Then I learnt that I might be moved from Narym to the Turukhansk region. So I escaped with a group of comrades who were all threatened with the same fate. After my escape I worked in Rostov and Kharkov.
In 1913 I managed to unite the two separate groups of Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in Kharkov, and I was active there until July. Then the organisation was penetrated by two skilful provocateurs (Sigaev and Rudov), and I was arrested. I was sent to Narym, and moreover was sentenced to six months imprisonment for a trivial matter (a demonstration). After I had served this sentence, I was mistakenly released at the prison gates and I escaped to Krasnoyarsk. When I had received good identity papers, I returned to Moscow.
There, at the beginning of the war, a group of comrades and I attempted to resurrect the local organisation, but after six months I was arrested on information from the agent provocateur Poskrebukhin, and deported back to Narym. The case could not be brought to trial for lack of compromising documents.
I remained in Narym until 1916 when I was pressed into the Tsarist army. The exiles who were called up discussed whether they ought to obey the call or escape, although the latter would have been very difficult. They decided to join, but with the aim of agitating against the war. In Narym a committee was chosen for our future military organisation and I was included in it. Immediately on arrival in Tomsk, we contacted the local organisation. With money received from Moscow, we equipped an underground printing-press and set to work. Our military organisation had very great success and, as far as I know, it was the only one existing at that time. It involved up to two hundred soldiers in Tomsk and a large number in Novonikolaevsk. Proclamations were distributed throughout Siberia. A provocateur, Tsvetkov, joined the committee and, as was later revealed during the February Revolution, he was awaiting a suitable moment for betrayal, but events forestalled him. The military union lost only one comrade, Nakhanovich, who worked on the printing-press and subsequently perished in Kolchak’s jail. Our union played a very important role in the February uprising. During it I was a member of the Executive Committee of Soldiers’ Deputies. In August I left for Moscow where, on the suggestion of the local committee and the Bureau of the Central Region, I founded the Party publication Volna.
At the outbreak of Civil War, the CC sent me to Kazan. There I was appointed member of the RVS on the Eastern Front. In December 1919 I changed from military work to conspiratorial activity in the enemy’s rear, for which I joined the newly formed CC Siberian Bureau. Subsequently, in the aftermath of the defeat of the Fifth Army, I was appointed to its RVS, combining this with my other work. After the defeat of Kolchak, I was made Chairman of the Siberian Revolutionary Committee. In 1921 I was transferred to Party work in Petrograd where I was Secretary of the local committee and the North-Western Regional Bureau of the CC. After six months in these positions, I worked for a year in the VSNKh where I was in charge of the armaments industry. Then I was appointed to the People’s Commissariat for Trade and Industry.
In all I spent roughly six years in prison and never completed a sentence of banishment, although I did spend roughly four years in exile.
First and foremost, Ivan Smirnov was the man of the Fifth Army, the army which repulsed Kolchak and the Czech Legion on the Eastern Front, liberated Siberia and managed to absorb an enormous army of peasant partisans. He was a member of the Eastern Front RVS, then a member of the Fifth Army RVS and President of the Siberian Bureau, which operated clandestinely in Siberia under Kolchak’s occupation. Subsequently, in 1921 and 1922, Smirnov ran the war industries. Elected to alternate membership of the Central Committee in March 1919, and to full membership in April 1920, he joined Trotsky’s platform on the union question, and was only re-elected to alternate membership in March 1921. In 1922, he lost his position on the Central Committee altogether and for good.
Later on, a member of the Marxist-Leninist Institute recalled that at a preparatory meeting before the twelfth Congress, Ivan Smirnov’s name was put to Lenin for the secretaryship of the Party. Smirnov had just lost the secretaryship of the Petrograd organisation (replaced by Uglanov) and had been transferred to Siberia. Lenin, according to the story, hesitated before replying, ‘Ivan Smirnov is essential in Siberia’.
He was signatory to the ‘Declaration of the 46’, Commissar for Posts from 1923 to 1927, leader of the United Opposition, and was expelled from the Party in 1927 before being exiled to Siberia. Smirnov was scarcely an ‘ideologist’, but he was greedy for action. ... He rallied to Stalin at the end of the summer of 1929: he could not watch ‘the building of socialism’ without having a part in it, even if he rejected some of its methods. But disillusionment was quick to come. In 1932 he entrusted Leon Sedov with an unsigned article for the Byulleten Oppozitsii. A few months later, early in 1933, he was arrested by the police in connection with the Ryutin affair. In August 1936, he was among the defendants at the first Moscow Trial, and ‘confessed’ to having participated in the assassination of Kirov, even though he was in prison at the time. Sentenced to death like the other fifteen defendants, he refused to sign his appeal for pardon out of anger at having been led to make incriminating confessions. …
Larissa Reisner wrote of him thus: ‘Outside any rank or right, Smirnov was the incarnation of the revolutionary ethic, he was the highest moral criterion of the communist consciousness at Sviyazhsk. Comrade Smirnov’s exceptional purity and probity imposed themselves even on the mass of non-party soldiers and on the communists who had not known him before.’ He had a gentle sense of humour which pierces through his few written works, and even more in an anecdote told by Victor Serge. Dismissed from the People’s Commissariat for Posts in 1927, Smirnov commented: ‘It would do us all good to go back to the ranks for a while’—and being penniless went to the Labour Exchange where he registered as an unemployed precision machinist. On his card under the heading ‘Last job held’ he wrote ‘People’s Commissar for Posts’. Serge adds: ‘For the younger generation he incarnated the idealism of his Party, without rhetoric or embroidery.’ Smirnov’s name is still omitted from republications of contemporary texts. He has not yet been allowed back onto the General Staff or the RVS of the Fifth Army, which, without Rosengolts or Smirnov, look rather skeletal. …
J.-J. M.
(autobiography)
I was born on 15 August 1888 in Romny, a provincial town of Poltava province, where my father worked as a doctor on the Libau-Romny railway. I learnt to read at the age of five. After my family’s removal to Moscow, I entered the Fifth Classical Gymnasium there which retained the teaching of Latin and Greek in its curriculum. As a Jew, I was forced to endure persecution from the Gymnasium authorities. ‘Classical’ studies drove me into self-education circles which were then flourishing like mushrooms, and which spontaneously developed into political circles. In the latter, the youthful supporters of the proletariat were sorted into the categories of sheep and goats by the conditions of the rapidly growing revolutionary movement (1903–5).
After reading Populist and Marxist literature I joined the Moscow Marxist circles (and was particularly close to that of M. Lunts and Narkirier), where the basic legal Marxist books were carefully studied, and illegal journals and pamphlets were read regularly. Foreign literature, delivered to me for safe keeping at home, introduced me to the theoretical and tactical disagreements then being discussed in the SD press abroad. At clandestine parties I had arguments with young SRs and Tolstoyans (S. Durylin and Gusev). Among the first underground activists I knew was Loginov (Anton), through whom I made contact with the Moscow Bolshevik Committee. In 1905 I joined its organisation, directed the SD student movement, and participated in the December insurrection. In connection with the youth movement, I often met M. N. Pokrovsky, N. N. Rozhkov, Mitskevich and Tseytlin. I based my decision to join the Bolsheviks rather than the Mensheviks largely on my assessment of their attitudes towards the role of the proletariat in the democratic revolution and participation in a provisional government.
In spring 1906 I joined the group of propagandists in the Gorodskoy district, being active mainly among printing workers. Then I worked in Sokolniki district, at first as propagandist among the weavers and later as a member of the district committee—as organiser, agitator and propagandist. After this, I worked in the Moscow Committee’s ‘Military-Technical Bureau’, the centre for the detachments of armed Bolshevik workers. My acquaintance with ‘Viktor’ (Taratut), ‘Bur’ (Essen), and ‘Mark’ (Lyubimov) can be dated from this time. I had a particularly close working relationship with ‘Vlas’ (Likhachov). In the bureau I was linked with ‘Semyon Semyonovich’ (Kostitsyn) and ‘Erot’ (P. K. Shternberg). Street meetings, mass demonstrations in forests, sudden appearances of Bolshevik orators in workers’ barracks, proclamations and primitive leaflets written and printed by workers—all this led to a threefold increase in shadowing by the police.
The Sokolniki organisation was crushed during the mass police arrests in Moscow in autumn 1907. After being arrested at a meeting surrounded by police, I spent a few days in the Sokolniki police station and was then transferred to the Butyrki prison, from where I was deported in February 1909. Until my transfer to solitary confinement, I was sent out to work with ordinary criminals and swept Dolgorukov Street, receiving the traditional kopecks from warm-hearted passers-by. Shortly before my departure for Siberia I was thrown into an underground punishment cell, clapped in irons and given convict status for a refusal to doff my hat when the prison governor walked past. I came before the court in autumn 1908, accused of belonging to the Sokolniki district SD(b) Committee (Article 102), and was sentenced to permanent exile. My eighteen months in solitary confinement were a time of systematic reading in economics, history and philosophy. For variety, I also played chess with my neighbours by knocking on the walls. Despite confiscation of the chess set, which was fashioned out of bread, and punishments for knocking, this game flourished. During these years, the regime in ‘solitary’ in the Butyrki was comparatively tolerable, the deterioration setting in only at the end of 1908. A hand written prison journal was produced by B. Plyusnin, and one of his most active colaborators was N. L. Meshcheryakov, who was awaiting trial with N. Sokolov and Veselov. Heated arguments about empiriomonism and dialectics were conducted in the prison bath-house, amidst thick steam, splashing water and clattering wooden bathtubs. The unsuccessful attempt of a maximalist expropriator to escape from the baths disguised as a warder led, however, to a revision of the charter of liberties allowed in the bath-house and a marked reduction in them.
After four months of wandering from one staging-post or transit jail to another, I was finally delivered to my place of exile, the village of Rybnoye on the Angara (Yeniseysk region). In the Krasnoyarsk transit jail I had met Ordzhonikidze, Erkomashvili and Shklovsky. By the Angara, polemical papers against the SRs and organisational meetings of exiles alternated with excursions into the taiga and the delivery of bark to a local merchant. With Shklovsky I escaped after six weeks in Rybnoye. I made my way via Moscow to Mariampol (near the Prussian border), and with the assistance of Stoklitsky escaped over the frontier. After settling in Paris in autumn 1909, I was entrusted by Lenin with managing the Proletary workers’ club. Emigré meetings took place at that time in the Russian library on the Avenue des Gobelins, where Lenin fulminated against the ‘liquidators’ and the otzovisty. I became acquainted with Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya in the editorial offices of the central organ Sotsial-Demokrat, where she usually collected painstaking information from new arrivals about events in Russia. I first saw Lenin at a meeting of the Paris Bolshevik group: it was the occasion of his report on the two possible paths of agrarian development in Russia. At this time reaction was at its height in Russia, but Lenin radiated invincible firmness and courage. He lived in a tiny flat on the Rue Marie-Rose, spent long hours in the Bibliothèque Nationale, and in the evening chatted with comrades in the small, sparkling kitchen over the simplest of suppers.
It was in Paris that I finished my courses for the Law Faculty and took my doctorate in economic sciences. When the split came after the CC plenum in spring 1910, I sided with the Bolshevik group that included ‘Mark’ (Lyubimov), ‘Lev’ (Vladimirov), ‘Lozovsky’ (Dridzo), and I helped with the group’s paper Za Partiyu. I met Plekhanov a couple of times while he was rallying around him the Menshevik ‘anti-liquidators’: the arrogance he showed could not hide the fact that he had already lost the ability to understand Russian affairs. Later, in Switzerland, I organised the Swiss Bureau of Émigré Groups and Bolshevik Party Members. After adopting an internationalist position from the first days of the war, I was active in the Swiss Socialist Party, collaborated on the internationalist newspaper Nashe Slovo, published in Paris and which Trostsky helped to edit, read reports on imperialism and the prospects for a socialist revolution in a number of Swiss towns and, supporting the Zimmerwald left after the conference there, drew closer to the position of the Bolshevik CC.
After the February Revolution I was among the first group of émigrés to leave for Russia—it included Lenin, Zinoviev, Radek, Kharitonov, Inessa Armand, Miringof, Lilin and Usnevich. The journey in the sealed train through Germany was filled with discussions of tactical platforms, but was done on an empty stomach—on principle we had decided to refuse the watery soup to which the German Red Cross was ready to treat us. Two delegates from the CC of the German SD Party who attempted to board the train to greet Lenin were forced to make a hasty retreat when they were presented with an ultimatum—they could either go away or be thrown out. This ultimatum was presented by Lenin without any rhetorical courtesy and had the desired effect. The news of the campaign of slander opened against him and his companions forced us to allow for the possibility that the Provisional government would attempt to arrest us as we crossed the Russian border. As a precaution (on Lenin’s suggestion), we agreed how to behave under interrogation.
In Petrograd I entered into discussions about common action with the leaders of the so-called Mezhrayonka—a group of internationalists and unifiers, with whom émigré Bolshevik groups had been in contact. This organisation, which subsequently was incorporated into the Bolshevik Party, spoke against an immediate merger at that time and this circumstance made an alliance impossible.
After leaving Petrograd for Moscow (in April 1917), I rejoined the Moscow organisation, which soon voted me on to its Committee and Regional Bureau. I was also a member of the Executive Committee of the Moscow Soviet. At this time I worked closely with Bukharin, V. M. Smirnov, Osinsky, Yakovleva, Bubnov, Stukov and Sapronov. Whilst still abroad I had spoken in favour of the seizure of power by the soviets and the first move towards the socialist revolution. Consequently I supported Lenin’s April Theses against that section of the Bolsheviks who at first opposed them. In the course of an agitational tour of the Moscow region, I was arrested by some officers in Kineshma, but was freed by soldiers from a reserve detachment there. I wrote an article for a collection published in Moscow—my contribution was called ‘On the Question of the Revision of the Party Programme’ and it advocated a reform of the principal part of the old (SD) programme.
At the fifth Congress1 I was elected to the CC and the editorial board of the central organ. With Stalin, I helped edit the papers that came out in place of Pravda after the ‘July days’—Rabochy i Soldat, Put Pravdy, Golos Pravdy (for these papers I wrote a number of editorials and other articles, as well as a review of the other press), and then Pravda again from the moment of the October Revolution. After the July defeat, Lenin thought a more or less prolonged period of counterrevolutionary violence against the masses was likely. He demanded the preparation of underground organs of the press and for a while considered the hopes of retaining legal Bolshevik papers to be illusory. The failure of the Kornilov putsch, however, changed the situation radically, for it showed that the active proletarian forces would enter battle only under Bolshevik leadership. The ‘Kornilov days’ were a kind of ‘rehearsal’ for October. On returning from hiding in Finland, Lenin led the revolutionary forces in a headlong assault. I was a member of the Petrograd Soviet Executive Committee and then of the Soviet TsIK. I belonged to the majority in the CC which voted with Lenin for a rising and carried it out. During the preparations for the insurrection, I was also elected to the newly formed Politburo. After October I was in-structed to go with the delegation to Brest-Litovsk to open negotiations for a cease-fire. On my return from there, I formulated the outline of a decree for the nationalisation of private banks, was in charge of the nationalisation itself and with a group of bankers (Tumanov, Basias, Kogan) reorganised and merged the banks. I participated in the ‘seizure’ of the State Bank and in its revolutionary reorganisation. And I was elected to the Constituent Assembly as one of the Bolshevik list of candidates.
In spring 1918 I made a second journey to Brest to head the Soviet delegation in the new negotiations over a cease-fire (after the breakdown of peace negotiations and renewed German attacks). We were authorised by the CC to accept the ultimatum of the German High Command and sign the peace treaty (also in the delegation were Chicherin, Ioffe and Karakhan). During the disagreements inside the CC over the resumption of negotiations and the declaration of our willingness to sign the peace, I supported Lenin’s position. There was of course, no certainty that the peace proposals would be accepted by the German government, and when the first words of the German reply agreeing to the resumption of talks appeared on the tape of the Hughes apparatus at dead of night, it was a complete surprise to everyone, particularly as the delay in replying, the continued movement of German troops and their capture of Pskov had made us more convinced with the passing of every hour that our initiative had failed.
The Soviet delegation, unable to reach Pskov by train following the destruction of the railway line, transferred to trolleys and then covered the final stage of the journey on foot. The commander of the advance troops, unaware of the resumption of negotiations, was greatly perplexed and at first did not know what to do with the delegation which had appeared in such a strange and unexpected fashion at dead of night. The German soldiers justified their attack by the alleged need to liberate neighbouring peoples from the Russian yoke. The departure of the delegation from Pskov for Brest attracted a hostile demonstration by a mass of local inhabitants who believed a malicious rumour that the delegation’s departure was only a cover for the escape of members of the Soviet government which had been overthrown in Russia. The German government announced that the advance would continue until the signing of the peace treaty. The peace delegation, however, did not have a mandate to hold lengthy discussions: in view of the complete defence-lessness of the front, the massive retreat of units of the old army for a hundred miles and more to the rear, and the weakness of organised Red detachments, resistance to the German ultimatum was impossible. Its terms were made even harsher by the inclusion at the last minute of new Turkish demands. On signing the peace, as head of our delegation (the head of the German delegation was von Rosenberg, subsequently Minister of Foreign Affairs), I made a speech in which, to the great indignation of the German generals present led by General Hoffmann, I gave a biting assessment of the German ultimatum and expressed my certainty that the triumph of imperialism over the land of the Soviets would be short-lived.
On my return from Brest, I moved to Moscow with the rest of the CC and resumed work on Pravda which had also been transferred to Moscow. In the pamphlet On the Question of Nationalising the Banks, I estimated the significance of their nationalisation and the future role of credit institutions. At the first All-Russian Congress of Sovnarkhozes (Councils of National Economy), I made a report on the bases of financial policy in the transitional period, rejecting a policy of the gradual abolition of money. I defended the same principles in articles in Narodnoye Khozyaistvo. In June I was included in the commission dispatched to Berlin to conclude economic and legal agreements arising out of the peace treaty. At the same time Krasin made a trip to Ludendorf’s headquarters to discuss the halting of the German troops’ advance on Baku. Ludendorf’s firm plan for the dismemberment of the Caucasus and Turkestan was frustrated by the landing of American troops in France, which created a new military situation and thwarted the schemes of the extreme right-wing German imperialists.
In Berlin I made reports at meetings of independent socialists and Spartakus circles. With Bukharin I visited Kautsky, but our conversations were rapidly abandoned in view of their obvious futility. After the assassination of Mirbach,1 negotiations with the German government were interrupted and the committee returned home. Back in Moscow, I reported to Lenin on the growth of the revolutionary movement in Germany, the rapid demoralisation of the army, and the soldiers’ mutinies.
Meanwhile the White Guard insurrection beyond the Volga, encouraged by the SR committee in the Constituent Assembly and supported by the Czech legions, began to pose a serious threat—and the epic struggle of the Civil War loomed nearer. As a member of the Second Army’s RVS on the Eastern Front, I left for Vyatka (with S. Gusev). The RVS promoted Colonel Shorin, a former Tsarist officer and one of the first ‘military specialists’ in the Red Army, to be commander of the Second Army. The latter was ordered to crush the rising at the Izhevsk and Votkinsk factories and to prevent the rebels from uniting with the Constituent Assembly’s troops. Kulak rebellions were taking place round Vyatka and some of the provisioning detachments sent from Moscow went over to the rebels.
In its first engagements the Second Army suffered a number of reverses. This motley collection of units was originally far from being a single, unified whole. It consisted of worker partisans, sailors and volunteer soldiers who had gone through the school of the imperialist war and been transferred from the German Front. The requisition of supplies, horses, hay and buildings provoked sharp clashes with the peasantry. The mobilisation of local peasants into the ranks of the Red Army met with enormous difficulties: conscripts deserted after receiving their uniforms, or surrendered to the enemy in the first skirmish; there were even cases of outright treason by units large and small. Whilst the main forces of the reorganised Second Army made an advance on Izhevsk, a separate division, which I helped to raise, was ordered to march on the Votkinsk factory. The division could only be slowly built up between battles, which, in the wooded foothills by the Kama, amounted to a frenzied struggle for small Tartar villages, all of which suffered raids by day and night. The front line existed only in name: separate units had difficulty keeping contact and on more than one occasion companies of Reds were in the rear of the Whites in one area, whilst elsewhere Whites found themselves in the rear of the Reds. Sometimes the ‘front’ moved twenty-five miles forward during the day and forty-five miles back during the night.
The regular element in the division was the Lett regiment under Colonel Tauman who preferred to act cautiously, slowly and surely. The shock role was performed by the partisan sailors’ detachment, who could barely be controlled by their Commissar, Baryshnikov (later military commander of the Glazov district), although he was himself a man of boundless courage. The battalions of conscripts were commanded by their Commissar, Malygin (who originally came from among the local peasantry) and the ‘specialists’—young officers from the old army including Captain Ginet, who was cut to pieces by the Whites when he tried to hold back the enemy with a few soldiers as the rest fled. The Whites, able to rely on the armaments factories, had more weapons and ammunition, and at dangerous moments mobilised every single worker, driving them into battle with a second line of punitive companies to shoot those who retreated.
After two months’ fighting, during which the leadership of the rebellion passed more and more from the SRs and Mensheviks into the hands of monarchist officials and officers who had settled in Izhevsk in particularly large numbers, the Whites retreated over the Kama (subsequently joining Kolchak’s army). The shift in the sympathies of the peasants beyond the Volga and the defeat of the Constituent Assembly’s army near Kazan decided the fate of the Izhevsk and Votkinsk rebellions.
After the liquidation of the Izhevsk rising, I was transferred to the Southern Front and the RVS of the Ninth Army, whose Commissar was Knyagnitsky (an engineer and old Bolshevik). Other members of the RVS were Dashkevich and Vladimir Baryshnikov (a Moscow Party worker, later captured by General Mamontov and executed after prolonged torture). The basic elements of the Ninth Army were the volunteer partisan divisions of Kikvidze and Sivers, and the mounted Cossack partisan division of Mironov. Kikvidze was one of the best partisan organisers. His units consisted of experienced troops who had marched with him from the Austrian border to the Volga, fighting Germans, Petlyura’s men and Cossacks all the way; their numbers were swelled during this long march by reliable volunteers from among local workers. Kikvidze himself was on good terms with the left-wing SRs, but in spite of the urgings of Proshian (who had come to see him after the collapse of the left-wing SR rising in Moscow in summer 1918), he refused to support their movement. Full of mistrust for the Army Command, he jealously defended his ‘autonomy’ and his division’s freedom of manoeuvre. A similar ‘line’ was drawn in Siver’s division, although less zealously.
Things were considerably worse among Mironov’s Cossacks, who would have no truck with military commissars, objected to political work and allowed undisguised anti-communist agitation. Until the Party line on the peasant question was changed (the condemnation at the eighth Congress of the forcible introduction of socialism in the villages), the mood of the conscripted peasants was frequently anti-communist. Meanwhile the Cossacks’ sector of the front was undermined by fatigue, a struggle between the old men and the young ones, the appearance of monarchist tendencies among the Don High Command, and a longing for work in the fields. At the same time, supplies, equipment and recruitment of the Red troops continually improved. The machinery of a regular, revolutionary army began to fit together and work correctly. In spring 1919, Krasnov’s army suffered a series of crushing defeats and disintegrated with astonishing speed. The Cossack regiments threw away their arms and surrendered. Krasnov handed over command of the remnants to Denikin, but the latter’s volunteer army, relying on Anglo-French military support and having regiments of regular officers at its disposal, halted the advance of the Soviet armies not far from Novocherkassk.
I crossed the Don steppes with the advancing units before leaving for Moscow, where I participated in the eighth Congress as a member of the Commission for the Revision of the Party Programme. I also spoke on questions of military organisation and advocated the need for a speedy transition from partisan ‘separatism’ to a centralised, ‘regular’, revolutionary army. After the Congress I was sent by the Southern Front’s RVS to the Thirteenth Army, whose Commissar, Kozhevnikov, embodied all the worst traditions of partisan warfare. Then I helped to organise the struggle with the Cossack rebellion on the upper Don. This rising, which took place in villages that had split from Krasnov not long before, was partly caused by mistakes of Soviet punitive and provisioning organs, and represented an attempt to find a native Cossack political solution which would reconcile the positions of landowners, workers and peasants. The social basis for the rising was the antagonism between the interests of Cossacks and peasants in neighbouring provinces. The prosperous Cossacks, with plenty of land and cattle, had been evolving from small-holdings and single farmsteads towards capitalist farming and the export of grain. On the other hand, the peasants, who had earlier been hired to work for the Cossacks and now owned small plots of land, had proceeded to divide land and property equally in the aftermath of the Soviet victory. The rising was to a certain extent a war about iron roofs and straw ones—as a rule a Cossack’s house can be distinguished from a peasant’s by its roof. With the advance of Denikin’s army towards Moscow, the Red Army was forced to abandon the line along the lower Don, and the rebellious villages of the upper Don merged with the Denikin Front.
During Mamontov’s raid in the rear of the Red armies on the Southern Front, I was sent to the Eighth Army’s RVS in Voronezh. I participated in the attack by the Eighth and Thirteenth armies against Kharkov which, after succeeding as a show of force (patrols from the Eighth Army were ten miles from the town), and drawing the enemy’s forces on itself, put the Eighth Army in an extremely difficult position and compelled it to retreat. Surrounded on three sides and sometimes completely cut off, the army withdrew from Volchansk to Voronezh, maintaining only intermittent contact with the neighbouring Thirteenth Army and the front’s commander by means of radio and aeroplane. The raids by Mamontov had a disorganising and demoralising effect. It was at this time that Vladimir Baryshnikov, a member of the Eighth Army’s RVS, was captured by an enemy patrol. The army’s staff wandered from place to place, always in danger of being caught unawares. Some deserted and a few defected to the Whites.
It was under these conditions that I was appointed Commander of the army, a move intended to strengthen confidence in the leadership. Denikin’s march on Moscow was then at the height of its success. Oryol had been captured. Tula was threatened. But these successes swallowed up all his remaining forces. Peasants flocked into the Red Army to swell its reserves, whilst the Whites were beset by an atmosphere of peasant hostility. Powerful units transferred from the Eastern Front, together with the Mounted Army withdrawn from Tsaritsyn, enabled the Red Army to go over to the offensive. Denikin’s army began to roll back towards Kuban. The difficult march from Voronezh to Rostov necessitated a breathing-space, and the need to regroup our forces after the capture of Rostov reduced military activity for a while. An attempt by the Whites to recapture Rostov ended in failure. The Kuban Cossacks, antagonised by Denikin’s reprisals (for example the hanging of Bych) against the petit-bourgeois, democratic wing of the Kuban Rada, did not provide the retreating ‘Kadets’ with sufficient support. Whole units of Cossacks and conscripted peasants came over to the Reds, bringing with them shells, cartridges and equipment. The further the advance went, the more it was carried out by former deserters. By the end of the campaign, many regiments had an overwhelming majority of soldiers, and in a few cases commissars, who had once fought for the Whites.
Denikin was no more successful in holding the Kuban line. The Eighth Army made a swift, outflanking movement along the coast towards Novorossiysk and reduced the Whites to sheer panic. The officers’ regiments were hurriedly withdrawn from the front and embarked on ships inside twenty-four hours under cover of British guns and a British landing. The Cossacks surrendered in their thousands. The prize of Novorossiysk, with its extremely rich stocks of equipment, weapons and all types of military stores, fell into the hands of the Red armies. A large number of horses were drowned in the sea by the enemy. But an even larger number swarmed freely about the town and its suburbs, and although local peasants collected as many of them as they could, hundreds starved to death. [ … ]
After reaching Novorossiysk with units of the Eighth Army, I returned to Moscow and, thinking the period of civil war essentially over, went back to work on Pravda. I joined the Moscow Committee, directed the School for Propagandists and attended the second Comintern Congress. In August 1920 I was sent to Turkestan as Chairman of the Turkestan Commission of the VTsIK and Commander of the Turkestan Front (other members of the Commission were Safarov, Koganovich and Peters). I directed the consolidation of Soviet power in Bukhara after the overthrow of the Emir. I was closely connected with military operations against the Basmachi in Fergan, which ended in the rout of one of their leaders, Khol-Khadzhi. The latter, a former convict and a bandit of unusual height and strength, escaped with his gang into the mountains, heading for the Chinese frontier, but he perished under an avalanche on the narrow path. Although the Basmachi later spread the story that he had been saved from death by angels flying down to him, his disappearance was none the less final.
However, economic and other measures no less than military ones helped to weaken the Basmachi movement. A monetary reform was carried out, abolishing the special Turkestan coins – turkbony – which lost their value even faster than ordinary Soviet ones; they were exchanged for Soviet money, and prices and wages were re-calculated in the new currency. The surplus appropriation system was abolished (at first on a local scale and then generally) and replaced by a tax. General labour conscription was discontinued, and the right of free access and trading was introduced in bazaars. The mullahs were released after affirming their political loyalty. The organs of Soviet administration were transferred from Russian to native towns and quarters. In Semireche a start was made on returning land to the Kirghiz, which had been seized from them without warrant by Russian settlers. Measures were taken to re-establish the cotton industry in Fergan and the necessity of support for craftsmen was recognised by the authorities. In addition organisational plans were made for a Union of the Village Poor (koshchi). All these measures taken by the Turkestan Commission with the aid of Kirghiz, Uzbek and Turkmen activists who had been enlisted in responsible government work (Rakhimbaev, Turyakulov, Khodzhanov, Atabaev, Biryushev) combined to create a calmer atmosphere in Turkestan and established the preconditions for the consolidation of Soviet power, the development of the economy and the freeing of local administration from the influence of the native bourgeoisie (the bai).
In the discussions about trade unions that began at the end of 1920, I supported the ‘buffer faction’, although I considered that the basic problem to be decided did not concern trade unions, but our relations with the peasantry and the necessary concessions that ought to be made to them. From the beginning of 1921 until the autumn, serious illness prevented me from working. In November 1921 I returned to financial work for the first time since 1918 to deal with changes in the Party’s financial policy arising out of NEP. I was appointed a Collegium member of the People’s Commissariat for Finance and soon afterwards Deputy Commissar. As a result of the absence of the Commissar, Krestinsky (appointed Plenipotentiary in Germany in autumn 1921), I directed the Commissariat, and in autumn 1922 was appointed Commissar myself, which post I held until January 1926. My main tasks over this period were: the organisation of the Commissariat of Finance, which had been almost completely abolished under War Communism, the creation of a strong, balanced budget and the drafting of the norms of Soviet budgetary law, the abolition of taxation in kind and the organisation of a system of monetary taxes and incomes, the introduction of a stable currency, the formation of a system of banking institutions underneath the State Bank, the organisation of state credit facilities (short-term and long-term loans), the foundation of the State Insurance Organisation and State savings-banks, the differentiation between State and local budgets, the widespread development of the latter, in particular of rural district budgets, and the introduction of financial discipline and accountability. The greatest difficulties were presented by the abolition of taxes in kind and the introduction of a graduated income tax in the countryside, the cessation of the practice of issuing paper money to cover budget requirements, the struggle against unrealistic economic plans which threatened to stimulate inflation, the establishment of the proportions in which national, republic and local interests would be satisfied, and the defence of correct priorities in fulfilling the country’s cultural, economic and purely political needs. The most active workers in the Commissariat over this period were Vladimirov, Sheinman, Reinhold, Tumanov, Yurovsky, Shleifer, Bryukhanov, Polyudov, Kuznetsov and R. Levin.
In summer 1922 I went with the Soviet delegation to the Hague Conference and at one of the sessions made a detailed report on the financial state of the Soviet Union, which provoked fierce attacks from all the bourgeois press. In autumn 1923, whilst preparing the monetary reform, I defended a policy of credit restrictions and reduction in industrial prices. In the political discussion I sided with the majority of the CC. In autumn 1925 I defended the necessity for a distinct, class policy in the countryside, as well as the need to ensure rapid growth in agriculture as the basis for a powerful industry, and in the intra-Party disagreements of 1925-6 I supported the minority in the CC. In spring 1926 I was appointed Deputy Chairman of Gosplan. In summer 1926 I went with my wife, G. O. Serebryakova, to the United States for discussions about a financial agreement, but our visit was halted half-way by Kellogg’s withdrawal of the entry visa that he had promised.
I made speeches on questions of financial policy at the congresses of Soviets and sessions of the TsIK. At the fifth Party Congress I made a report on behalf of the CC about financial policy and defended the outline resolution which laid down guidelines for the construction of the Soviet financial system.
My writings on financial problems are collected in the books, The Financial Policy of the Revolution (two volumes) and Monetary Reform. Pamphlets devoted to the economic difficulties at the end of 1926 are entitled Autumn Hazards and the Problems of Economic Assessment and The Path So Far and New Tasks.
I have attended Comintern Congresses and was a member of the Party CC from 1917 to 1919, and from 1922 to the present.
Sokolnikov was a conciliator in the period 1908–10, associated in the war years with the editorial board of Nashe Slovo and, more loosely, with the Mezhrayonka group, but after his election to the Central Committee in August 1917 he became one of Lenin’s firm supporters in 1917–18: with Stalin, he was a co-director of Pravda, and a member of the shadow Politburo set up on 10 October. He supported the insurrection, the homogeneous Bolshevik government, and the Brest-Litovsk peace terms. In November 1917, he and Bukharin were entrusted with controlling the ‘parliamentary’ Bolshevik splinter group in the soviets, dominated by right-wingers.
A member, successively, of the RVS for the Second, Ninth, Thirteenth and Eighth Armies, he defended Trotsky’s military policy at the eighth Congress, and maintained that the partisans’ war was mere ‘banditry and pillage’. No doubt because of this attitude and because of the hostility he drew from Stalin’s group, Congress did not re-elect him to the Central Committee. Ordzhonikidze, in effect, wrote to Lenin in October 1919: ‘Where did the idea come from that Sokolnikov could command an army? [ … ] Is it to protect Sokolnikov’s pride that he has to be allowed to play with a whole army?’
In 1920, he organised the Soviet uprising in Bukhara; after supporting the ‘buffer group’, he rallied to Trotsky’s platform on the union question; in 1921 he was appointed People’s Vice-Commissar for Finance, and in 1922 Commissar for Finance, in which post he pursued a policy of monetary re-stabilisation. In the same year he regained his seat on the Central Committee. Believing that the development of the Soviet economy would depend for many years more on the enrichment of the peasantry and on trade with the capitalist countries, he opposed the monopoly on foreign trade, and succeeded in making the Central Committee reconsider the matter on 6 October 1922. He was supported by Bukharin and Stalin, who was to denounce Sokolnikov’s ideas to the fifteenth Congress as leading to a ‘Dawes-isation’ of the Soviet Union.
He also believed that Soviet industry needed to develop without state subsidies, by straightforward self-financing, and thus opposed the left opposition with its proposals for industrialisation and planning. He rejoined Zinoviev’s group and was elected an alternate member of the Politburo in 1924. He suffered the effects of the rout of the new opposition, and lost his seat on the Politburo as well as his post as People’s Commissar for Finance after the fifteenth Congress in 1926; after which he became Vice-President of Gosplan. He then maintained the need of the Soviet regime to tolerate the existence of several parties, and provoked the thunder of the Party machine. He occupied a rather deviant position in the United Opposition, and left it after the declaration of 16 October 1926, in which the United Opposition renounced splinter struggles. This explains the curious – but politically logical –affirmation of Trotsky’s, ‘Sokolnikov never joined the opposition bloc formed in 1926–7’, whilst he was one of the six signatories of the declaration of October 1926! Sokolnikov the administrator fitted in badly with the image of a left-wing oppositionist. …
Having rallied to the majority before the Opposition struggle on the Chinese question, he was re-elected to the Central Committee by the fifteenth Congress (1927) and subsequently supported the right-wing struggle on behalf of the peasants. In 1929, Stalin sent him to Britain as Soviet Plenipotentiary. He returned to Russia in 1934, and was appointed People’s Vice-Commissar for Foreign Affairs. He was eliminated from the Central Committee by the sixteenth Congress in 1930, and in 1936 he was arrested and tried at the second Moscow trial in January 1937. Like Radek, he was sentenced to only ten years’ prison. He had asked for indulgence in his final speech, in which he had ‘openly made honourable amends’. He died in obscure circumstances in 1939.
J.-J. M.
(autobiography)
I was born in 1886 in Orienburg. [ … ] My father, a retired soldier who had served for twenty-five years during the reign of Nicholas I, had been still a little boy when he was forcibly taken from his father and draped in a greatcoat at the military school. What military service, and in particular life at such a school, was like, I only discovered when I had grown up, and then not from him. At rare moments during his reminiscences about his past, my father would talk graphically about the way he had been often and harshly beaten. He recounted how they had tried to convert him to Orthodoxy by beatings, humiliation and even torture. He had even been chased into the river and threatened with drowning if he would not cross himself. Many of his contemporaries had embraced Orthodoxy, but for some reason he had remained a Jew. At the bazaar he showed me old stall-holders with genuine Russian names but genuine Jewish noses and beards, and he explained that they had been brought to see the truth of the Orthodox faith with birches and fists. [ … ]
My father spent whole days in the Saratov Inn near the bazaar. That was his reception room, there he practised as a ‘lawyer’. He was only semi-literate. How he coped as a lawyer, I do not know. But I do know that when I was nine, he made me write fair copies of the petitions and complaints which he composed for his clients. Even at that age I could write better than he. [ … ]
The barefoot period of my life with games in the street and day-long fun on the bank of the peaceful, shallow Urals soon came to an end. I began classes at a Gymnasium. [ … ] It is difficult to speak well of this period. There was the callousness of the school system, the cowering pupils, the mediocre teachers, the cramming, the boredom. [ … ]
The faster I developed mentally, the more unbearable my time in the Gymnasium became. Above all I was oppressed by the humiliation, the arbitrariness, the constant expectance of boorishness, humiliation or punishment. [ … ] I longed for freedom and left school. [ … ] I found a job as pupil in a chemist’s shop in Samara. At first I received no pay, as was the custom. The work was hard and the days were long. I had to work on holidays just as on weekdays, enjoying only occasional free days. And soon I was involved in night duty. [ … ]
One day the chemist, who was German and very strict, struck a pupil, and we went on strike out of solidarity. He did not even notice our strike, however, with so many boys like us eager for work. But I was the richer for a new sensation—the desire to chasten the exploiters and oppressors of the workers.
We prompted a comrade to write an article for the local Samara paper under the title ‘The White Slaves’, about the life of pharmacy employees. At roughly the same time I was introduced into a social democrat circle. There we were told of the massacre of workers at Zlatoust, there we read Iskra. I began to render such services to the Party (of a technical nature) as I could, and from this time (1903) I considered myself a Party member.
After Samara I wandered for a while from one pharmacy to another (Oboyan, Chelyabinsk), arriving in Ekaterinburg in 1904. Here I soon made the acquaintance of Bolsheviks. At first they employed me in a technical capacity. The chemist’s shop where I worked was very convenient, both for storing illegal things and as a rendezvous for underground activists. Letters, including some from abroad, arrived in my name. Party workers from elsewhere would present themselves at the chemist’s and I would direct them to a secret address. [ … ]
In spring 1905 I met and soon became familiar with the leaders of the Bolshevik organisation in the Urals. Ya. M. Sverdlov appeared and immediately enchanted me as a model revolutionary. I began to visit meetings and mass demonstrations. I duplicated proclamations and carried out various small assignments. Then the events of autumn 1905 came upon us. The organisation had powerful forces at its disposal. Sverdlov, Chutskaev, Syromolotov and many other comrades were experienced, resolute Bolsheviks, from whom we could learn much.
The days of October 1905 had the scent of a real struggle. Our meeting of 19 October was attacked by the Black Hundreds. Several people were injured (including Minkin). But a couple of days later our organisation was ready to withstand any onslaught and threw down a challenge to the Black Hundreds. Under the protection of armed Bolshevik workers, we held public meetings in the municipal theatre, where Sverdlov made exceptionally successful speeches. I remember nights when the group of Bolsheviks was ready to give an armed rebuff to the attack they expected hourly. These were marvellous nights and they forged a genuine iron determination in everyone. [ … ]
In November I was advised to go to Zlatoust where the social revolutionaries were in the ascendancy. I set off there with misgivings, for I felt myself very poorly prepared as a Bolshevik. In Zlatoust my first duty was to look for work at the factory. I had already been accepted as a lathe operator when the management found a cunning method of rejecting me: I was found unfit at the medical examination. So I would walk about the factory, carry on a little propaganda and take part in disputes with SRs, where I was again and again convinced of my insufficient preparation as a propagandist, particularly on the agrarian question.
It was in Zlatoust that I addressed a huge workers’ meeting for the first time. It commemorated the first anniversary of a massacre of workers by the Tsarist butchers on the town square. It was freezing hard. Even without that I could hardly breathe. What with the cold and my agitation, I was shivering. In my short speech I displayed such hatred for Tsarism that even my friends were astonished at my eloquence and predicted a career as an orator for me. Soon, however, the punitive expedition of one of the bloodthirsty generals advanced across the Urals and I had to slip away. I reached Samara in an empty goods wagon, half dead from cold. I could find none of the Party workers in the town, so I went on to Odessa, where I had been given a few addresses. I had no more luck there, so I decided to escape over the frontier in the hope of learning about Marxism, seeing for myself the labour movement abroad, and simply breathing free air.
After a series of unsuccessful attempts to leave, I decided to travel like the heroes of novels I had read. I stowed away on board the first ship I saw without even asking where it was bound. When we had passed Constantinople, I climbed out of the hold and was made to scrub decks by the captain. In Algiers I escaped from the ship, as he was threatening to hand me over to the courts in England. I began my life as an émigré with three roubles in my pocket. I worked in a tobacco factory and a pharmacy before reaching Paris.
There I lived the life of an émigré for roughly a year. Out of work, hungry, often with no home, I eagerly absorbed the impressions of my new surroundings. I attended lectures and debates, studied in libraries, went to trade union meetings and even the French Trade Union Congress at Amiens in 1906.I gained a great deal from Paris, but I began to long for Russia and work. After spending some time in Geneva and Vienna, I took the firm decision to return to Russia. I reached Tashkent where I found a job as type-setter on the local bourgeois newspaper Turkestansky Kurier. I organised a Union of Printing Workers. Sometimes I collaborated on the local SD paper which was published by my old comrade, M. V. Morozov. The proprietor of my printing works and the paper’s editor, Rabbi Kirsner, hurriedly dismissed me. The Union declared a strike. On the same night we were arrested. The Union continued the strike until we were set free and Kirsner himself had to arrange our release. Soon I was employed as clerk in the Druzhkin company. [ … ]
After leaving Tashkent, I tried to settle in Orienburg. Whilst I was there, the dissolution of the second Duma took place, as well as the beginning of even more savage reprisals by the Tsarist authorities against revolutionary activists and the working class. According to some accounts I heard, the smouldering revolutionary flame was brightest in the Caucasus, and I was drawn there.
I found myself in Baku. I lived then in secret, working at first as a clerk in a restaurant and hotel, where I could observe the debauchery of Baku merchants. Then I found work in a chemist’s shop. I soon made contact with the local organisation through Semkov, a friend from my days in Paris. Baku taught me an immense amount. There was large-scale industry; there were many nationalities among the proletariat; and the peculiar position of the oil industry allowed workers and the Party to breathe more freely than in the rest of Russia. There, mass trade unions operated openly and a workers’ press appeared. Time and again the proletariat erupted in impressive political and economic action. The capitalists entered into negotiations with the workers’ unions over a collective agreement. In a word, the class struggle was at its height and took the most varied forms. The opportunities for propaganda and agitation were immeasurably greater than in other parts of Russia. The combination of legal and underground revolutionary activity enabled us to be active on many fronts. During my stay in Baku, I was in turn district organiser of the (underground) Party organisation and Secretary of the Union of Joiners and Builders, while at the same time participating in the work of clubs and co-operatives. The work was flourishing and absorbing, but my arrest brought it to an end. I managed to escape after a few days, however, and I went to ground in the oil district of Balakhany. [ … ]
There I lived with workers and shared their life. I worked as a labourer on the Rothschild oil fields, but was dismissed. I worked with Samartsev in the pipe-laying artel for unemployed workers. This was onerous, and at times highly dangerous work (for example when a pipe had to be laid over a marsh).
After Baku I made my way to Moscow with a passport given to me by Nikolay Krayushkin, an engineering worker. I began to work as secretary of two trade unions, those of the textile-workers and the leather-workers. Both unions shared a tiny room belonging to a dressmaker in the Zamoskvoreche district. Essentially my function was that of agitator rather than organiser. Workers’ meetings took place quite legally in the guise of union meetings, where legal social democratic propaganda and agitation was carried on. [ … ]
I also did some journalism for the Party in Moscow. The Bolsheviks at that time published a political and trade union journal. It was banned, but reappeared under new names (Rabocheye Delo, Vestnik Truda, etc.). M. I. Frumkin and Skvortsov-Stepanov were among those who contributed to it.
In winter 1909 I was arrested. [ … ] Although finally released, I was compelled to do my military service. This meant prison, travel under escort, army hospitals, medical examinations, and there I was in Ekaterinburg in soldier’s uniform, with the rights of a ‘defender of Tsar and country’ under supervision. After a few months of strict supervision, I began to steal out of the barracks and search for old friends of 1905. To my great delight I did find one or two of them. I began to receive Zvezda and a few illegal writings. [ … ]
After two years in the army, I slipped a bribe to the army doctor to declare me unfit for service. I was demobilised and given full legal status. [ … ]
Soon Pravda began to appear. After receiving the first ten or twenty numbers, my thoughts began to turn towards St Petersburg. I had no connections in the capital but I took a chance and moved there. At first I endured hardships for several months, but then I found my way into Pravda and became an enthusiastic worker on it.
Simultaneously I undertook semi-legal activity in workers’ clubs and trade unions—I helped to eradicate Menshevik influence in the Union of Metal-Workers and some clubs. [ … ] In spring 1913 I was arrested, but after a few months’ ‘preventive’, I was released and no further action was taken. Of course, I immediately returned to Pravda. Soon several comrades and myself began to organise a workers’ journal, Voprosy Strakhovaniya, for which I was secretary until my second arrest in autumn 1913. This time, after spending winter in custody, I was banished to Chelyabinsk.
There, I spread the influence of Pravda among the working masses as far as I was able, recruited subscribers and correspondents, joined cooperatives and unions, and exploited all possible opportunities for legal and semi-legal activity. With the declaration of war, I was arrested on orders from St Petersburg and held for several months in such strict isolation that it was only on my release that I discovered who was fighting whom. In 1915 I was arrested yet again, but not for long. At this time I managed to make contact with comrades in other towns in the Urals. A small Party conference to discuss our attitude towards the war was held in Ekaterinburg, attended by amongst others Krestinsky, Sevruk (then a Bolshevik) and myself. Still lacking documents from the CC relating to the Party’s attitude towards the war and deprived of information, we did, however, instinctively adopt the correct position, and our resolution, subsequently printed in the émigré journal Sotsial-Demokrat, received the approval of the CC as one of the first reactions from local Party organisations.
With the end of my time in exile, I took up residence in Ekaterinburg. I earned a living with contributions to the local newspaper Uralskaya Zhizn, which by that time was relatively radical. Thus for example, during the elections for the military-industrial committees, we succeeded in printing discreet exhortations for a boycott, which corresponded to the Party line. This did not prevent the paper from following a generally ‘defencist’ policy. Little by little a strong group of Bolshevik activists came together in legal and clandestine work. Not long before the February Revolution a number of them were arrested, and the remainder were searched and carefully shadowed. I escaped to the Satkin factory (southern Urals) where I found work in the office. But hardly had I unpacked my cases when news of the Tsarist collapse forced me to return to Ekaterinburg. There I went directly from the station to a large meeting in the town theatre.
From February to October of that unforgettable year, I was active in Ekaterinburg. I worked most of all as agitator, journalist and editor, but I had to cope with everything. I occupied leading positions in the Soviet from its foundation (Assistant-Chairman and then Chairman of the Urals Regional Soviet, President of the Regional Board of the Urals Trade Union Councils, member of the regional Party committee, etc.) [ … ]
In December 1917 Krestinsky and myself were elected to the Constituent Assembly from the list of Bolshevik candidates and we left for Petrograd. The Assembly was dissolved after one day and I was left behind to work in the capital. The Petrograd Soviet decided to publish a popular newspaper for the working masses and it was entrusted to Volodarsky and myself. Thus Krasnaya Gazeta was born. Of the two of us, Volodarsky was more occupied with Party (mainly agitational) activity and would appear in the offices only in the evening to write a rousing leading article on the vital issue of the moment. I, on the other hand, spent whole days in the editorial office, selecting contributors for this new type of paper and looking through all the copy. At the same time I had to make speeches at meetings of workers and soldiers to exhort them to fight against the Mensheviks and SRs.
As a Presidium member (until 1924) of the VTsIK, I moved to Moscow with the rest of the central government. In Moscow I was entrusted with the task of creating a mass peasant newspaper. I was forced to merge the existing Party papers Derevenskaya Bednota (Petrograd) and Derevenskaya Pravda (Moscow). In spring came the first issue of Bednota, of which I remained editor for over six years. Work on Bednota, and the flood of letters from peasants and soldiers that I had to read, brought me into intimate contact with peasant affairs for the first time. [ … ]
With the Urals liberated from Kolchak, the CC instructed a group of Party workers to go there. We consisted mainly of former activists from that area. I was appointed Chairman of the Provincial Revolutionary Committee in Ekaterinburg. Following the year-long dictatorship of the White Guards, we had to concentrate on reconstruction.
In the winter of 1919–20 I was ordered to Kharkov, which had only just been liberated from Denikin, but I was only due to work there for three months as head of the Party Committee for the province. On my return to Moscow, I took up a post in the Main Political Transport Directorate (an organisation conducting political work throughout the transport system). I suggested to Trotsky, then Commissar for Transport, that we should publish a mass paper for railway-workers. After receiving his agreement and the approval of the CC, I organised Gudok and was its editor during the first months. In 1921 I was appointed head of the CC’s Agitprop Department.
In 1922 I was a member of the Soviet delegation to the international conference at Genoa. The trip gave me the opportunity of looking more closely at life in Europe since 1905. Of later periods in my life there remains to be noted only my appointment as Collegium member of the People’s Commissariat for Agriculture, although I did very little work there, my main functions being confined to journalism.
This was my basic occupation during the Revolution. From spring 1918 until the present, I have been a permanent contributor to Pravda, combining this with many other tasks, but without devoting nearly as much energy to them as to Pravda. It fell to me to blaze a trail for Soviet satirists. During the first months of the Revolution, D. Bedny and myself were alone in writing satire. Then appeared V. Knyazev, and others after him. Some of our works were published in two volumes entitled Things and People. Apart from this, small books of articles have appeared in various editions: Soviet Virgin Soil, On Music and Other Things, Dymovka, Painful Questions, On Culture and Philistinism.
From time to time I wrote articles on literary topics, for example about Demyan Bedny, against the Futurists, against decadent literary works à la Esenin, and against the distortion of Soviet reality by Pilnyak. Contributions on agriculture occupied a particular place in my literary output. [ … ] Some of my satirical sketches were translated into German and, I think, other languages, whilst a small illustrated collection appeared in Esperanto.
A passionate and ironical journalist, Sosnovsky became by the end of the Civil War a symbol of two struggles that in his view were complementary: the struggle against bureaucracy and the struggle against the Kulaks. He waged these campaigns in the columns of Pravda and in Bednota, which he edited between 1918 and 1924. He was a member of TsIK and one of the spokesmen of its communist fraction; he soon turned his intransigence against the Party and State machines. He wrote of the ‘apparatchiki, neither hot nor cold’, who skim through all the circulars, record, note, cover reams of paper, file, seal, label and ‘are happy when calm reigns over their organisation’.
He supported Trotsky in the union dispute of 1920–1, and was a signatory of the so-called ‘Declaration of the 46’; he belonged to the left opposition, then to the United Opposition. In 1924, he played a decisive role in the celebrated Dymovka affair, where he unmasked the assassins of one of Bednota’s ‘Selkors’ (peasant correspondent), which allowed him to launch violent attacks on the Kulaks, whom he accused of having plotted the murder.
At the fifteenth Congress he was expelled as a Trotskyite. Yaroslavsky declared, from the speaker’s tribune, that Sosnovsky had told the TsKK that the Party had ‘sunk to the level of the Kuomintang’. In 1928 he was deported, and in the summer of the same year wrote three ‘letters from exile’ to Trotsky from his place of banishment, Barnaul, as well as a fourth letter to the oppositionist Vardin, who had just capitulated. These letters earned him a sentence of six years in the Chelyabinsk ‘isolator’. All four were published in issues 3 and 4 of the Byulleten Oppozitsii. In Siberia, Sosnovsky studied all the manifestations of the struggle between the Byednyaki (poor peasants) and the Kulaks (rich peasants), whose existence had just been officially admitted, and recounted the remark of a discontented byednyak: ‘Meetings for the byednyaki, land for the Kulaki.’ On 30 May 1928 he wrote to Vardin, who had rallied to Stalin by describing the evils of ‘former Trotskyism’:
With a philosophy like yours one becomes more easily a servant (let us say, even, a lackey) than a revolutionary militant [ … ] I have asked Vaganian to tell you about a detail of Jewish funeral rites. As the corpse is about to be carried out of the synagogue and off to the cemetery, a verger leans over the deceased and calling him by his name, says, ‘Know that thou art dead.’ It is an excellent custom.
Sosnovsky resisted pressures and threats for a long time. One of his guards was shot for having passed on one of his letters. On 27 February 1934, a few days after the eighteenth Congress (the ‘Congress of Victors’), he capitulated. Trotsky commented: ‘The declarations of capitulation by Sosnovsky and Preobrazhensky show the same frame of mind: they are closing their eyes to the situation of the world proletariat. Only that can allow them to accept the national perspective of Soviet bureaucracy.’
In 1935, Sosnovsky was readmitted to the Party. In 1936 he was again expelled and was murdered the same year, for having refused to play the farce of improbable confessions.
J.-J. M.
(autobiography)
I was born on 16 October 1873. I was the fifth child in our family, with two elder brothers and two elder sisters. [ … ] My father, Dmitry Vasilievich, a lawyer by training (he had graduated from the School of Jurisprudence in St Petersburg in 1847 at the age of nineteen), had soon found advancement in the Senate and would probably have achieved high office, judging by the beginning of his career, since he was herald at the coronation of Alexander II. His views and interests, however, developed in an undesirable direction from the government’s point of view and in 1861, one month after his marriage, he was arrested during a student demonstration for collecting signatures against the matriculation of students. His career of course was in ruins. He never worked in government service again and became first an attorney, then a lawyer.[ … ]
He was President of the first Council of Lawyers in Russia (St Petersburg). With short interludes he remained in this post right up to his death in 1918, for lawyers considered him the ‘conscience’ of the profession. His enormous civil practice did not prevent him from appearing in political cases both in the old courts and in the reformed ones (including the trials of the 50, of the 193, and of Karakozov). As a result of this activity, and the endlesss number of defendants for whom he stood bail, he was more than once arrested and searched, and in 1880 he was banished from St Petersburg to Tula, for Alexander II had declared: ‘One can’t spit without hitting Stasov, he’s involved in everything.’ Besides his work as a lawyer, he devoted much effort and time to music: he was an excellent piano player and a highly knowledgeable musician. With Anton Rubinstein and Kologrivov, he founded the St Petersburg Conservatoire and the Russian Musical Society, which right up to the Revolution organised symphony concerts in St Petersburg and other major towns, and encouraged the spread of music in Russia.[ … ]
Until the age of thirteen I studied at home, and by that time I could already speak two languages (French and German). In spring 1887 I entered the fifth form of the Tagantsev private Gymnasium for girls. I was a very good pupil, and graduated with a gold medal.
The year 1892–3 was an extremely significant one for my intellectual development. In that year I attended a special course of lectures given by Professor A. S. Lappo-Danilevsky on the history of man’s primitive culture. As I now remember, I was enormously impressed by his exposition of man’s concept of property. I decided there and then that to understand life, it was essential to read about political economy. [ … ]
Life in a deeply humanitarian family which had retained all the best features of the Russian intelligentsia of the 1860s, and constant contact with the cream of Russian artists and musicians, all this undoubtedly had a strong influence on me. I remember that inside me grew an even stronger feeling of debt to the people, the workers and peasants who had provided us, the intelligentsia, with the opportunity of living as we did. I think that these thoughts of our unpaid debt were also formed partly by my reading. Looking back, I can remember the impression made on me by Ivanyukov’s book The Decline of Serfdom in Russia. It pointed out a gap in my education and I took to studying Semyovsky’s History of the Peasantry. It is obvious that all this reflection, plus external events which often involved student incidents, forced me to seek a practical outlet for my energies, such as teaching in the classes given in the evenings and on Sundays for adolescents and adult female workers in Ligovo, and working for a mobile exhibition of educational textbooks. My work amongst tobacco and textile workers brought me into direct contact with the working class, and through my acquaintance with Krupskaya, Yakubova, Nevzorova, Ustrugova and Sibileva, I came across militant political activists.
Gradually I began to work in the political Red Cross. Lectures on its behalf (with an admission fee) were more than once arranged at home, which was a very popular thing to do at that time and was supported by all the humanitarian intelligentsia, including my parents. Simultaneously militant comrades began to ask me and my acquaintances to store literature, Party archives and printed matter. It grew to the stage where, after the arrest of the comrade in charge of storing literature, I was entrusted with all the St Petersburg Committee archives. This was in 1898, and that is why I consider my entry into the Party as having taken place then, although as early as spring 1896 I had been keeping The Workers’ Day, Who Lives on What, and You Can’t Do Anything about Us. Little by little the work grew, and my province came to include not only the caches of literature but everything connected with the technical side of the St Petersburg Committee, that is finding rooms for meetings, secret addresses and beds for a night, receiving and distributing literature, equipping duplicating machines and printing-presses, as well as maintaining correspondence with abroad.
From the first appearance of Iskra and the beginning of the campaign for a tighter-knit Party, I worked a great deal with I.I. Radchenko. He had come from Geneva and had been given my address by Krupskaya. He was the local representative of Iskra and he asked me to put him in touch with the ‘Union of Struggle’. I introduced him to N. A. Anosov, but maintained personal contact with him as well, and the correspondence between Iskra and St Petersburg was conducted by us jointly. We were also greatly helped by Varvara Fyodorovna Kozhevnikova-Shtremer and N. N. Shtremer. This was our compact Iskra company, which waged an energetic campaign against the ‘economists’—Tokarev, Anosov, etc. The ‘Union of Struggle’ and Iskra did not merge in St Petersburg and were represented separately at the second Congress.
I continued working for the St Petersburg Committee until January 1904 when, as a result of my arrest, due to the blunder of an inexperienced girl who had only just joined the organisation as technical assistant, I was obliged to leave the capital. My departure coincided with a call from G. M. Krzhizhanovsky, a CC member, for me to come to Kiev. I was not able to stay there, however, as a result of arrests on the day before my arrival, and with M. M. Essen (‘Zver’) I left for Minsk where we were hidden by M. N. Kuznetsov, an engineer. Essen soon went abroad and I was given the task of working with ‘Mark’ (Lyubimov) on technical matters for the CC. I had to move to Oryol, and from there I went to F. G. Gusarev in Smolensk and Klopov in Vilno on a matter of passports, links with the military organisations and escape routes over the frontier. In early spring I made my way to Moscow where Krasikov, Lengnik, Galperin, Bauman and myself were entrusted with organising the Northern Bureau of the CC. In June Bauman, his wife and Lengnik were arrested, and I had to transfer the Northern Bureau to Nizhny Novgorod. But arrests had taken place simultaneously in Moscow and among the Southern Bureau in Odessa, and ‘Mysh’ (Kulyabko) had moved to Moscow. It was decided that he should become Secretary of the Northern Bureau, and that I should take over the Southern. Whilst on my way to hand over to him, however, I was arrested in Nizhny Novgorod and within a day was transported to the Taganka in Moscow. I remained there until December 1904 when I was released on bail. From Moscow I went to St Petersburg, where I immediately rejoined the organisation. Zemlyachka passed on all the contacts to me and I again became Secretary of the city committee. Then when A. I. Rykov was arrested on his return from the Congress in the spring, I also performed the function of CC Secretary throughout the summer. In autumn I handed over my technical responsibilities to the engineer V. S. Lavrov and my secretaryship to V. Ksandrov, although I continued in the latter post until August. Then I was ordered to Geneva as CC technical representative.
In January 1906 I returned to St Petersburg as Secretary of the committee there. Then in February I was instructed to go to Finland and take over from German Fyodorovich (N. E. Burenin) all links with abroad (the escape route into Sweden and the shipment of arms, both via the land route Tornio-Haparanda and the sea route Turku-Hanko-Vaasa-Stockholm). Simultaneously I was to prepare a unifying congress in Sweden, making arrangements for delegates both to leave and reenter Russia clandestinely. When this was completed, I returned to St Petersburg and until my arrest on 7 July 1906 I was joint Committee Secretary with Raisa Arkadevna Karfunkel, a Menshevik—since the Unification Congress, the St Petersburg Committee had been reunified. Together we organised a city conference which met first in the building of the Society of Engineers, 21 Zagorodny Prospekt; then at Terijoki in the hall of the Narodny Dom; and finally in the house of the Society of Technologists on Anglisky Prospekt. This last session did not actually take place as too few people came, and on leaving, Karfunkel, Krasikov and myself were arrested. Karfunkel and I were taken to the Lithuanian Castle, and Krasikov to the Kresty. Since nothing was found at home apart from articles on the organisation intended for our legal paper Ekho, I was merely banished from the capital, and in January 1907 I was allowed to return following appeals from my father. I worked in the city committee until March when illness obliged me to move to the Caucasus. I was active in Tiflis as a propagandist in various circles from autumn 1907 until autumn 1910, when Spandarian and Ordzhonikidze drew me into working for the CC, at first on preparations for the Prague Conference, and then in the CC section dealing with literature and technical matters.
In November 1913 I left Tiflis for exile and on 9 January 1914 arrived at the appointed place—the village of Rybinskoye, Kansk district, Yenisey province. I had been sentenced in Tiflis under article 102 at the same time as Vera Schweitzer, Maria Vokhmina, Armenuya Ovvyan, Vaso Khachaturiant, Suren Spandarian and Nerses Nersesyan. We had all been arrested in May and June 1912, but evidence to incriminate me was only found after the arrest of Ovvyan and Vokhmina. [ … ]
Our trial was held on 2 May 1913 and we were all sentenced to deportation. My sentence was confirmed in September, and on 25 November, Ovvyan and I set off for Krasnoyarsk via Baku, Kozlov, Ryazhsk, Samara and Chelyabinsk. In Samara we met quite a number of male comrades (including Serebryakov and V. M. Sverdlov), and we were joined in Chelyabinsk by Semyon Schwartz, Anna Trubina and Marusya Cherepanova, the latter also being destined for Rybinskoye.
In autumn 1916 I received permission to make a visit to Petrograd ‘to see my aged parents’, for so ran the article under which exiles were strictly entitled to leave Siberia. In Petrograd I made immediate contact with Shlyapnikov, Molotov, Zalutsky, M. I. Ulyanova and others so that I could undertake Party work. I did not return to Siberia as I fell seriously ill, my stay in the capital was extended and then the Revolution broke out. The Tsarist police, however, did not leave me in peace and visited me on the night of 25/26 February 1917. They carried out a fruitless search and took me to the Liteyny police station where I found at first only one political prisoner, though during the night we were joined by another sixteen.
I was released by the popular uprising on the evening of 27 February. The following day I went to the Tauride Palace and was delegated by Shlyapnikov to form the Secretariat of the CC Bureau. From then until the ninth Congress I was a CC Secretary in Petrograd and Moscow. Then I moved back to Petrograd and from May 1920 was organiser for the Party gubkom until it was merged with the city committee. I was sent to Baku by the CC to organise the first Congress of Peoples of the East, and to work in the CC Caucasus Bureau. After the Congress, I was elected a member and Secretary of the Council for Propaganda and Action of the Peoples of the East, whilst simultaneously carrying on my functions in the Caucasian Bureau. From April 1921 until February 1926 I was at the disposal of the Comintern. At the present time, I am working in the CC Secretariat of the VKP(b).
Stasova was for many years a close collaborator of Lenin, and she became one of the last survivors of the Bolshevik Old Guard. Her life was characterised throughout by discipline and unconditional devotion to the Party line. On many essential points in her life, of importance for the history of the Communist Party of the USSR, our knowledge is slim—particularly on her activities between 1917 and 1920, when she was Secretary to the Central Committee of the Russian CP. The fragmentary memoirs published in 1957 under the title Pages from My Life and Struggle1 reveal a little, despite their mediocrity, about her activities after July 1920 as Secretary of the Central Committee’s Transcaucasian Bureau, where she worked with Sergo Ordzhonikidze. In May 1921 she carried out underground work in Germany as representative of the Comintern. ‘First, I was appointed Secretary at the CC organisation, then President of the Central Committee of the MOPBR.’ Her party pseudonym in Germany was Herta. She lived in the Weimar Republic until February 1926, with a passport made out in the name of Lydia Wilhelm which she obtained by formally marrying a certain Ernst Wilhelm. In 1926 Stalin accepted her request for transfer to Moscow, to the information bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the USSR. From 1927 to 1938 she was president of MOPBR.
At the start of the great purges Stasova was on the various purge commissions. Subsequently she was in fact confined to the role of a figurehead, and took part in numerous international feminist, antifascist, etc. congresses. From 1938 to 1946 she edited the French and English edition of International Literature. After the twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the USSR, Stasova regained celebrity as the senior Old Bolshevik, and attracted attention at the twenty-second Congress by a violent diatribe against Stalin’s misdeeds. She died at the age of 93 and was buried in the Kremlin wall in January 1967, with all the honours due to a veteran; the Central Committee had set up a special commission under Suslov to organise the funeral.
G. H.
(authorised biography)
Mikhail Pavlovich Tomsky was born on 31 October 1880 in St Petersburg. His mother, an intelligent, sturdy woman, parted from his father, a St Petersburg factory worker, as she could not ‘get used to’ the beatings he inflicted on her when he arrived home drunk almost every day. Tomsky never knew his father since he was born after the separation; and as his father would not acknowledge him, Tomsky was registered as ‘illegitimate’. This was a cross that caused him great pain in early childhood.
Until he was six, Tomsky, his 25-year-old brother and 11-year-old sister lived with their grandfather, who worked for the Sheremetievs. With his grandfather’s death, his mother had to take care of the whole family, living from hand to mouth and barely subsisting on the pittance she earned by sewing. His brother had no profession although he was widely read. Ill with tuberculosis and often unemployed, he dealt savagely with little Misha, turning him into a timid, weak-kneed boy by the time he was eleven.
Tomsky first had classes at the age of five in a private boarding-school where he and his sister were accepted out of kindness as his aunt was a servant there. Tomsky only spent a year there but learnt to read well.
At the age of nine, he was sent to a three-class primary school, where he received free education. On leaving school he worked at the Theodor Kibbel box factory for a wage of five kopecks per day. After injuring a finger, he was dismissed. He found work first at the Laferme tobacco factory, then back at the Theodor Kibbel factory at a wage of five roubles per month, and from there he went to the Bruno Hofmark engineering works. When he was fourteen and working at the small Smirnov factory manufacturing ‘Rus’ engineering products, he was one of the leaders of a strike, which earned him his dismissal when it collapsed. After a few months of unemployment, he became apprentice to the chromolithographer, V. Nessler. At the age of twenty-one, he completed his apprenticeship and worked in various chromolithographic factories in St Petersburg.
In 1903 he first came across socialist literature, and in 1904 he joined a social democrat circle. Whilst working at the Haimovich tin factory, he became known as a socialist, for which he was dismissed in 1905. After wandering about St Petersburg for several months without work, he went to Revel. There he found a job as a lithographer at the Zvezda factory which manufactured preserve boxes. It was here in Revel in 1905 that Tomsky began his revolutionary career in earnest.
First he was elected spokesman for the factory’s workers and joined the Revel Council of Workers’ Representatives, whose task was to hold discussions with the managements of various types of factories about the workers’ economic and political demands. With his energetic encouragement, the Revel Soviet of Workers’ Deputies was formed after the fashion of the St Petersburg one, and he subsequently became a member of its Presidium. He organised a protest strike against the massacre of Revel demonstrators on 16 December 1905.
His first experience of trade union work came at this time with the organisation of the Revel Union of Metal-Workers. In January 1906 he was arrested as a member of the Revel Soviet and was imprisoned in the death cell. After four months in custody, he was deported to Siberia to the village of Parabel in the region of Narym. During discussions in exile he showed himself an advocate of armed rebellion in opposition to those who supported the amnesty. He spent two months in Parabel, escaped to Tomsk with a small group of comrades and for the first time was hidden by the Party; he also acquired his pseudonym of ‘Tomsky’.
In August 1906 he made his way secretly to St Petersburg, where he found work at the Haimovich tin works under the name of Artomonov. At first under the pseudonym ‘Mikhail Vasileostrovsky’, and then ‘Mikhail Tomsky’, he performed tasks for the Party in the district of Vasilievsky Ostrov. He formed the Union of Engravers and Chromolitho-graphers and was elected their President. With the merger of the lithographers and printers in one union, he was elected to the joint management committee. In early January 1907, he was elected to the St Petersburg RSDRP Committee at the conference of the city organisation and he began to perform Party work in various districts. The committee then elected him to the enlarged editorial staff of the CC organ Proletary and the editorial commission of Vperyod.
In spring 1907 he was a St Petersburg delegate to the fifth Party Congress in London. There he made a speech on behalf of the Bolsheviks against the idea of an ‘All-Russian Workers’ Congress’, as proposed by Akselrod and supported by Plekhanov. He also attended the All-Russian Party Conference in Helsinki. On his return from the latter, he was arrested at a session of the St Petersburg Committee. After four months’ preliminary detention in the Kresty, he was condemned by a court in May 1908 to one year in a fortress for membership of the RSDRP. A few months before the completion of his sentence, he was released on bail following the exertions of Poletaev, then a member of the State Duma. With unquenchable energy he again threw himself into Party work, but not for long.
In November 1908 he was denounced by the agent provocateur Konovalov, arrested and put in solitary confinement until April 1909. In May he went to Paris for the enlarged session of the editorial staff of Vperyod. From Paris the CC directed him to Moscow as their representative in the Moscow central industrial region. On arrival, he reestablished the smashed Bolshevik organisation there, simultaneously working as a member of the Regional Bureau, the Moscow Committee and the Area Committee. He organised an underground printing-press and took an active part in the reappearance of the regional Party paper Rabocheye Znamya, of which he was editor-in-chief. After the arrest of the Moscow Committee and the subsequent discovery of the printing-press, Tomsky succeeded in evading strenuous police searches.
He was arrested in December 1909 at the station in St Petersburg where he had arrived from the Southern Regional Bureau in Odessa. He was transferred from St Petersburg to Moscow, where he was held in connection with the Trial of the 33. In November 1911, after an eleven-day hearing, the Moscow Chamber of Justice brought in its verdict. Tomsky was sentenced to five years’ hard labour for membership of the RSDRP, the sentence to be served in the Butyrki prison in Moscow.
During his imprisonment he energetically occupied himself with broadening his knowledge, chiefly of Marxism. On completion of his sentence of hard labour, he was banished for life to the Kirensk district of Irkutsk province in Siberia. In exile he worked at first as an agricultural statistician. The February Revolution and the amnesty found him still in exile, where he helped to organise a Committee of Public Security, and to arrest and disarm the police and gendarmes.
At the end of March, without waiting for the Lena to be freed from ice, he made his way on horseback to Irkutsk and then to Moscow. His long isolation prevented an early return to Party activity. With Lenin’s arrival, Tomsky went to Petrograd, where, after a conversation with Lenin, he began work in the Petrograd Committee as a member of its Executive Commission. He represented the Petrograd Committee at the third All-Russian Conference of Trade Unions (June 1917).
After the ‘July days’ he moved to Moscow where he worked in the Commission supervising elections to the Moscow district dumas. Later he became editor of the journal Metallist for the Union of Metal-Workers. They made him their delegate to the Moscow Council of Trade Unions, where he was elected President in December 1917. Simultaneously he was editor of the Central Trade Union Council journal Professionalny Vestnik.
At the first Trade Union Congress (January 1918), Tomsky put the Bolshevik case in his closing speech on Zinoviev’s report about the tasks of unions.
At the fourth Conference of Trade Unions in 1918, he was elected to the Presidium of their Central Council, and at their second and third Congresses, he was chosen as President. In 1920 he helped to organise the Red International of Trade Unions (Profintern) and became its first General Secretary. In May 1921, with his appointment as Chairman of the Commission for Turkestan Affairs, he temporarily left trade union work.
In January 1922 he returned to the VTsSPS, at first as its Secretary and then, from its fifth Congress, as President. At the eighth Party Congress he was elected to the CC, and at the eleventh to the Politburo. From 1920 until the present day he has been a Presidium member of VTsIK, and since the first Congress of the USSR he has been Presidium member of the TsIK of the USSR.
In 1924 he was included in the Soviet delegation sent to hold negotiations with the British government. Whilst in London, he made contact with representatives of the British trade union movement, who subsequently invited Soviet trade union representatives to their next Congress in Hull in September 1924. There Tomsky made a speech outlining the revolutionary class position of trade unions in the USSR.
Almost all Tomsky’s literary works have been devoted to problems of the trade union and labour movement. The main ones are: Principles for the Organisation of Trade Unions, Trade Unions on New Paths, An Outline of the Trade Union Movement in Russia, and The Tasks of Communists in the Trade Union Movement. They set forth the role, organisational methods and tactics of trade union work. The first three have been translated into Asian languages, the fourth into European ones.
P. Kashin
Tomsky was a working-class militant and belonged to a profession – typography – whose trade union was a citadel of Menshevism. Nevertheless he soon became a Bolshevik without renouncing, for all that, what constituted the basis of his political thought and militant activity: namely, trade unionism, which placed him at all times on his party’s right wing. In 1917, he already had ten years’ prison and deportation behind him when he emerged in the whirlwind of the Revolution. Unimpressed by Lenin’s authority at the Central Committee meeting of May 1917, he first opposed the project to emphasise the propaganda work by creating a larger Pravda. A working class supporter, he defended the autonomy of the Petrograd Committee against the theoreticians. The speech he made on that occasion reveals the depth of his hostility towards intellectuals returned from exile: ‘You don’t write in Russian, we can’t all understand your articles.’1 And Lenin was put in a minority.
Although he had lost touch a little during the years of deportation, he soon regained a prime position in the Bolshevik Party. He was an excellent civil servant, and his political realism constituted a valuable asset. From 1919 he presided over the trade unions. In 1919 he was elected to the Central Committee, and in 1922 entered the Politburo, where he sat until his expulsion in 1929. He was so typified by his post at the head of the trade unions that according to Trotsky he was a tendency all on his own. As Arthur Rosenberg observed,
Tomsky represented the views of a minority of skilled and better-paid Russian workmen who had grown weary of revolution and refused to listen any longer to the socialist fables. Their desire was to defend and improve their living conditions with the assistance of the trade unions. If the Soviet State were to take on a semi-middle-class character, that would not cause them any anxiety. Tomsky regarded the Soviet State after the fashion in which a Western European socialist trade union leader looks upon his middle-class capitalist State.2
This position cut both ways. After the tenth Congress D. Ryazanov, who had gained a position of responsibility in the trade unions, proposed that union members should be allowed to choose their own leaders. Tomsky did not object to this proposal, was dismissed from his post in the Trade Unions’ Central Council and sent to Turkestan. When he had recognised the correctness of the Party line, he was recalled and reappointed to his former post.
Among certain categories of workers, Tomsky enjoyed great popularity which Stalin put to good use in 1925 when the ‘right-wing bloc’ came to power. Tomsky was one of the pillars of this bloc, both in his political convictions and in his deep animosity towards the left-wing leaders, particularly Trotsky: in 1917, he called him an ‘ever-juggling whale’, and in 1920, at the time of the union quarrel, he attacked Trotsky by accusing him, at the November meeting of the Central Committee, of wanting to eliminate elected leaders—a criticism to which Lenin paid some attention.
Between 1925 and 1927, he was an ardent supporter of the union of Russian workers and Western trade unions. He was the main architect of the rapprochement with the British trade unions, and, in 1925, of the Anglo-Soviet Trades Union Committee. This earned him attacks from the left wing, all the more so since the British TUC denounced the alliance in 1927.
He was above all a trade unionist, but his administrative sense brought him close to Stalin: It is impossible to run the Party without Rykov, Kalinin, Tomsky and Bukharin,’ the leader replied to Kamenev’s accusation, at the fifteenth Congress, that he wanted to control the machine and run it with his own clique of ‘faithfuls’. When this speech was reprinted in his complete works, the names of Rykov, Bukharin and Tomsky were omitted. These two facts give a rapid glimpse of Tomsky’s fall between 1925 and 1936.
At the fifteenth Congress Stalin tried to eliminate the opposition, and leant heavily for support on the right-wing bloc, which included Tomsky. But although he supported Stalin’s general political line, he was opposed to his methods, and in particular to the expulsion of Trotsky from the USSR.
As soon as Stalin had achieved his aim and the Congress was over, the change of direction in economic policy that he began to consider fostered rumours of the creation of a ‘rightist’ opposition, and the names of Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky were mentioned in this connection as early as December 1927. The conflict only came out in the open, however, in 1928, when Stalin turned about and launched the programme of industrialisation and collectivisation. In June, Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky, in agreement with Uglanov, formed what is known as the ‘trio’: they wanted to stop Stalin speeding up collectivisation, which, they thought, endangered the results already achieved. Thenceforth and until his death, Tomsky’s name was inseparable from those of his two companions.
For Stalin Tomsky became an important target, for he held authority over the enormous trade union machine. Even before the conflict became overt, all preparations had been made for replacing Tomsky. Although he had not actually been accused of dirigisme, a decision was made in favour of internal trade union ‘democracy’ which nevertheless allowed the Party to tighten its control and political leadership without admitting it was doing so. Tomsky offered his resignation in irritation at this in December, but the Politburo refused to accept it.
Early in 1929, the trio attempted their final assault, sharper than their earlier attempts, by submitting their resignations collectively. The game was played according to the usual rules, and they were offered concessions: if on the one hand they withdrew their resignations and held limited independence in their respective branches, the Politburo would promise not to submit to the Central Committee the act of accusation it had drawn up against them. Indignant at this political ‘cooking’, they rejected the proposal—and Tomsky was expelled from the Politburo. Consequently, all three were condemned by the Central Committee in April 1929, and on 2 June Tomsky was stripped of his position at the head of the trade unions. At the plenary session of the Central Committee in November 1929, Tomsky was given a serious warning and, with Bukharin and Rykov, he signed the required declaration.
At the sixteenth Party Congress in the summer of 1930, Tomsky had to make a self-criticism, but none the less, like Bukharin and Rykov, he was re-elected to the Central Committee. At the following Congress, in early 1934, when he was director of the State Publishing House, he was re-elected as a candidate member.
He was not spared by the purges which began shortly afterwards. The names of Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky had been mentioned during the first trial, and Vyshinsky announced that an inquiry had been set up. Tomsky feared the worst and committed suicide on 23 August 1936. He had not been mistaken—two years later, Bukharin named him during his trial as the liaison agent between the ‘rightist opposition’ and ‘a group of conspirators’ in the Red Army.
G. H.
(autobiography)
I was born in 1881 in the village of Verkhneye, Ekaterinoslav province. My father was a level-crossing keeper at the time, my mother a charwoman. My father, who had been a soldier under Nicholas I, was a freethinker with a will of his own. Performing the most onerous tasks on landlords’ estates, down mines and on the railways, he was often obliged to change his place of work as a result of arguments with proprietors and the management. Consequently, I became acquainted with the most abject poverty from early childhood. During one period of my father’s unemployment, my sister and I had to go begging for bread. At the age of six or seven, I found work sorting pyrites in the coal-mines, for which I received ten kopecks per day. When I was ten, I helped my father graze cattle for a landowner. It was at this time that I first came across the rapacity of the kulaks. During one of the regular lean periods in our family (father had disappeared in search of work), I was ‘invited’ to stay with an uncle, my father’s brother, who lived a wealthy life in the country. Instead of being a guest, I was turned into a farm labourer and subjected to the cruellest exploitation for a whole year. Then I went back to the mines as an apprentice. There I was brutally beaten by peasants hired from a neighbouring village. They seized on a trivial pretext, but it was really because I had been hired in the workshops instead of one of them. This experience – being beaten as a boy by a whole artel of adults – remained a painful memory throughout my life.
I grew up illiterate, which greatly distressed my mother who had set her heart on my becoming sufficiently ‘educated’ to be able to read the psalter and prayer-book like her father. Her dreams did not extend further than this. Unfortunately, there were no schools in the places where we lived. In 1893 a zemstvo school was opened in the village of Vasilyevka, Slavyansk district, and I was accepted there. I remained a pupil for two winters and successfully completed the whole course. In two years, we had three form masters and the last of them, S. M. Ryzhkov, proved to be an excellent teacher and educator. He took a great liking to me and often invited me home, where I was treated as one of the family. Subsequently he became a trudovik deputy in the first Duma and its Second Secretary. He was an intelligent, honest, cheerful man with an instinctive, well-developed social conscience. Whilst at school, at the age of fourteen or fifteen, I began reading literary classics and books on the natural sciences under his guidance, and I also began to form clear ideas about religion.
In 1896 I found a job at a factory near the village of Alchevskaya. Whilst working there, I continued my reading, and contact with my teacher brought swift progress both mentally and culturally. Once, in either 1897 or 1898, a police officer was appointed to the factory. This marked the beginning of my political activity. The police officer, Grekov, arrived to see the postmaster and ordered ten or fifteen adolescents to file in front of him. All greeted the policeman politely except me. Grekov was zealous and stupid. He jumped from the bench where he had been sitting in the company of ‘ladies’, rushed up to me, threatened me with his fists, and demanded to know why I had not bowed to him. I laughed in his face. He angrily grabbed hold of my shirt and I, in turn, laid my hands on the tie of this brutal satrap. The postmaster and all my comrades disappeared, and I was beaten, albeit not severely, before being thrown into jail. I was released the following day, but then began to be subjected to systematic and determined persecution. At first I was shadowed ‘secretly’, then agents began walking at my heels. The persecution had its effect: I not only turned conversations with Ryzhkov to openly political topics, but also looked for acquaintances both at the factory and among the teachers.
In 1899 the roller operators in the foundry came out on strike under my leadership. After a little while, I was searched and briefly arrested. Ryzhov was also searched. Then he was summoned to St Petersburg, I think to the Ministry of Education, where he was warned against further contact with me. I was out of work for three years because I was blacklisted by all the factories and mines in the Donbass. In 1903 I found work at the Hartmann factory in Lugansk, but after two or three months the police drove me out of the town. During this time I officially joined the Party, became a Bolshevik and took a seat on the Lugansk Committee. In summer 1904, with Ryzhkov’s help, I was again given a job at the Hartmann factory. In February and June I led strikes there. I was also elected Chairman of the Works Soviet. In July I was arrested in the course of the strike, beaten half to death and imprisoned until December. Then I was released on bail on the demand of a thousand workers who had come to the jail. Soon I escaped from the surging tide of reaction. In 1906 I travelled to the Stockholm Congress and for the first time met the light of our Party—Ilyich.
On my return, we made strenuous preparations for an armed struggle. I went twice to Finland to fetch large consignments of arms bought from Finnish revolutionaries. The present Chairman of the Comintern Executive Committee, G. E. Zinoviev, also had to deal with these arms. The Lugansk organisation had the best armed detachments and an excellent laboratory manufacturing bombs in unlimited quantities. Whilst remaining President of the deputies’ Assembly, I was elected President of the newly-organised Workers’ Union at the Hartmann factory. Management of the works effectively passed to the workers, and the director of the factory retained only nominal control.
In October I and several others were due to be tried at an assize session of the Kharkov Chamber of Justice, but a general strike of Lugansk workers prevented it at that time. In spring 1907 I was tried and acquitted, after which I represented the Lugansk organisation at the London Party Congress. Previously, I had been a delegate to the first All-Russian Conference of Trade Unions in Moscow. In July 1907 I was arrested, and in October of the same year deported to Archangel province for three years.
In December 1907 I escaped from exile and was directed by the CC to Baku. Here I worked with comrades Shaumyan, Dzhaparidze, Stalin, Sosnovsky and others until autumn 1908 when I went to St Petersburg. There I was rearrested in September and sent back to Archangel. Whilst in exile in Kholmogory, I was put in custody in January 1911, imprisoned until November, and then deported to Mezen district. On my release from exile in 1912, I went to work in the workers’ co-operative at the Dyumo factory, but after three to four months I was again arrested and deported to the area of Cherdyn. I was released in 1914 and found a job at the Tsaritsyn ordnance factory. There I drew together old Bolsheviks scattered throughout factories and enterprises in the locality, but I soon had to go to Petrograd to escape from the Tsarist army. In the capital I was again subjected to searches and shadowing.
From the first days of the February Revolution I was a member of the Petrograd Soviet and our Party Bureau. In March I was in the Donbass. In April I was a delegate to the Party Conference and then the sixth Party Congress. In Lugansk, where I was active in 1917, I presided over the town Soviet, duma and Party Committee. I was a delegate to the Democratic Conference, and was then elected to the Constituent Assembly on behalf of Ekaterinoslav province.
I began my military activity by commanding the detachment organised in March 1918 to fight against the German occupation troops. I was soon appointed commander of the Fifth Ukrainian Army, and then of the detachments retreating from the Ukraine to Tsaritsyn and the Volga under German pressure. An important battle took place at Likhaya station. Our detachments came up against the bullets of rebellious Cossacks and fled in panic towards the river Belaya.
Tens of thousands of demoralised, exhausted, ragged people and thousands of wagons filled with workers’ families and their chattels had to be brought through the rebellious Cossack areas of the Don. For three whole months, surrounded on all sides by Generals Mamontov, Fits kanaurov, Denisov and others, my units tried to break out, re-laying the railway lines which had been torn up and burnt for tens of miles, building new bridges, and raising embankments and dykes. After three months, the Voroshilov army group fought its way through to Tsaritsyn. Here it became the backbone of the newly formed Tenth Red Army, whose command I assumed.
In 1918 I became a member of the Ukrainian government, and then was appointed Commander of the Kharkov Military District. After this I was put in charge of the Fourteenth Army and the internal Ukrainian front. At the end of 1919, I joined the First Mounted Army’s RVS and in 1921 the Party CC. I subsequently commanded the Northern Caucausus Military District and was promoted to the RVS of the USSR, becoming a member of its Presidium in 1924. In May 1924 I was appointed Commander of the Moscow Military District. At the present time I am a member of the Party’s Moscow Bureau, the Presidium of the Moscow Soviet, President of the Moscow Aviakhim, Deputy-President of the Aviakhim of the RSFSR, and special delegate from the RVS of the USSR to the Council of People’s Commissars of the RSFSR.
From the days of the Baku Committee to the Second World War, Voroshilov was one of Stalin’s closest political companions—at Tsaritsyn, in the struggle against the left opposition, down to the purge of the marshals and generals in 1937–8. It was to this intimate association that Khrushchev was ironically alluding in his report to the twentieth Congress when he addressed Voroshilov in the following terms: ‘May our dear friend Kliment Efremovich find the necessary courage to write the truth about Stalin—for after all, he knows how Stalin “fought”. It is a difficult task for comrade Voroshilov to undertake, but it is meet that he should do it.’
This was a cruel taunt to the man who set up Stalin’s military legend, from Stalin and the Red Army (1929) down to The Captain of Genius of the Great National War (1950). Perhaps a prisoner of the blunder he committed in August 1914, when in a fit of patriotic fervour he volunteered for the Tsarist army, Voroshilov always remained in effect a pawn in the hands of Stalin, who used him, from Tsaritsyn (1918) to the liquidation of the marshals (1937), but was never quite sure of him. Krivitsky has recounted how Stalin had all Voroshilov’s correspondence photocopied, and Khrushchev has affirmed that Stalin had Voroshilov ‘bugged’ and did not allow him into Politburo meetings for several years since he feared he was an agent of MI5. …
Voroshilov was a good cavalry officer and a good partisan leader, but did not really have the stature of a military chief. In any case, through-out the 1930s he used his memories of the Southern Front to oppose a wing of the high command, which included Tukhachevsky, in their desire to modernise the army, just as in 1918–19 he had opposed the construction of a centralised army, and favoured small, independent and mobile units capable of carrying out isolated coups. When war broke out in 1941, Voroshilov was appointed a member of the GKO and Supreme Commander of the Northern Front—which was the quickest to yield to the Germans, and where the mistakes of the command were the most serious (for example, no measures were taken to evacuate civilians from Leningrad before it was too late). Voroshilov had exhorted Soviet troops, in February 1938, to be ‘ever ready and capable not only of riposting to any enemy who might attack us, but also of destroying him before he enters Soviet territory’. In December 1941 he was dismissed, and the same misadventure occurred to his other companion from Tsaritsyn, Budyonny, who was just as outdated as he.
In 1918, Voroshilov had stirred up the ‘NCO opposition’ to centralisation, and in 1925 he took over from Frunze at the War Commissariat. One month later he was elected to the Politburo—a stunning ascent, considering he had only been on the Central Committee since 1922. But in order to run a commissariat that still bore the mark both of Trotsky and of the Zinoviest Frunze, Voroshilov needed a title. In 1928, he supported Bukharin but abandoned him at the last moment: ‘Voroshilov and Kalinin betrayed us at the eleventh hour’, Bukharin confided to Kamenev.
In 1935 he was appointed Marshal of the USSR. Stalin made him give his approval to the liquidation of the entire General Staff of the Red Army, from Tukhachevsky to Blucher. After the Finnish campaign, Stalin’s personal secretary, Mekhlis, tried to throw the blame for the campaign’s misadventures on Voroshilov, but the General Staff collectively defended the last but one survivor of the Civil War’s military leaders. In May 1940 he left the Defence Commissariat for the vice-presidency of the Council of People’s Commissars, where he remained until 1953.
From March 1953 to May 1960 he was President of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, that is to say, nominal head of state. Since May 1960 he has only been a member of the Presidium of the Central Council (the old and new name for the Politburo). Khrushchev removed him as an accomplice of the ‘anti-party group’ (Molotov, Malenkov, Kaganovich) which was routed in June 1957, and denounced him at the twenty-second Congress in December 1961 as an accomplice of Stalin. Voroshilov was not re-elected to the Central Committee at that Congress, but was ‘rehabilitated’ by the twenty-third, which put him back on the Central Committee as an alternate member. For many years now he has been a mere effigy.
J.-J. M.
1 See pp. 222–3.
1 After the July days (3rd–5th) and the smear campaign waged against him by the Plekhanovian and former Bolshevik Aleksinsky (who denounced Lenin and Zinoviev as German agents), Lenin decided to go into hiding. The first hiding-place he used, on 6 July, was Kayurov’s apartment.
1 Written during the Party purge in 1921.
1 An external student takes the examinations without going to classes.
1 In 1927 N. A. Skrypnik was appointed People’s Commissar for Education in the Ukraine.
2 See A. Yaremenko, Materiali do biografii M. O. Skrypnika (Kharkov, 1932).
1 Les bolcheviks et la révolution d’octobre (Paris, 1964), p. 157.
1 See R. Pipes, The Formation of the Soviet Union. Communism and Nationalism 1917-1923 (Harvard, 1957).
1 This was the title of a biography of Skrypnik compiled by Yu. Babko and published in Kiev in 1962. See also D. M. Corbett, ‘The Rehabilitation of Mykola Skrypnik’, Slavic Review XXII, no. 1 (March 1963), pp. 304-13.
1 See p. 406, note 1.
1 Contre le Courant, no. 213 (Paris, December 1927), pp. 21-3.
2 V. Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary (Oxford, 1963), p. 214.
1 No doubt a misprint for the sixth Congress.
1 In July 1917. Mirbach was the German envoy to Russia.
1 Stranitsy zhizni i borbi (Moscow, 1957), 144 pp.
1 Quoted in G. Walter, Lénine (Verviers), p. 312.
2 A. Rosenberg, A History of Bolshevism. From Marx to the First Five Year Plan (New York, 1967), p. 230.