(autobiography)
I was born on 9 March 1884 in Chernigov. My father, at that time lieutenant in a reserve infantry regiment and an impoverished landowner, died in 1902 after rising to the rank of captain.
In 1901 I graduated from the Voronezh Military School and entered the Nikolaev Army Engineering College. One month later I was arrested for refusing to take the oath of loyalty to Tsar and country; I was detained for eleven days and then released on my father’s surety. This refusal was motivated by an ‘organic repugnance for militarism’. In the winter of 1901 I entered a student SD circle in Warsaw (previously I had had no revolutionary acquaintances and had arrived at this aversion for militarism quite independently as a result of the degrading and humiliating atmosphere of the school and college). In spring 1902 I left home, worked as a labourer in the Alexander docks in St Petersburg, and then as a coachman for the Society for the Protection of Animals.
In autumn 1902, in my eagerness for definite revolutionary activity, I entered the St Petersburg Military Academy and carried on propaganda there on behalf of the capital’s SD organisation, which supplied me with literature. In 1903 Comrade Stomonyakov (Party pseudonym ‘Kuznetsov’, and now a Collegium member of Vneshtorg), put me in touch with the Bolsehevik organisation.
In August 1904 I was caught in possession of illegal literature, detained for ten days and then released on direct instructions from Grand Prince Konstantin Konstantinovich, who prided himself on his liberalism.
On graduation from the Academy, where I left behind a strong SD circle, I was posted as an officer to the Fortieth Kolyvan Infantry Regiment stationed in Warsaw. In autumn 1904, on instructions from the St Petersburg Bolshevik organisation, I travelled to Moscow, Ekaterinoslav, Odessa, Kiev and Vilno to link the Party with newly graduated officers from my circle. In Vilno I made contact with the local military group, and in Warsaw I established relations with the SD, Polish Socialist Party, Proletariat and Bund organisations. I founded the Warsaw RSDRP Military Committee (which subsequently included Comrade Surits, our ambassador to Turkey, and Comrade Bogodsky, our representative in Switzerland). In spring 1905 I received an unexpected posting to the Far East, and so I went into hiding, aided by the SD group, and Comrade ‘Nikolay’ (Hanecki) in particular. I set off for Krakow and Lvov, keeping in touch with the Polish SDs, and I returned to Poland two weeks later to direct the unsuccessful Novo-Aleksandria mutiny of two infantry regiments and an artillery brigade. (A description by me of this mutiny can be found in Iskra, no. 100, under the signature ‘Shtyk’.)
After this I went to Vienna. I was introduced to the so-called ‘Party Council’ (Menshevik), which sent me on a mission to St Petersburg where I arrived at the end of May, and I was active in the Menshevik Military Committee and agitational group. At the end of June I was arrested in Kronstadt at a meeting of soldiers and sailors (betrayed by ‘Nikolay with the gold glasses’, otherwise known as Dobroskok). I was released under an assumed name following the October amnesty. I joined the United Military Committee, which was led by Comrade Nogin (‘Makar’). From there I passed to the United St Petersburg Committee and edited the very successful underground paper Kazarma.
At the beginning of April 1906, I was arrested with Emelian Yaroslavsky, Zemlyachka and others at a congress of the military organisations. Five days later, Emelian, myself and three other comrades escaped from the Sushchevsky jail by breaking through a wall. Within a month I was in Sebastopol under orders from the CC to prepare an insurrection. It broke out suddenly in June, and I was arrested in the street as I tried to shoot my way through a cordon of police and soldiers surrounding the house where a meeting of representatives from military units was in progress. I was imprisoned for a year without my true identity being revealed – I gave my name as Kabanov – and then I was sentenced to death, which eight days later was commuted to twenty years’ hard labour. Within a month, in June 1907, and on the eve of our departure from Sebastopol, I escaped with twenty others during an exercise period by blowing a hole in the wall and firing on the warders and sentry. This break-out was organised by Comrade Konstantin who had come from Moscow. After hiding in the mountains for a week, I set off for Moscow. On the way I had to jump from a train to avoid detectives. After many ordeals I reached Moscow and I sought out the CC Bureau. They directed me to Finland, from where I went to St Petersburg two months later armed with a ‘cast-iron’ passport.
In the capital I embarked upon propaganda among sailors on the yacht Shtandart, but increased police attention obliged me to leave for Moscow. There I progressed from Bolshevik workers’ circles in the Suchchevsky-Marinsky district to activity in legal organisations, joining with the ‘liquidators’. During the winter of 1908 I organised workers’ co-operatives in various districts: the Zhizn co-operative in Lefortovo (Blagushe), Trud (in Presnya), and Obyedineniye (in Sokolniki). Simultaneously I worked for the Union of Printing Workers (whose weekly journal I edited with the Bolshevik Comrade Lyubimov). I assisted in the take-over of the Lefortovo Temperance Society by Bolshevik workers, and founded the ‘Club for Sensible Amusements’, which promoted widespread revolutionary activity before being quickly closed. In these respects I worked side by side with Bolshevik activities. In spring 1909 I participated in a clandestine conference in Nizhny Novgorod, where underground organisations from Nizhny Novgorod, Sormovo, Moscow and Bogorodsk were represented, and where it was decided that an underground newspaper supporting the Plekhanov line should be published by me in Moscow. Whilst attending the Congress of Factory Doctors in Moscow (this was my new field of activity instead of workers’ co-operatives), I was arrested at an SD meeting following betrayal by Malinovsky, but I was released after three days and went to Kiev. As a result of mass arrests there I returned to Moscow, where I was again arrested and held for six months. After my identity had been ‘established’ in the village of Kreslavka, Dvinsk district (this cost 400 roubles, which were collected by Bolshevik workers’ organisations), I was released in February 1910 under the name of Anton Guk.
Arrests in Moscow, the impossibility of finding a reliable passport and uninterrupted shadowing by the police all drove me abroad (in July 1910). I had no sooner crossed the frontier than I was seized by Prussian police officers, but they did not hand me over to the Russian authorities thanks to the intervention of German social democrats. I was in Paris until 1914 as an adherent of the Menshevik group, but simultaneously I worked with Bolsheviks (Vladimirov, Lozovsky, Sokolnikov) both in the circle assisting the SD Duma ‘fraction’ and in several publishing ventures. I was Secretary of the Paris Labour Bureau, consisting of representatives from Russian cells of workers’ syndicates. Beginning in September 1914, I joined with D. Manuilsky (then a member of the Vperyod group) in issuing and editing Golos. The paper grew rapidly and attracted articles from some of the most prominent internationalists of varying shades of opinion—Martov, Trotsky, Lunacharsky, M. Pokrovsky, ‘Volonter’ (pseudonym of M. Pavlovich), Lozovsky, Vladimirov, etc. It remained in existence under various names until April 1917. In late 1914 I left the Mensheviks as a result of their readiness to agree with the ‘socialist’ patriots, remained active in the Nashe Slovo group, joined Bolsheviks (Grisha Belensky, etc.) in the SD Internationalist Club and adopted a left-wing editorial policy for Golos (Nashe Slovo), which coincided on all fundamental points with the Bolshevik line.
In May 1917 I benefited from the amnesty and returned to Russia. On my arrival I presented myself to the Party CC and formally joined the Party, publicly announcing my split with the mezhrayontsy. I became an activist in Helsinki, edited Volna, and was also an agitator in Petrograd, where I joined the Party Committee and the city Duma. On 15 July I was arrested in Helsinki on instructions from Kerensky and imprisoned in the Kresty for one month. I was a member of the Finnish Regional Commission, represented the Northern Front in the Constituent Assembly, was Secretary of the Committee of Northern Soviets and of the Petrograd Military Revolutionary Committee. On 25 October I directed the seizure of the Winter Palace and the arrest of the Provisional government. Afterwards, I was elected to the Sovnarkom and the Commissariat for Military Affairs, and was also appointed Commander of the Petrograd Military District. On 6 December I left for the Ukraine to lead the struggle against the partisans of Kaledin, Kornilov and the Rada. From March until May 1918 I was Commander-in-Chief of Military Forces for the southern Soviet republics. I also held seats on the RVS of the Republic and the Collegium of the Commissariat of Military Affairs. In September and October I commanded the Second and Third Armies, from 11 November the Kursk group, and from January until June 1919, the Ukrainian Front. In August and September of that year I was given plenary powers by the VTsIK to enforce compulsory food deliveries in Vitebsk province. From November 1919 until April 1920 I performed the same function in Tambov province, as well as being Chairman of the province’s Party and Executive Committees.
In April 1920 I became Deputy Chairman of the Chief Labour Committee and Collegium member of the People’s Commissariat for Labour. From November until January I was a Collegium member of the Commissariat for Internal Affairs and Deputy Chairman of the Small Sovnarkom. From mid-January until the beginning of February 1921 I was given plenary powers by VTsIK in Perm province (Chairman of the Soviet, Party Committee, and Committee for Political Education). From mid-February until mid-July 1921 I headed the VTsIK special committee charged with eliminating banditry in Tambov province. From October 1921 I was Chairman of the Executive Committee of Samara province where I directed the drive against famine. From autumn 1922 till February 1924 I was head of the Political Directorate of the Republic and member of the RVS. Since then I have been at the disposal of the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs.
Antonov-Ovseyenko was the main architect of the armed insurrection in Petrograd on 7 November 1916, and shared with Podvoysky the leadership of the RVS which ran all military operations including the taking of the Winter Palace. He was a member of the first Soviet government as one of the three Commissars for War. No one was better prepared by training and experience for these tasks than Antonov-Ovseyenko. This former officer, who had joined the revolutionary movement in 1901, was one of the military experts in Russian social democracy at the time of the 1905 Revolution, when he gained considerable experience of agitating among the troops and of organising an armed insurrection.
He was arrested several times and sentenced to death after the failure of the Sebastopol uprising, which he had instigated. He enjoyed a great reputation for courage and calmness in social democrat circles. After his escape he went into exile and settled in France in 1910. Although he had till then remained outside all splinter groups, Antonov-Ovseyenko joined the Mensheviks, drew closer to Trotsky and in 1913 joined the August bloc.
Among socialist émigrés in Paris on the eve of the First World War, Antonov-Ovseyenko was a character well known both for his position and for his violent anti-Bolshevik speeches at various meetings. In his memoirs on Lenin in Paris, Alin described him thus: ‘Antonov-Ovseyenko, his curls down his back, called down thunder from heaven, and shook his first at the “corrupters”, that is to say, Lenin and his supporters.’1
After the outbreak of the First World War, Antonov-Ovseyenko acquired a role of some importance; it was he who ran the newspapers Golos then Nashe Slovo in Paris. Around Antonov-Ovseyenko, Trotsky and Martov, all the Russian internationalist tendencies regrouped. His military skills were put to use and an important part was his in the preparation of the October insurrection. He was a member of the ‘troika’ in charge of operations.
He was asked to intervene at various strategic points: in December 1918 he was appointed Commander-in-Chief on the Ukrainian Front. He was dismissed in June 1919 on Trotsky’s urgent demand and following his military defeat. He was given new postings. He took part in virtually all the revolutionary campaigns, and in numerous areas where there was trouble in establishing Soviet power—in the struggles against the uprisings, against famine, and so on.
Although a soldier, he none the less remained a political activist. At the eleventh Congress in 1922, he was the spokesman of the dissatisfied Old Guard, and violently attacked Lenin and Trotsky with accusations of capitulating to the kulaks and to foreign capitalism. Despite some differences, he remained close to Trotsky throughout these years, and shared his political ideas. When Trotsky counter-attacked in 1922, he replaced his adversary Gusev at the head of the political leadership of the RVS with Antonov-Ovseyenko. In this crucial post, he was, next to Pyatakov, one of the most resolute and daring leaders of the Trotskyite opposition in 1923. He signed the celebrated ‘Declaration of the 46’. When Stalin undertook the dismantling of the opposition he began by stripping Antonov-Ovseyenko of his post. He was dismissed from his post at the head of the army’s political administration on the pretext that he had sent out a circular on workers’ democracy without referring it to the Central Committee, and thus disobeying its orders. Like the other opposition leaders, he was neutralised by his transfer to the diplomatic service; he was removed from the centre in 1925 when he was appointed Soviet Political Representative (ambassador) to Czechoslovakia, whence he was later transferred to Lithuania. In 1928 he left the United Opposition and moved himself, baggage and all, into Stalin’s camp. He made a shattering declaration which absolved Stalin of the accusations that Lenin had set down in his Testament. In the same year he was appointed Soviet Political Representative to Poland. In his diplomatic post he devoted himself to drawing up his four volumes of notes and documents on the Civil War, an indigestible but valuable work.
In 1936, he was Consul-General in Barcelona. Practically nothing is known about his activities during the Spanish Civil War. Was he involved in the liquidation of Poum and of the foreign Trotskyites, as some writers have claimed? It is not improbable. Antonov-Ovseyenko’s end was tragically ironic. He was recalled to Moscow in August 1937 and saw Stalin in the Kremlin. In 1938, Pravda and Izvestia published the decree of his appointment as People’s Commissar for Justice in the RSFSR. A few weeks later, he was arrested, and was shot without trial in 1939. He was one of the first men to be rehabilitated in 1956, with the group of Civil War army chiefs.
G.H.
(authorised biography)
Georgy Vasilievich Chicherin was born on 12 November 1872 at Karaul on the estate of his uncle Boris Nikolaevich. He came from an aristocratic family imbued with moderately liberal traditions. His grandfather, Nikolay Vasilievich Chicherin, was considered an extremely educated man and a liberal. He lived almost permanently in Karaul on his estate, which he had turned into a noted centre of provincial intellectual life. Boris Nikolaevich, the well-known lawyer, philosopher and publicist, was his eldest son. His second son, Vasily Nikolaevich, Chicherin’s father, was a refined, worldly man, who could speak and write excellent French, and had devoted himself to a diplomatic career. He was a secretary at the mission in Piedmont in 1859 during the Italian War and in that year married Baroness Georgina Egorovna Meyendorf, whose family had also provided the Tsarist government with a number of outstanding diplomats. [ … ] Chicherin’s father died after a long illness in 1882. The last years cast gloom over the family and Chicherin grew up alone in an atmosphere of pietism, deprived of companions of the same age.
His main childhood memories are of constant prayers, combined singing of hymns, recitation of the Bible, and of a generally ecstatic, highly charged atmosphere. The basic attitude of his childhood was a sort of messianism, the expectation of another reality, the Kingdom of God, in place of the existing one. His family lived on their limited income in Tambov, but they maintained the traditions of aristocratic culture, which set them sharply apart from provincial society. It was as if the solitary child had been walled off from life around. His sensitive and artistic mother educated him in the traditions of refined culture, teaching him to love works of art. From early childhood he adored historical books, being fascinated by the bright, colourful pageantry of historical events, the fluctuations of circumstance, the distinctive style of each succeeding age. His mother’s vivid tales and reminiscences about her earlier life evoked the diplomatic milieu. Pietism and fanatical exaltation coexisted in him with a tendency to admire the refined, mocking scepticism of the eighteenth century, which still lives on in Western high society. He loved reading and re-reading diplomatic documents which his mother had kept, for example peace treaties. [ … ]
When he entered the first form of the Tambov Gymnasium, he became painfully aware of the contrast between his home environment and the provincial milieu. He learnt to make a careful distinction between ‘official’ and ‘non-official’ reality. He made very few close friends at school. On the one hand he acquired the knack of ‘official’ behaviour, whilst on the other he was drawn into shunning tell-tales, idealising mischievous pranks and treating teachers as enemies. In a provincial Gymnasium of that time, there were the most heterogeneous elements side by side. Chicherin observed repeated injustices with his own eyes, the victimisation of the poorest students by the school authorities and the tragic scenes of their despair.
All this was interrupted, however, by the family’s move to St Petersburg, where he entered the fourth form of the Eighth Gymnasium. Here almost all the students came from the same official background, and their musical and other cultural interests were more highly developed. Chicherin could not at first accommodate himself to the new environment and his first two years there passed in isolation. It was his mother’s old milieu, but she returned impoverished and estranged from that way of life. The family only frequented relatives and a very few acquaintances, among them another impoverished lady, Mme Albedinskaya, the former Princess Dolgorukova and a favourite of Alexander II in her youth.
Society life dazzled Chicherin’s imagination, but at the same time he was disgusted by its intellectual vacuity. As a result of his family’s straitened circumstances, he fell into the frame of mind of The Humiliated and the Insulted, a tendency towards moral self-flagellation and self-abasement. His shy reserve reached extreme proportions, yet it was curiously mingled with instinctive high spirits which had been repressed by an unhappy life, just as his exaltation and striving for the all-embracing Idea had been combined with an admiration for the refined scepticism of the eighteenth century or French Stendhalism. His study of ancient Greece filled him with boundless delight and he devoted his leisure to reading the Greek lyric poets. A passionate devotee of history, he particularly liked Kostomarov during his school years for the latter’s critical method and evocation of the mind of the popular masses. On the long, wearisome, lonely winter evenings, when the dim lanterns on Vasilievsky Ostrov gave off but a glimmer of light, the Russian countryside would float into his imagination radiant in beauty, and the peasantry, imbued with the harmony of a life of labour, would appear as the bearer of the superior human type. He regularly visited his grandmother Meyendorf, a lively and witty woman, and he delighted in listening to her memories of the old diplomatic life in Metternich’s time. He also visited his aunt, Aleksandra Nikolaevna Naryshkina, and her husband, Emmanuel Dmitrievich, but only out of family duty. They lived in luxury and he smarted at being in the acutely humiliating position of a poor, despised relative. This life of poverty in the capital had a tremendous effect on him. Lacking both intellectual guidance and the companionship of friends, he was inwardly torn by ever more acute contradictions.
A turning-point in his life came whilst he was in the sixth form of the Gymnasium—he discovered the later music of Wagner, when Der Ring des Nibelungen was performed in St Petersburg. Its pantheism led him to study oriental cultures and engendered a passionate love of the Orient. In Wagner’s music he also perceived heroic power and fierce revolutionary energy. He saw in his favourite opera, Die Walkure, the dazzling enactment of a tragedy of rebels perishing as a result of their rebellion, but leaving behind a legacy for future generations. It was at this time that he became more friendly with his classmates. Whereas once he had idealised the St Petersburg bureaucratic milieu, he now found in it only trivial love-affairs, interminable games of cards, and a constant rivalry in indecent stories and witticisms. He became very close to some students at the Gymnasium thanks to common musical and other cultural interests, but in general he was more and more overwhelmed by frustration with the emptiness of life and the sense of being a failure.
After enrolling in the History and Philology Faculty, he wrote to his grandmother Meyendorf that history for him was bound up with life and that he would encounter his subject face to face in the street. At university he went to as many and varying lectures as he could. Lacking guidance, he eagerly sampled all possible sciences. The strongest and most lasting impression was made on him by Klyuchevsky’s duplicated lecture notes with their economic analysis of the historical process and their sharp, critical approach. Isaev’s lectures and his conversations in the corridors first made him aware of the workers’ movement, though this was still distorted by a mass of undigested intellectual impressions. The student disorders of 1895 caught his passionate imagination, but were soon over.
By the end of his university course, his dissatisfaction with the futility and emptiness of life, his moral self-flagellation and his lack of positive ideals had reached the point of the most acute inner tragedy. As Caesar says in Julian’s Dialogues of the Dead, which he assiduously read: ‘One must come second in nothing.’ Being lower than anyone else in any respect seemed to him grounds for unlimited self-abhorrence. He later developed these attitudes in the abstract to the point where it was impossible to be reconciled with the notion that he was only an individual, limited and transient phenomenon. He found in Schopenhauer a formula to describe the internal contradiction of the human personality, that it is the eye of the world and at the same time a detail in the world. Suicide in his view was no solution to the problem. He decided to punish the unknown forces that had created him against his will by gradually destroying himself and doing everything that might undermine his health. Experiencing the most painful spiritual torments, he threw himself into society life on the spur of the moment, but it disgusted him. He was suddenly overwhelmed by social grief but it led to nothing and evaporated into thin air.
He found echoes of his pessimism in the work of the reactionary writer B. V. Nikolsky, only the least interesting of whose writings were published. In them he found contempt for life, self and every being raised to an absolute. But this very contempt finally dissolved in a vacuum: ‘In the heights where contempt sleeps, where delight sleeps, the rooks can fly and eagles can hover, but as for him who sees all, whither can he fly?’ Nikolsky’s development of his basic idea led to ultimate absurdity and thus helped Chicherin to grope his way towards the opposite path. The initial stage in this process was individual anarchism, which at first seemed to Chicherin the height of revolutionary action. [ … ] But after discovering the futility of a philosophy based upon the notion of the individual personality as the supreme principle, he finally stumbled upon the opposite path, the understanding of oneself as part of a collective.
In the meantime, the moment when he left university was the beginning of the most difficult period in his life. He was in a state of utter depression, aggravated by poor physical health. He pored over Dostoevsky and Nietzsche. In addition to an agonising hatred of life and a cultivation of the superman, he became absorbed by music and mystical pantheism, studying the Gnostics in particular. During his first trip abroad since early childhood, he was captivated by the medieval towns he saw and he longed to sink into the ordered life of bygone ages. Between 1895 and 1897 he was fascinated by ‘stylisation’ and ‘daily life’, which were such an important influence on later, pre-war literature. In 1896, despite the indignant protests of his highly placed relatives, he joined the records office of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, wishing to be as far removed as possible from the real work of the Tsarist State machine.
After two years of almost total despair, a sudden transformation came over Chicherin in 1897 induced by the famine and the official measures to hush up the news. He suddenly heard the voice of real life, the call to practical work and the struggle for social goals. He was seized by an eagerness to fight by the side of suffering humanity. But another seven years of inner ferment and spiritual zigzags were needed before he found the path of revolution. He began to be influenced by the labour movement as it engaged in massive strikes, but was at first put off by the primitive thinking of Rabochaya Mysl. The student disturbances of 1899 and Finland’s struggle for a constitution confirmed this feeling. Then he was introduced by a close friend, a young neurologist, to some people whom the latter knew and who were members of revolutionary parties. He began to perform technical services for them. The aesthete in him clashed with the revolutionary and did not as yet unite in a synthesis. Kant came into conflict with Marx, of whom he had only a hazy understandings but he was already groping for positive ideals, and the solution to his prolonged spiritual crisis was in sight. He became a close friend of his immediate superior in the Ministry archives, N. P. Pavlov-Silvansky, and together they prepared a history of the Russian Department of Foreign Affairs for its anniversary. After making a detailed study of Russian foreign policy throughout the nineteenth century, Chicherin undertook a special analysis of it during the reign of Alexander II, reading archive material, historical literature and memoirs. At the same time, the horrors of Russian reality came to appal him and brought home to him the impossibility of further passivity. His acute hatred of the old world, which had brought him so many torments, became unbearable.
At the beginning of 1904 he took the decision to emigrate with the aim of studying revolutionary literature, revolutionary parties and the Western labour movement, drawing practical conclusions, and then returning to Russia for revolutionary work. The technical help he had given to other revolutionaries put him in danger of arrest, but in spring 1904 he went abroad with a legal passport. At first he kept up his close ties with Pavlov-Silvansky, who was himself connected with the left-wing Kadets and SRs and forwarded material to him through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. But he concealed his true aims from relatives and former acquaintances.
1904 saw the beginning of his new life. He devoured revolutionary literature with boundless enthusiasm, moved in revolutionary circles and associated himself with the German working class. He was most profoundly impressed by the personality of Karl Liebknecht, who rapidly became a close friend. He experienced the rapture of rebirth, the palpable reality of life with a clear goal where group interests predominated over personal ones. He had found the synthesis of ecstatic enthusiasm and cold realism, of the joy of living and of ascetisicm, of a crowning ideal and of daily, routine work. His earlier mental convulsions were cured by his awareness of being part of a collective. He had been accustomed to think historically since his youth and he now asked himself what was the immediate task of history and what was its prime driving force. He found the answer in Marxism. Immediately after his arrival abroad, he had intended joining the SRs, but their eclecticism, their lack of self-discipline and historical sense, their subjectivism, their reliance on feelings and emotions all quickly repelled him. The Marxist analysis gave him the key to all social phenomena. As the ideological bond uniting the avant-garde of the revolutionary class, Marxism linked him with the countless suffering masses. Where he had been suffocating in the world of the philistine and the petit-bourgeois, he now discovered the heroic man in the proletarian revolution. Whilst trying to win genuine acceptance among the core of the proletariat, as far as political conditions allowed, he came under the very strong ideological influence of German social democracy which was to weigh heavily on him for a long time. Already, however, he was painfully shocked by the petit-bourgeois mentality widespread among social democratic leaders. He only felt complete solidarity with Karl Liebknecht, to whom he became personally very attached.
In 1905 he joined the local Bolshevik organisation, the so-called Berlin section of the Foreign Organisational Committee (KZO). He had been induced to do this by the argument over the seizure of power. The Menshevik thesis of refusal to do this, even if the revolution should evolve to a point where it became feasible, seemed to him to contradict the fundamental requirements of the revolutionary struggle. He prepared to return to Russia illegally, but fell ill and was detained for a long time in Berlin by the after-effects. Meanwhile, the two factions had merged and the KZO ceased to exist. United groups of the RSDRP were formed abroad with a Central Foreign Bureau. In 1907 Chicherin was elected Secretary of the latter and attended the London Congress in this capacity. The huge influence of German social demoracy pushed him towards the Mensheviks, whose tactics he saw as closer to those of the Germans. While staying in the same hotel as Tyszka, he had long discussions with him every evening. The famous Krokhmal was the Menshevik delegate who had the strongest influence on him. Chicherin attempted to prove to Tyszka that the Bolshevik tactics of a permanent coalition with the left-wing SRs was nothing other than Jaurès’s plan for a permanent union with the petite-bourgeoisie, only in a revolutionary situation. He preferred alliances of circumstance with everyone up to the Kadets, whilst preserving permanent freedom of action for the SDs. This he saw as being closer to the German tactics. All his past evolution had prepared him for a cult of the masses and he was now carried away by the idea of a workers’ congress. Consequently, he was particularly hurt by the Bolshevik resolution forbidding agitation among the masses on this topic and he joined the group which soon came to call itself ‘Golos SD’.
He was arrested in late 1907, tried by the court at Charlottenburg for being in possession of false papers, fined, and sentenced to be deported from Prussia. N. P. Pavlov-Silvansky wrote to him about the police material which had been received in connection with his case, from which it was apparent that he was the object of particular attention and that it would be impossible for him to return to Russia. Chicherin lived in secret for a while in Leiben, near Dresden, making occasional clandestine visits to Berlin. After the transfer of the editorial board of Golos SD to Paris, he lived in the French capital almost as a recluse. Everything paled for him by comparison with the problem of Party unity. As he conceived the proletariat to be the only historical force opposing the old world, he was acutely distressed by all the Party splits. It seemed that the very basis of his ideals was crumbling. But the campaign of the Vienna Pravda for unity struck him as superficial and appealing to mere sentiment, without fulfilling the historical necessity of fully overcoming essential disagreements. He sharply condemned the ‘liquidators’, and sought a counterweight to them in Golos SD, deploring the latter’s tendency towards amorphism and its readiness to make concessions.
In 1908 he was particularly active in the summoning of the Basel congress of émigré groups. He saw the budgetary autonomy of these groups as the only means of preventing them from being split over the question of finance for this or that Party organ. He did his utmost to preserve the groups as Party rather than factional entities, insisted on them allocating 10 per cent of their funds to the Central Committee as laid down by the Party rules, and tried to sponsor papers by members of all factions. He devoted all his time to petty chores for the various groups, saying, ‘When opposite sides are brought together, even the most trifling work has its satisfactions’. At the same time he became active in the fourteenth section of the French Socialist Party and made personal acquaintances among the French workers, but he was shocked by the intellectual approach of the former, and he was exasperated by the disdain for organisation among the latter. So he attempted to influence the young workers and gave them a great deal of his time.
In 1912 he welcomed the August bloc as a step towards Party unity, especially in view of its inclusion of the Vperyod group, and he put himself at the disposal of the Organisational Committee. Trotsky’s resignation from the bloc was a particularly painful blow. Chicherin’s hopes were dashed. Meanwhile, the growing middle-class attitudes of leaders of the second International caused him both anxiety and indignation. Pannekoek’s pronouncements were too woolly for his liking, but he did welcome the attempt which they represented to resurrect the revolutionary labour movement. Both the opportunism of Luch1 and the rigidity of the German SD leadership sickened him. All his hopes were pinned on Liebknecht as the standard-bearer of a new era in the labour movement. Having been connected with the socialist youth movement since 1907, Chicherin found in it the embryo of a brighter future for the whole of the working class and did everything he could to encourage it. In 1914, whilst studying the state of the Party in Lille, he uncovered appalling petit-bourgeois careerism behind the veil of fine socialist phrases. With Bruno, the local socialist youth leader and a genuine revolutionary, he pleaded for a demonstration to be arranged in Lille against the war.
After the outbreak of hostilities, he left Lille for Brussels where he joined the so-called ‘intransigent’ émigré commission, inveighed against volunteers for military service, and then went to London. The war drove him into a searching reappraisal of his ideas. Both voting for war credits and enlistment in the army were clearly inadmissible. But what next? He could not accept the former anarchist programme of desertion. The Stuttgart and Copenhagen resolutions provided no answer as they left too much unsaid and were full of internal contradictions. He found that Bolsehvik literature supplied an outline of tasks connected with the war: in Russia, the destruction of the autocratic and aristocratic order; in Germany and Austria, the elimination of the last vestiges of monarchical feudalism; and in other countries, the social revolution itself. Thus in Germany, Austria and Russia there were still tasks outstanding for the revolutionary movement to perform within the limits of the bourgeois state. There could be no equation of them with the bourgeois, democratic countries. Confused by these complexities, Chicherin attempted to solve them by distinguishing between the concept of action and the concept of analysis: the SD Party had to direct political action against all governments alike, but in its theoretical assessment of the importance of military events for various states, it could draw distinctions between the latter.
This speculative house of cards, however, did not survive for long. Chicherin was visited in London by the Secretary of the Paris Union of Youth, whom he had known earlier as a brilliant revolutionary activist, and who told him that the war had opened his eyes to the common interests of capital and labour in every country. These words were a blinding revelation for Chicherin of the fact that the slogan of ‘defencism’ meant capitulation by labour to capital. As time passed, this fact was increasingly illustrated by the ‘defencist’ press and literature of all countries. He clearly perceived that British capitalists were exploiting this slogan to keep the British working class in their power. The political reality in Britain revealed with dazzling clarity the role of democracy as the most refined form of the domination of capital, and acquainted him with its innumerable ways of acting on the masses. He became once and for all convinced of the absolute necessity for a merciless struggle against all the warring bourgeois governments. He began regular contributions to Nash Golos, which was a stepping-stone for him. He considered that the Organisational Committee had become hopelessly entangled in the ‘defencist’ quagmire and had betrayed the cause of the Revolution. The Gvozdev saga1 had been monstrous and the Mensheviks’ behaviour in this affair had been shameful. He no longer had anything in common with them.
From the very first he had been close to the left wing of the British Labour Party, and with Petrov had been a passionate opponent of Hyndham. So he joyfully welcomed the creation of the British Socialist Party. Collections on behalf of Russian political prisoners were made, accompanied by agitation to counteract patriotic British attempts to whitewash Tsarism which were then at their height. This brought Chicherin into contact with the leftist minorities in the trade unions and he began to write for trade union papers.
The February Revolution shocked him by its crude ‘defencist’ refrains. The newly arrived representative in London of the so-called ‘socialist bloc’ was a ‘defencist’ of the vilest kind. The commission of Rusanov, Erlich, Goldenberg and Smirnov paraded about Europe in what Chicherin was convinced was a vain search for democracy. In London the main practical task was to organise the return of émigrés. Chicherin, who was by then secretary of most émigré organisations there, was also made secretary of the commission delegated to deal with this problem. The SR representative on it, Dr Gavronsky, a narrow-minded man capable of any mean action, had agreed with the chargé d’affaires, Nabokov, to try to delay the return of the Bolsheviks. At the height of the argument, Chicherin was detained without trial in Brixton jail, where he remained until he was exchanged for the British Ambassador, Buchanan, at the start of 1918. He returned to Petrograd in January, and thus began a fresh page in his life.
Chicherin was by birth an aristocrat, related to the Baltic nobility, and he received a solid university education, particularly in history; he began a diplomatic career before breaking irrevocably with his background and involving himself in the revolutionary movement. Amongst his fellow political exiles, however, Chicherin, who used the pseudonym Ornatsky during the emigration, always remained a strange figure: this Red aristocrat and former Tsarist civil servant cut something of a contrast in a Bohemian milieu. It was precisely his qualities as a civil servant that were appreciated, however: he was given the important post of secretary of the social democrat organisation in exile. Chicherin was a Menshevik and among Lenin’s staunchest opponents. In Paris, where, since he had contacts in the French socialist world, he spent much of his period of exile, he came into frequent and sharp conflict with the Bolshevik leader. A contemporary account of Lenin in Paris speaks of Chicherin thus:
Chicherin was a picturesque figure among the émigrés. Easy, calm, slow and quiet of speech, he never got excited, never spoke with raised voice. He sincerely disliked the Bolsheviks, and considered them to be human monsters; he was persuaded that their existence constituted an abnormal phenomenon. He never lost control of himself or got angry, he did not speak at the big meetings, but he had his audience, with whom he kept up regular relations; he wrote a great number of letters to all the Menshevik orgnisations in existence outside Russia, and also to individual émigrés spread around Europe and America.1
Chicherin did not struggle against Lenin in émigré circles only, but fought him with all his strength on the international scene. After the Prague Congress in 1912, he was one of the first to lay accusations against Lenin before the ISB; on the eve of the First World War, he was utterly opposed to any attempt at a merger of Mensheviks and Bolsheviks. He was all the more dangerous as an opponent since he enjoyed good relations with and exercised some influence over a faction in the European socialist movement with which Lenin was attempting to establish points of contact—namely, the left and the extreme left.
Chicherin’s sympathies extended, in fact, to revolutionary tendencies on an international level: he was in close touch with Pannekoek’s extremist group in Bremen; he was friendly with Karl Liebknecht and, above all, played a major role in that seedbed of the left wing, the Socialist Youth International. He had solid contacts, likewise, in the French and Belgian socialist movements, and during the war in England, where he was one of the first members of the British Socialist Party.
He was not understood, but he was respected, by both his political friends and his enemies (including Lenin) in the divided and quarrelsome world of political émigrés. The war marks a turning-point in Chicherin’s relations with the Bolshevik leadership. After a brief and falsely patriotic spell of hesitancy, Chicherin became a resolute internationalist,1 and his political stand after 1916 was warmly applauded by Lenin. On returning to Russia in January 1918 after the adventure of his imprisonment in England, Chicherin joined the Bolshevik Party. The Commissar for Foreign Affairs greeted him with great warmth: his name was Trotsky. ‘Chicherin arrived in Moscow at the most opportune moment,’ he wrote later. Indeed, Chicherin arrived in the middle of controversy and crisis in the leadership over the Brest–Litovsk agreement. Trotsky opposed the agreement and wanted to resign from his post as Commissar for Foreign Affairs. He saw Chicherin as his ideal replacement, particularly since Lenin held Chicherin’s diplomatic talents in high esteem. With a sigh of relief, Trotsky confessed, ‘I handed the diplomatic helm over to him’.2 He was immediately appointed Deputy Commissar and on 30 May 1918 became head of the Commissariat for Foreign Affairs. It was he who signed the Brest–Litovsk peace treaty, and he ran Soviet foreign policy with a great deal of skill. His name is closely involved in all Soviet diplomatic initiatives up to 1927. He led the Soviet delegations to Genoa and Lausanne, and he engineered the Rapallo agreement. Even after the Revolution, Chicherin remained faithful to himself and to his simple way of life. He was a tireless worker, an excellent functionary but a hopeless organiser: he tried to do everything himself, down to the last detail, and ended up being overwhelmed. He was a fragile man, easily excited, unsure of himself and of his position; a sensitive but very intelligent man whose opinions and thoughts were highly charged with emotion.
His predecessor had regarded his job in terms of politics and revolution; Chicherin’s style was that of diplomat and high functionary. In his memoirs, he does not hide that he supported no particular political line: acting according to Lenin’s directives, he was content to be a skilful executant. This did not change under Stalin. Louis Fischer has described his foreign policy line thus: ‘In Chicherin’s concept, Germany was the pivot of Soviet foreign policy and Asia its special concern ... In broad terms, Chicherin’s policy was isolationist and anti-West. …’3 Chicherin remained outside the internal struggles in the Party leadership, despite the fact that he was a member of the CC after the fourteenth and fifteenth Congresses (1925 and 1927 respectively). Suffering from a serious illness, he spent the year 1928–9 under treatment in Germany and was released from his duties ‘on his own request’ in 1930. He died in 1936.
G. H.
(autobiography)
I was born in 1877, the son of a small landowner. I went to school at the Vilno Gymnasium. In 1894, when I was in the seventh form, I entered an SD self-education circle, joined the Lithuanian SD Party the following year, and was the leader of circles for apprentice workers and craftsmen (who knew me as ‘Jacek’), whilst at the same time studying Marxism. I chose to leave school at the end of the eighth class in 1896 so as to be closer to the working masses. During my time at the Gymnasium, I was constantly at loggerheads with the administration, being of a hasty and impulsive nature. Again in 1896, I asked the comrades to send me among the masses and not confine me to militancy in the circles. At that time there was friction between the intelligentsia and the workers’ leaders. The latter demanded that the intellectuals should teach them general knowledge and how to read and write, without meddling in things that did not concern them, that is the masses. Despite this, I succeeded in becoming an agitator and reached previously untouched workers by talking to them in their bars in the evenings.
In early 1897 the Party sent me to Kovno, an industrial town where there was as yet no SD organisation and where the local group of the Polish Socialist Party (PPS) had been netted by the police. Here I infiltrated myself among the hard core of the factory workers, coming across appalling poverty and exploitation, particularly of female labour, and it was here that I learnt by practice how to organise strikes. During the second half of the year I was arrested in the street after being betrayed for ten roubles by an apprentice. Not wishing to reveal where I was living, I gave my name as Jebrovski, and in 1898 I was deported to Vyatka province for three years. First I went to Nolinsk, but then I was sent over 300 miles further north to the village of Kaigorodsk as a punishment for obstinate behaviour, a row with the police, and also for having found work at a tobacco factory. In August 1899 I escaped in a boat and returned to Vilno, where I found that the Lithuanian SDs were negotiating a union with the PPS. I was violently hostile to nationalism, and the fact that in 1898, whilst I was in prison, the Lithuanian SDs had not joined the RSDRP, was in my view the worst of crimes. Moreover, I had written a letter to this effect from prison to the leader of the Lithuanian social democrats, Dr Domashevich.
When I reached Vilno, my former comrades were already in exile and students had taken over the leadership of the movement. I was not allowed to make contact with the workers and I was pressed to go abroad, being put in touch with some smugglers who drove me by coach along the Vilkomirsk road to the frontier. In the coach I met a boy who, for ten roubles, managed to obtain a passport for me in a small town. I went to the railway station and took a ticket for Warsaw, where I had the address of a member of the Bund. At that time Warsaw had only PPS and Bund groups, the SD organisation having been decimated. I made contact with the workers and rapidly succeeded in re-establishing our organisation, winning over from the PPS first some shoemakers, and then whole groups of carpenters, bakers, engineering and leather workers. At this point, the clash with the PPS came into the open and inevitably ended in our victory even though we had neither financial support, nor literature, nor the intelligentsia at our disposal. At that time I was active under the names of ‘The Astronomer’ and ‘Franek’. In February 1900 I was arrested at a meeting and held first in the Warsaw citadel, and then in the Siedlce prison. In 1902 I was exiled for five years to eastern Siberia, but at Vekholenko, on the way to Vilyuisk, I escaped with the SR Sladkopevets and made my way abroad with the help of the Bund.
Soon after my arrival, in August of the same year, a conference of the Polish and Lithuanian SD Party was held in Berlin, at which it was decided to publish Czerwony Sztandar. I settled in Krakow under the pseudonym ‘Jozef’ to organise the smuggling of Party materials over the border. Until 1905, I made several visits to Russian Poland, at first for clandestine activity and then as a member of the Main Directorate of the Polish and Lithuanian SD Party. In July 1905 I was arrested and only released under the October amnesty. In 1906 I was a delegate to the ‘unifying’ Congress of the RSDRP in Stockholm and entered the Central Committee as representative for Poland and Lithuania. In late 1906 I was arrested in Warsaw, and released on bail in June 1907. On 13 April 1908 I was rearrested, tried on two counts, one old and one new, and in late 1909 I was deported to Taseyevka in Siberia. I spent only seven days there before escaping abroad via Warsaw. I settled afresh in Krakow, and visited Russian Poland several times. In 1912 I was arrested in Warsaw, tried for escaping from exile, and condemned to three years’ hard labour. In 1914 I was transferred to Oryol, where I served the remainder of my sentence. Then I was sent to Moscow in 1916, tried for my Party activity during the period 1910–12, and a further six years’ hard labour were added to my sentence.
The February Revolution freed me from the central Moscow prison. Until August 1917, I worked in Moscow, and then in that month I was one of the Moscow delegates to the RSDRP(b) Congress at which I was elected to the CC. I remained in Petrograd. In the October Revolution, I was a member of the Military Revolutionary Committee, and then I was entrusted with the task of organising the Vecheka [Extraordinary Commission for the Struggle against Sabotage and Counter-Revolution]. I was appointed its Chairman, holding at the same time the post of Commissar for Internal Affairs. From 14 April 1921 I was also Commissar for Transport, and then in 1924 became head of the VSNKh of the USSR. I have been a member of the CC of the RKP(b) continuously since 1917. Until then, I was a professional, clandestine revolutionary spending in all eleven years in exile, deportation, hard labour and prison.
In March 1917, the Revolution freed Dzerzhinsky from prison in Moscow, and he then joined the Bolshevik Party for the first time. In this experienced Polish revolutionary, Lenin’s Party acquired a first-class recruit. He had behind him twenty years’ experience of revolutionary work and eleven years of prison and exile. As well as a fanatic and efficient organiser, Dzerzhinsky was ‘a man of strong willpower … and explosive passion. His energy was kept under pressure by constant electrical charges, as it were. … Despite this nervous tension, Dzerzhinsky did not suffer from periods of depression or apathy. He seemed always to be at full steam. Lenin once compared him to “the fieriest of thoroughbred horses”’ (Trotsky). Lenin had known him since 1906, and held his qualities as a revolutionary in high esteem. In 1906, Dzerzhinsky had been one of Rosa Luxemburg’s lieutenants, and he remained attached to her for many years. His pro-Bolshevik sympathies date from this period, and he supported Lenin’s Party in its struggle within the Russian Party. After 1911, when the schism in the Polish Party brought out and added to Rosa Luxemburg’s hostility to Lenin, Dzerzhinsky was torn between his sympathies and his loyalties: so he supported the Bolsheviks in Russian affairs while continuing to fight against them with Rosa Luxemburg in Polish affairs.
In 1917 his entry into the Bolshevik Party was wholehearted, and he put all his talents and ardour at the service of the October Revolution. In July 1917 he was elected by Congress to the Central Committee, and was called to contribute to the running of the Party as a member of the Secretariat. In the turbulent period that preceded the October Revolution, when the Party’s leadership was split, he gave all his support to Lenin, who was in fact in the minority. At the decisive moment of the Extraordinary Central Committee meeting on 16 October, he was one of those who defended Lenin’s resolution against Kamenev and Zinoviev, and supported the insurrection and immediate action. He then became a member of the Central Committee’s RVS, which became part of the Petrograd Soviet RVS, and he was an energetic and active member. On 24 October he was given the task of watching over the actions and orders of the Provisional government. Then in December 1917 he was entrusted with the thankless and heavy job of organising and running the famous Extraordinary All-Russian Commission for the Struggle against Counter-Revolution (Vecheka) which later became the GPU, the political police which Dzerzhinsky continued to run. During the Civil War, this energetic man was called on in cases of extreme difficulty or when exceptional measures were thought necessary—for example, at the time of the Perm catastrophe on the Eastern Front, in 1919, and in the winter of 1920 when he had to face enormous transport problems caused by snowstorms.
He was an important personage in the Central Committee, and played a part in the internal struggles that the Bolshevik Party went through in the years immediately following the Revolution. As a left-wing communist, he opposed peace negotiations with the Germans in January 1918, and stood against Lenin to the extent of demanding his dismissal.
At the CC meeting on 11 [NS 24] January 1918 he delivered a violent diatribe against Lenin, accusing him of ‘doing under cover what Kamenev and Zinoviev had done in October’.1
Within the CC he moved closer to Trotsky’s position and in the end voted for the motion of conciliation. Until 1921 he supported the left-wing tendency in the CC and, according to Trotsky, was particularly attracted towards the leader of the left himself in 1920-1. In 1922 he opposed Lenin’s principle of self-determination, and came closer to Stalin on the question of nationalities. In the celebrated Georgian affair, in which the Caucasian CC came up against the integrationist policies of Stalin and Sergo Ordzhonikidze, Dzerzhinsky, who was in charge of the inquiry commission set up by the CC, manoeuvred in favour of the Commissar for Nationalities.2 There is nothing surprising about this alliance: as regards the question of nationalities, Dzerzhinsky was still faithful to Rosa Luxemburg. Lenin, though bedridden, realised that an attempt was being made to mislead him, and he riposted by making Stalin and Dzerzhinsky carry all responsibility for the policy of Russification. This opprobrium only served to bring Dzerzhinsky closer to Stalin, whom he aided during the struggle against the opposition. In October 1923 he headed the CC’s sub-commission which presented a report on the political situation. The clarity of his statements inside the sub-commission on the death of democracy in the Party’s internal affairs are in strong contrast to the final report which demanded a strengthening of repressive measures and which led Trotsky to take an even clearer stand. Indeed, for the latter democracy could only exist within the Party.
Stalin did all he could to retain the support of the influential Dzerzhinsky, who said himself that he ‘could only love and hate totally, never by halves’, since his heart was ‘completely Bolshevik’.
Dzerzhinsky had always dreamt of a position in the management of the economy, and in 1924 Stalin made the dream come true by appointing him President of the Sovnarkhoz. He remained president of the GPU none the less. In his post at the Sovnarkhoz, he was one of the architects of NEP. He sympathised with the right wing under Bukharin’s leadership, and maintained his alliance with Stalin. As an alternate member of the Politburo, to which he was elected in 1924 and reelected the following year, and as a member of the Orgburo, he played an active part in the struggle against the left opposition and the United Opposition. He was overworked, and reached a degree of strain that made life with him more and more difficult. He died on 20 July 1926 of a heart attack that struck him in the middle of a particularly turbulent meeting of the Central Committee.
Who was this man Dzerzhinsky, whose name became, during the 1920’s, the synonym of terror, who was the bogeyman of Western public opinion? Not only in bourgeois eyes, but also for the socialists, left-wingers included, Dzerzhinsky was hateful; the Austrian socialist Oskar Blum, compared the echo of his name with the spirit of Banquo in Macbeth.1 For his friends, however, Dzerzhinsky was the very typification of Bolshevism, firm, hard and uncorrupted, acting only in the service of his revolutionary ideals. His personal diary and letters which appeared a few years ago show the ‘Red hangman’ as a complex figure, capable of great tenderness towards children and simple folk, believing in friendship and torn apart as well as utterly convinced by the necessity of the tasks he had to accomplish.2 It was not mere chance that he was appointed head of the Cheka: he had asked for this ‘dirty work himself, out of masochism as much as out of the spy-mania that haunted him—he could see Okhrana men everywhere. Although he thought him excessively harsh, Lenin was convinced of Dzerzhinsky’s integrity and blind obedience to Party discipline, and thus entrusted him with this responsibility. With death in his heart he was prepared to strike down all those the Party considered its enemies—even if they were his friends. Radek, who belonged to the opposition in 1926, said this on learning of the death of a man who had been his comrade and adversary for many years: ‘Felix died just in time. He was a dogmatist. He would not have shrunk from reddening his hands in our blood.’ But nobody in the opposition doubted Dzerzhinsky’s ‘uprightness’.3
G.H.
(autobiography)
I was born on 10 October 1883 in Simferopol (Crimea), the son of a wealthy merchant. I was still studying in a Gymnasium at the end of the 1890s, when Russia witnessed an upsurge in the labour movement in general, and strikes in particular, and when the well-known persecution of students began. Nevertheless I joined the revolutionary movement and the RSDRP. As a result of this, by 1903, when I left the Gymnasium, I had become ‘politically unreliable’ and I could not enter a single Russian university. Therefore, I went abroad to study in Berlin where I entered the Medical Faculty, continuing at the same time my studies of the social and political sciences and participating in both the German and the Russian SD movements, as a member of the auxiliary RSDRP group in Berlin.
In 1904 I was instructed by the Central Committee to convey literature to Baku and to conduct propaganda there. I joined the Baku SD organisation, but I had to leave Transcaucasia in the same year to avoid arrest, and I was sent to Moscow for the same sort of work. I was soon exposed there, too, so I took refuge abroad, where I arrived immediately after the events of 9 January 1905. I straightaway returned to Russia and took part in the Revolution in various towns, first in the north and then in the south. I was in the Crimea at the time of the Potyomkin mutiny and I subsequently arranged the escape from the Sebastopol military prison of K. Feldman, one of the mutineers. After this, I again had to take refuge abroad. In Berlin, after the Stockholm Party Congress, I was designated one of the four members of the first ‘Foreign Bureau of the Central Committee of the RSDRP’.
In May 1906, on a directive from the Imperial German Chancellor von Bülow, I was expelled from Germany as an ‘undesirable alien’. I left to go back to Moscow, but as I was being hunted by the police there I was again obliged to emigrate, this time to Zurich, where I entered the Law Faculty, maintaining at the same time my revolutionary and Party activity. I returned to Russia in 1907, only to be forced to emigrate in 1908. I settled in Vienna, where Trotsky and I began to publish our Pravda. On behalf of the editorial board, I visited all the Party organisations in Russia in 1910. I made a similar trip in 1911 and in 1912, when an organisational commission was set up to summon an all-Party congress, I was given a seat on it to represent the Pravda group and its editors. In this capacity I made another clandestine tour of Russia to urge the calling of this congress. During my stay in Odessa in 1912,I was arrested with the whole of the local Party organisation.
In the absence of material proof, I spent ten months in solitary confinement and was then sentenced to administrative exile in Tobolsk province in the far north for four years. Following the arrest in Alexandria in Egypt of the editor of the journal Moryak, with whom I had been in correspondence as co-editor of Pravda, and the discovery of letters signed by a V. Krymsky in the journal’s archives, proof that Krymsky and Ioffe were one and the same person could be established to the satisfaction of a court. Consequently, in 1913 I was rearrested in Siberia and accused under Article 102 of being involved in the affair of the ‘Black Sea Union of Sailors’. In court I admitted my membership of the Party but, in view of the recent outbreak of war and leniency in sentences, I was not condemned to hard labour but to exile for life in Siberia, together with deprivation of all the civic privileges to which I had been entitled by birth. I was not, however, exiled. On the basis of the papers from the trial, an indictment for membership of the Party was drawn up and I was transferred to the hard labour block. In 1916 I appeared in court for the second time, and in view of my earlier confession of Party membership, I was again sentenced to exile in Siberia. The place chosen was Kansk district, Yeniseysk province, and as a result of the shortage of doctors caused by the war, I was compulsorily appointed head of the hospital at a mica mine in the very heart of the taiga. From Siberia I continued to contribute to various illegal papers. As soon as rumours of the 1917 Revolution reached me, I left the mine and, after a short stay in Kansk to organise revolutionary activity there, I left for Petrograd.
There, Trotsky, myself and some others began to produce the paper Vperyod. Then I represented the Bolsheviks successively on the Petrograd city Duma, the Petrograd Soviet, the VTsIK, and the Constituent Assembly (as member for Pskov); I was a participant in the ‘Democratic Conference’ and the ‘Pre-Parliament’. At the sixth Party Congress in July 1917, I was elected a member of the CC of the RSDRP(b) and then, after its change of name, of the RKP(b). During the October rising, I was chairman of the Military Revolutionary Committee. When the latter was abolished, transferring its powers to the Council of People’s Commissars, I was sent to Brest-Litovsk as head of the peace delegation. I concluded and signed the armistice with Germany, Austro-Hungary, Turkey and Bulgaria, but after the German ultimatum I refused to sign the peace treaty, declaring that this was not an agreed peace but a dictated peace, which must be resisted with all available means. At the end of the Brest negotiations, I was Commissar for Foreign Affairs and Social Security, and then I was sent as envoy to Berlin. There I held talks with the German government and concluded an additional agreement supplementing the Brest peace treaty. Next I undertook negotiations with Turkey. I took an active part in the preparations for the German revolution and on 6 November 1918, three days before the rising, the whole embassy and I were expelled from Germany.
After the trimph of the German revolution I made contact with the new German government and the Berlin Soviet of Workers’ Deputies from Minsk and Borisov, where our train was held up, but I did not succeed in returning to Germany. When the All-German Congress of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies was convened, I was sent as head of the VTsIK delegation, but we were not allowed into Berlin. After this, I was dispatched to Lithuania and Byelorussia as a member of the CC to direct Party work there and further the formation of a Lithuanian-Byelorussian republic. Immediately before the occupation of Vilno by the Poles, I returned to Moscow.
Soon I was sent to the Ukraine in my capacity as member of the Defence Council and Commissar for Soviet Socialist Inspection. With the capture of Kiev by Denikin, I retreated with the army and other members of the Council to Chernigov, whence I returned to Moscow after the whole of the Ukraine had been overrun by Denikin and Petlyura. I was directed to Petrograd to organise the newly formed Rabkrin in accordance with my plans and methods. I also joined the Petrograd Party Committee, and during the advance of Yudenich and the Estonians, I was a member of the Council for the Internal Defence of Petrograd. When Yudenich had been routed, I was sent to Yuriev to conclude a peace with Estonia. Within a short space of time, I also headed delegations to discuss peace terms with Latvia, Lithuania, and, in 1921, Poland. When they had all been agreed, I was sent to Turkestan as Chairman of the Turkestan Commission of the VTsIK and the Turkestan Bureau of the CC.
I toured the whole of Turkestan, Bukhara and Khorezm before being recalled to Moscow and dispatched to Genoa as a presidium member of the Soviet delegation. When talks there were ended, I was made Ambassador Extraordinary to China and Japan, and led the delegation which negotiated with Japan in Ch’ang-Ch’un (Manchuria). This was concluded despite serious illness on my part, and I returned to Peking for talks with the Chinese government. Then Viscount Goto, a member of the Japanese House of Lords and Mayor of Tokyo, invited me to Japan ostensibly for medical treatment, but in fact for diplomatic reasons. At first I had unofficial conversations with him, and then official ones with Kawakami, a representative of the Japanese government. My health at this time deteriorated to such an extent that I was obliged to call a halt to these talks and return to Moscow. There I fell gravely ill and in spring 1924 I was taken to Vienna for treatment. When I had recovered somewhat, I was sent to London as a presidium member of the Soviet delegation, and after a first agreement with Great Britain had been signed, I was left in London to prepare a second. Then I was appointed Plenipotentiary in Vienna.
During the whole of my Party and revolutionary career, I have contributed to a large number of Party newspapers and journals, and edited some of them. I have also written a few pamphlets, of which the chief ones are: Local Self-Government, The Collapse of Menshevism, The Foreign Policy of the Soviet Government, The Peace Offensive, The Genoa Conference, From Genoa to the Hague, The Last Utopian, and England Today.
Ioffe was a son of the upper Crimean bourgoisie, a member of the Karaite sect, and a brilliant intellectual who at a very young age already had behind him many years as a militant and many positions of responsibility. He had, moreover, donated his entire inheritance to the Party. From 1908 he belonged to the small group of Trotsky’s disciples, and he helped the leader publish Pravda in Vienna; Ioffe also financed the newspaper in part.
Afflicted with nervous disorders and suffering from violent attacks of neurasthenia, Ioffe was treated in Vienna by the psychoanalyst Alfred Adler. Trotsky took a great liking to him and did all he could to give him confidence in himself. He returned to Russia in 1912 to carry out secret work, but was arrested and deported. He was not freed until the February Revolution. Ioffe had never been a Bolshevik but joined the Party as a member of Mezhrayonka and went straight to the top leadership.
The thankless task of negotiating the peace treaty of Brest-Litovsk with the Germans fell to him. He did it reluctantly out of discipline. At the CC meeting in January 1918 he was the only one who instead of abstaining voted against Lenin’s motion in favour of resuming talks despite the ultimatum. Nevertheless, Trotsky managed to win him over to the position that Soviet power must not be jeopardised for the sake of a hypothetical German revolution. Thus Ioffe resumed the Brest-Litovsk talks and brought them to their conclusion. Ioffe’s talents as a diplomat, which Lenin appreciated highly, were thenceforth apparent. His nervous illness seemed to disappear; as his friend Trotsky said, the Revolution ‘did much more than psychoanalysis to liberate Ioffe from his complexes’.1
Ioffe was chosen as the first Ambassador to Germany. For the Bolshevik government, this was a post of strategic importance: the chances of world revolution depended on Germany. He took up his post on 20 April 1918. In May he transmitted to the German government the Soviet proposal for economic and political negotiations. The economic negotiations had no great outcome, but on the political front, however, Germany, who wished to diminish her isolation in the world, accepted an alliance with the Soviet Union, which was duly signed by Ioffe on 27 August 1918.
In Berlin Ioffe acted in the interests of world revolution. He directed both revolutionary progaganda and political and financial aid to the German revolutionary movement. The German government was justifiably afraid that the Soviet Embassy was becoming a centre for revolutionary propaganda. On 6 November Ioffe was obliged to leave his post in Berlin and diplomatic relations were broken off. Upon his return he declared with pride: ‘I too have helped within my own means towards the victory of the German Revolution.’
The most diverse tasks then fell to this ‘always meticulous’ man.1 He was an organiser and political commissar entrusted with special missions in various fields, but above all remained one of the builders of the Soviet diplomatic corps: the name of Ioffe is connected with all the major points in its history, his signature is to be found beneath every important treaty.
This kind of life once again wrecked his health. When his illness no longer permitted him to take up diplomatic posts, he was appointed Rector of the Chinese University in Moscow. The Party’s internal crisis only worsened Ioffe’s nervous state—for he was above all a political man. Diplomacy, like any other public service, represented in his eyes a mission to accomplish but not a career.
He had ‘a bearded, Assyrian face, powerful lips, and eyes that disconcerted the newcomer, so severe was their squint’, according to Victor Serge.2 Ioffe found enough time to write, to reflect and to pronounce on the major problems of his day. He remained a faithful supporter of Trotsky, and for a short period recommenced his collaboration with him. He was Trotsky’s deputy on the Glavkontseskom.
The way he ended his life bears the mark of this unconditional loyalty. His illness (polyneuritis had made him a semi-invalid), and Trotsky also, prevented him from becoming as deeply involved in the opposition struggle as he would have liked.
That is why he planned, after Trotsky’s expulsion from the CC and then from the Party, to give his death a political significance. He committed suicide on 16 November 1927. He left a farewell letter to Trotsky-his political testament – in which he encouraged him to persevere in a struggle he considered a just one, to ‘follow the example of Ilyich’, and to acquire the qualities which had been the secret of his victory: ‘intransigence, obstinacy’. His funeral was the pretext for the last public demonstration of the opposition.1
G. H.
(autobiography)
The first woman to join a government and the first woman representative and Ambassador Extraordinary of her country.
I was born in 1872 and grew up in a land-owning gentry family. My father was a Russian general, and Ukrainian by birth. My mother was a native of Finland and came from a peasant family. I spent my childhood and youth in St Petersburg and Finland. As the youngest in the family, and moreover the only daughter (my mother had been married twice), I was an object of special concern for all our numerous family with its patriarchal traditionalism. I was not allowed to go to a Gymnasium for fear that I should meet ‘undesirable elements’. At sixteen I passed the school-leaving certificate and began to attend private courses and lectures given by professors of history and literature. I was also forbidden to go to the Bestuzhev lectures. I studied a great deal, mainly under the guidance of the famous literary historian, Viktor Petrovich Ostrogorsky. He considered that I had literary talent and urged me to enter journalism. I married very early, partly as a protest against the will of my parents. But three years later I separated from my husband, the engineer V. Kollontai, taking my little boy with me (my maiden name is Domontovich).
By this time, my political convictions had already begun to take shape. I worked in a number of cultural and educational societies which then (this was in the middle of the 1890s) bore the character of a cloak for clandestine ventures. Thus while working in the ‘Mobile Museum of Educational Textbooks’ we made contact with prisoners in the Schlüsselburg fortress. Our work in the educational society, and the lessons we gave to the workers, provided us with the opportunity for rich, personal contact with the latter. In addition we arranged charity evenings to raise funds for the political Red Cross.
1896 was the decisive year in my life. In the spring of that year I visited Narva and the famous Kremholm textile works. The enslavement of the 12,000 weavers had a shattering effect on me. At that time I was not yet a Marxist and was more inclined to Populism and terrorism, but after my visit to Narva, I set about studying Marxism and economics. The two first legal Marxist journals, Nachalo and Novoye Slovo, were launched at that time, and they opened my eyes. The path for which I had been searching with particular insistence since Narva, was found.
The famous strike of textile-workers in 1896 in St Petersburg also greatly contributed to a clarification of my political views. 36,000 workers, male and female, were involved, and E. D. Stasova, myself and many other comrades organised collections and help for the strikers. This visible sign of the growing consciousness of the proletariat, for all its servitude and lack of rights, finally decided me to join the Marxist camp. I did not as yet, however, undertake any literary activity in this field, nor did I take any active part in the movement. I considered myself insufficiently prepared. It was in 1898 that I wrote my first article, ‘The Foundations of Education according to Dobrolyubov’. It appeared in the September edition of the journal Obrazovaniye which at that time still bore a pedagogical character, but which later became one of the most restrained legal organs of Marxist thought. Its editor was A. Ya. Ostrogorsky. On 13 August of the same year, I went abroad to study social and economic sciences.
I entered the university in Zurich to work under Professor Herkner, whose book on the labour movement (in its second edition) had interested me. A characteristic feature was that the deeper I delved into the laws of economics and the more I became a true ‘orthodox’ Marxist, the more my professor and tutor moved to the right and the further he departed from Marx’s revolutionary theory, so that by the fifth edition of his book, he had become a real renegade. This was that strange period when the German Party saw the emergence of tendencies such as ‘practical conciliationism’, opportunism, ‘revisionism’, all deftly initiated by Bernstein. My worthy professor echoed Bernstein and praised him to the skies. But I resolutely sided with the ‘leftists’. I became a passionate supporter of Kautsky, devouring every edition of his paper Neue Zeit and Rosa Luxemburg’s articles, especially her pamphlet Social Revolution or Social Reforms, where she demolished Bernstein’s time-serving theories.
On the advice of my professor and armed with introductions from him, I set off for England in 1899 to ‘study’ the English labour movement, which was supposed to convince me that truth was on the side of the opportunists, and not the ‘leftists’. I had an introduction to Sidney and Beatrice Webb themselves, but after our first conversations I realised that we were not talking the same language, and I set out to see the labour movement for myself without their guidance. What I saw convinced me that they were wrong. I realised the acute social contradictions existing in England and the impotence of the reformists to cure them by trade union tactics or by the famous ‘settlements’ such as Toynbee Hall, the co-operatives and clubs, etc. I returned from England even more persuaded of the correctness of the ‘leftists’ and the ‘true’ Marxist, and I went not to Zurich but to Russia. I had made contacts with underground militants and I wanted to try my hand at the real thing, to apply myself to the struggle.
When I had left Russia in 1898, all the avant-garde of the intelligentsia and students had been Marxist-inclined. Their heroes were Beltov, Struve and Tugan-Baranovsky. A fierce struggle was taking place between the Populists and the Marxists. The up-and-coming elements – Ilin (Lenin), Maslov, Bogdanov and others – were providing a theoretical basis for the tactics which had been formed underground by the SD Party. I returned with the optimistic hope of finding myself among like-minded people, but the Russia of autumn 1899 was not the Russia of previous years. The honeymoon unity between legal and underground Marxism had come to an end. Legal Marxism was openly turning to the defence of large, industrial capital. The ‘left wing’ was going underground, defending with ever increasing determination the revolutionary tactics of the proletariat. The passion for Marx was replaced among students and the intelligentsia by a no less ardent passion for ‘Bernsteinianism’ and revisionism. Nietzsche began to come into fashion with his ‘aristocracy of the spirit’.
I remember as if it were yesterday an evening arranged in the flat of E. D. Stasova’s father to raise funds for the political Red Cross. Struve gave a lecture on Bernstein. It was a ‘select’ audience including many underground activists, and yet Struve’s lecture received sympathetic, even fulsome praise. Only Avilov spoke against him. All the leading lights and ‘names’ of that period supported Struve. I took the floor, although this was granted reluctantly, as to someone little known. My defence of the ‘orthodox’ (leftists) was too heated. It met with general disapproval and even an indignant shrugging of the shoulders. One person declared it was unprecedented impudence to speak against such generally accepted authorities as Struve and Tugan. Another thought that such a speech played into the hands of the reactionaries. A third believed that we had already outgrown ‘phrases’ and must become sober politicians. [ … ] During this period I wrote articles against Bernstein, about the role of the class struggle, and in defence of the ‘true’ Marxists for the journal Nauchnoye Obozreniye, but the censors indicated in red and blue pencil that my articles were unsuitable for publication.
Then I decided to devote myself to research in economics. My links with Finland were still strong. The Finnish people were suffering a black period of violence and oppression under the Governor, General Bobrikov. The independence of this small people had been shaken to its foundations. The constitution and laws of the country were being blatantly infringed. A struggle was in progress between the Finnish people and the Russian autocracy. Both intellectually and emotionally I was whole-heartedly on the side of the Finns. I saw in Finland the growing but scarcely recognised strength of the industrial proletariat. Noticing the signs of sharpening class contradictions and the formation of a new, workers’ Finland in opposition to the nationalists, bourgeois parties –whether pro-Swedish, pro-Finnish, or in favour of the Young Finn movement – I helped the Finnish comrades to organise their first strike fund. My articles about Finland appeared in 1900 in the German economic journal Soziale Praxis, as well as in Nauchnoye Obozreniye and Obrazovaniye. One article, a concrete, statistical analysis, was carried in Russkoye Bogatstvo. Simultaneously during the years 1900–3, I collected material for my large economic and statistical work on Finland, which had the innocent title of The Life of Finnish Workers. Naturally, these years were not solely devoted to literary and scientific work. I had also to undertake underground activity, but here I remained more on the fringe—organising circles beyond the Nevskaya Zastava, compiling appeals, storing and disseminating underground literature, etc.
In 1901 I went abroad. I met Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg, the Lafar-gues in Paris, and Pleknanov in Geneva. An unsigned article by me about Finland appeared in Zarya, and another article appeared under the pseudonym ‘Elena Malin’ in Kautsky’s Neue Zeit. Since then I have remained in regular contact with foreign comrades. At the beginning of 1903 my book The Life of Finnish Workers was published—an economic analysis of the state of Finnish workers and the development of Finland’s economy. Written in the Marxist spirit, it was greeted sympathetically by the underground militants and disapprovingly by many legal Marxists.
In 1903 I made my first speech at a public meeting organised by students on St Tatiana’s day, where I contrasted the idealist philosophy with the socialist one. In summer 1903 I went abroad again. This was the time of peasant rebellion in Russia, and the workers in the south were rising. Heady ideas were abroad. Two antagonistic forces were coming into ever more bitter conflict: underground Russia marching towards the Revolution, and the autocracy stubbornly clinging to power. Struve’s Osvobozhdeniye group occupied an intermediate position. Many of my close friends were going over to Osvobozhdeniye, considering pure socialism a utopia, given the Russia of that time. I had to make a clean break with recent comrades-in-arms and like-minded associates. Among socialist émigrés, the arguments were no longer between Populists and Marxists as before, but between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks. I had friends in both camps. I was closer in spirit to Bolshevism, with its uncompromising belief in revolution, but the personal charm of Plekhanov restrained me from condemnation of Menshevism.
On my return from abroad in 1903, I joined neither of the Party groupings, offering to be used as an agitator for proclamations etc. by both factions. Bloody Sunday, 1905, found me on the street. I was going with the demonstrators to the Winter Palace, and the picture of the massacre of unarmed, working folk is for ever imprinted on my memory. The unusually bright January sunshine, trusting, expectant faces … the fateful signal from the troops drawn up round the palace … pools of blood on the white snow … the whips, the whooping of the gendarmes, the dead, the injured … children shot. … The Party Committee had been very wary and mistrustful of the demonstration of 9 January. At specially organised workers’ meetings, many comrades had attempted to dissuade workers from participating, seeing in it a ‘provocation’ and a trap. I thought that we had to go. This demonstration was an act of self-determination by the working class, a school of revolutionary activity. And I was inspired by the decisions of the Amsterdam Congress on the question of ‘mass actions’.
After the January days, underground work went forward with new energy and strength. The Bolsheviks in St Petersburg began to publish a clandestine paper (the name of which I forget), for which I not only contributed articles but also did technical work. Of the proclamations I wrote during this period, a particularly successful one was directed against the idea of a Zemsky Sobor1 and in favour of a Constituent Assembly. Having maintained my close contacts with Finland, I now actively assisted the co-ordination of the efforts of the Russian and Finnish SD Parties to strike a blow against Tsarism.
I was one of the first women socialists in Russia to lay the foundations of an organisation for female workers, arranging special meetings and clubs for them, and moreover from 1906 I defended the idea that the organisation for female workers should not be separate from the Party, but that inside the Party there should be a special bureau or commission to ascertain and defend their interests.
I worked with the Bolsheviks until 1906, when I split with them over the questions of workers’ participation in the first Duma, and the role of trade unions. Between 1906 and 1915, I allied myself with the Men-sheviks, and since then I have been a member of the Bolshevik Party. In 1908 I emigrated to escape from two court cases: I was accused of organising female textile-workers, and of calling for armed insurrection in the pamphlet Finland and Socialism. I remained a political émigrée until 1917, that is the first bourgeois revolution. Whilst abroad, I immediately joined the German, Belgian and other Parties, and I was a militant agitator and writer in Germany, France, England, Switzerland, Belgium, Italy, Sweden, Denmark, Norway and the United States (1915–16).
During the war, I was arrested in Germany, deported to Sweden, and again arrested for anti-militarist propaganda. Nevertheless, I consistently advocated support for the Zimmerwald Union (against the second International) and for internationalism, in Norway, in Sweden, and in the United States, where I had been invited by the German group in the American Socialist Party. Thus my underground work also served Russia. Returning to Russia in 1917, I was elected the first female member of the Petrograd Soviet Executive Committee, and then of the VTsIK. I was arrested with other Bolshevik leaders by the Kerensky regime, and only released just before the October Revolution on the insistence of the Petrograd Soviet. I was elected to the Bolshevik CC and stood for the seizure of power by the workers and peasants. In the first Bolshevik revolutionary cabinet I was People’s Commissar for State Assistance. From the moment of my return to Russia, I worked for the organisation of women. From 1920 I directed the Party section dealing with female labour. During my period as Commissar for Social Security, I published decrees, introducing maternity and child protection and benefits.
I was Plenipotentiary and trade representative in Norway from May 1923. From March 1924 I was Chargée d’Affaires there, and from August Minister Plenipotentiary and Envoy Extraordinary.
My major theoretical socialist and economic works are the following: The State of Working Class in Finland (1903), The Class Struggle (1906), The First Workers’ Calendar (1906), The Social Foundations of the Female Question (1908), Finland and Socialism (1907), Society and Motherhood (600 pages), Who Needs the War? (which sold in millions of copies), The Working Class and the New Morality. In addition to this, I have written a large number of articles, case histories of sexual problems, and all sorts of agitational literature directed mainly against the war and in favour of the emancipation of female labour.
Aleksandra Kollontai specialised in questions of sexuality and women’s liberation, and she has left her name in history as one of the inspirers, together with Shlyapnikov, Kiselev and Medvedev, of the Workers’ Opposition (1919–22). Her Granat autobiography does not make the slightest allusion to this. This autobiography is no doubt also one of the most unselfconscious and revealing of the period in which it was written: a long pre-history followed by a few discreet lines on the years after 1917.
In 1912 Kollontai was one of the leaders of the anti-Leninist August bloc, but from 1915 to 1917 (when she joined the Bolshevik Party) she was one of Lenin’s few faithful adherents, and he wrote to her frequently. Upon her return to Petrograd immediately after the Revolution, she opposed the majority line on critical support for the Provisional government; and when, on 4 April, Lenin delivered his historic speech to the conference of bemused Bolsheviks, Kollontai was alone in speaking out in favour of the leader. A ditty went round Petrograd at that time:
Though Lenin gives a tweet
Kollontai follows suit.
At the time imprisoned by Kerensky, Kollontai was elected in absentia to the CC at the sixth Congress. Her prestige was at that time so high that on 5 October 1917 the CC elected her to membership of the Programme Commission—a commission entrusted with the task of refurbishing the Party’s programme, which Lenin thought out of date. She figured at the head of the Bolshevik list of candidates (third name from the top) for the Constituent Assembly. Jacques Sadoul saw her at that time and found the Bolshevik Egeria of free love very beautiful, and extremely eloquent.
Moved more by sentiment than by rational motives, she rallied to the left communist group during the discussions on the Brest-Litovsk peace terms, and declared to the seventh Congress, ‘If our Soviet Republic must perish, others will carry the banner forward’. This frenetic romanticism cost her her seat on the CC, to which she never returned.
Nevertheless she retained a certain amount of prestige, and when she joined the Workers’ Opposition in 1920 she brought to the group the weight of her name and her talents as a writer. Early in 1921, she drew up a pamphlet entitled The Workers’ Opposition, but it did not reach a wide public. In it she defined the problems which had led to the creation of the Workers’ Opposition: ‘The cardinal point in the controversy between the Party leadership and the Workers’ Opposition is this: to whom will the Party entrust the construction of the communist economy? To the Sovnarkhoz, with all its bureaucratic departments, or to the industrial trade unions?’ She placed this problem in the context of a general analysis of the dangers of the Party’s fossilisation, and she brutally stated that ‘to rid Soviet institutions of the bureaucracy that lurks within them, the Party must first rid itself of its own bureaucracy’. At that time Bukharin first saw in Kollontai traces of ‘disgustingly sentimental catholic bestiality’.
She was one of the ‘twenty-two’ members of the Workers’ Opposition who protested to the Comintern, and the CC tried to have her expelled at the eleventh Congress in March 1922. Stalin tried out a ‘device’ on her, which he later used abundantly: to detach her from the Opposition – and indeed she did break with it – he sent her abroad as a diplomat. From then on she made a diplomatic career: from 1923 to 1925 she led the Soviet Legation to Norway, from 1925 to 1927 to Mexico, then again to Norway from 1927 to 1930, and from then until 1935 to Sweden. In 1927 she wrote a novel, Love Affair, in which some have seen a fictionalisation of the alleged relationship between Lenin and Inessa Armand, and a weapon in Stalin’s battle against Krupskaya, who still preserved in her links with the opposition. In 1930, it was she who handed Stalin’s ultimatum to the Swedish government, who were willing to grant Trotsky a visa. In 1945 she retired, and she died peacefully on 9 March 1952, in Moscow. She was the only major figure of any of the oppositions whom Stalin did not exterminate.
J.-J. M.
(autobiography)
I was born in 1885 in Lvov, eastern Galicia. I lost my father when I was four years old and was brought up by my mother, a primary school teacher, in the town of Tarnow, western Galicia, where I attended the Gymnasium. All my mother’s family were self-taught people with a passion for culture. Since Polish literature was Catholic and clerical, the source of education for her family, as for all Galician Jews, was classical German literature, with its universal, humanitarian ideas. [ … ]
But at school I soon fell under the spell of Polish literature and history. Polish patriotism captivated me despite its Catholic wrapping. I embraced it and, until I was thirteen, I was not only a Polish patriot but even had a leaning towards Catholicism. I was impelled to study social questions in order to discover the reasons for the division of Poland and the means of reuniting it. Old democratic and patriotic literature, which I read, represented the reasons for Polish decline as lying in the rule of the gentry and indicated that Poland’s future was linked with the international revolutionary movement. I witnessed the grinding poverty of our family – mother had to feed and educate my sister and myself on a pittance – and the penury of the craftsmen living round about us. When I was ten, I heard from an old farm-hand the story of the peasant rebellion of 1846. [ … ] From him I received my first invigorating whiff of a large revolutionary movement and I began eagerly to observe what was happening among the peasantry. [ … ]
Whilst at the Gymnasium, I began to attend clandestine meetings with a group of hatters. They belonged to an all-Austrian union which distributed literature in German among its sections, and they kept their social democratic literature in a cupboard in the room of the Jewish baker where they gathered. There I found Kautsky’s Erfurt Programme, Bebel’s Woman and Socialism, Lassalle’s speeches, and Mehring’s The History of German Social Democracy. For the rest of the year I neglected my school work and read this literature day and night. When I had assimilated the rudiments of socialism, I naturally set about spreading propaganda in the Gymnasium, where there was a tradition of illegal organisations. I myself belonged to a patriotic organisation whose immediate goals were beyond me, but which sent us boys out late at night to the cemetery so as to test our strength of character. [ … ] Later, when some socialist pamphlets found their way into my hands, I set about forming new socialist circles. They attracted roughly twenty people including the now well-known Polish actor Stefan Jaracz, and Marian Kukiel, the Polish military historian and Commandant of the Military Academy of liberated Poland. Socialism was identified in our eyes with the striving for an independent Poland. We heard nothing of the Social Democratic Party of Poland and Lithuania, which had been crippled by arrests in 1896 and only began to make itself felt again in 1902–3. Patriotism, democracy, socialism – the title of a collection of articles by Boleslaw Limanowski, the veteran of Polish patriotic socialism – these three words summed up our political ideas. [ … ]
After being expelled from the Gymnasium for the second time in summer 1901 for subversive activities, I devoted myself to the organisation of workers. Two or three months later, I left for Krakow and persuaded Haecker, the editor of the Krakow paper Naprzód, to come and give a public speech to us. I owe a great deal to Haecker. [ … ] It was from him that I learnt, in an understandably distorted form, of Rosa Luxemburg’s position on the Polish question and that Zygmunt Žulawski, one of the young members of Galician social democracy, supported her. I hastened to make the acquaintance of Žulawski, who soon came to occupy the post of secretary of the growing trade union movement in Tarnow, and it was from him that I received the first literature by social democrats in the Kingdom of Poland,1 the first numbers of the splendid Marxist journal Przeglad Socjdldemokratyczny, published by Adolf Warski, Rosa Luxemburg and Tyszka. This journal, and in particular Warski’s articles, had a stunning effect on me. From them I learnt how Polish Marxists posed the question of a programme for the Polish movement and how they made a clean break with the ideology of Polish patriotic socialism. I spent the whole year reading Marxist literature; the first volumes of the works of Marx’s youth had then appeared, published by Mehring, and they introduced me to the laboratory in which Marxism was born. I was also involved in practical work among bakers, hatters and construction workers. In summer 1902 I passed the school-leaving examination and then took my first literary steps. I wrote three articles: a study for young people of historical materialism printed in the socialist youth magazine Promien (‘The Ray’), an article on the position of bakers in Tarnow in the paper Naprzód, and an article on the excellent book by Max Schippel, The History of Sugar Production. I found a complete edition of the scientific journal of German social democracy in the house of a lawyer called Simkhe, and I read it number by number.
In autumn I went to the university of Krakow, where I decided not so much to study law as to win over Galician social democrats to a consistently Marxist policy. I was due to achieve this with Z. Žulawski, who incidentally has now become Chairman of the Central Commission of Polish Trade Unions and a deputy in the Sejm, thus rejecting this task completely and showing his true colours as a member of the PPS and an enemy of communism. Despite my views, I was added to the editorial board of Naprzód for as Daszynski, the Galician social democrat leader, laughingly said, radicalism is a short-lived childhood malady, and everyone begins his Party career with the conviction that Party history is going to start with him. This year, spent in dire poverty, energetic thought and work among the Krakow workers, completed the first period of my life. I became acquainted with Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky, whose revolutionary fervour, comradely directness and cordiality hastened my development, and it became clear to me that the gains of social democracy in a petit-bourgeois country with no industrial proletariat are not easily achieved and that it would be more productive to work in the Polish Kingdom, but that for this I would need serious preparation. Therefore, after clashes with Haecker whom I attacked at a public meeting, I left for Switzerland without a kopeck in my pocket, but with the hope of supporting myself by contributing articles to a Marxist weekly called Glos which appeared in Warsaw and in which Adolf Warski was the leading figure. I made my debut in this paper in 1904 with an article about the development of the peasant movement in Galicia, and then articles by me on the Western labour movement and reviews of books on the Polish economy and the international labour movement began to be featured every week. I entered into a correspondence with Rosa Luxemburg and was enormously proud when Warski entrusted me with the translation of Kautsky’s manuscript introduction to a new edition of the Communist Manifesto.
In autumn I set off for Switzerland, leaving unpaid debts in Krakow but with my head full of faith in the future. When I arrived, I threw myself into study and the labour movement. [ … ] The émigré cell of the Polish and Lithuanian Social Democratic Party, which I joined, brought me into contact with the Russian labour movement. It was included in the Federation of Russian Social Democratic Organisations and through it I came to know a number of Russian SDs. Zinoviev was studying in Berne at that time, and Medem, a well-known member of the Bund, was also there. It was there that I first heard Lenin speak at a meeting, though I did not understand a word of what he said, and there that I first heard Plekhanov, who made little impression on me. [ … ]
The Russian Revolution broke out and I longed to go back to Tsarist Poland for grass-roots Party work. Even in 1904, whilst still a member of Galician social democracy, I exchanged letters with Rosa Luxemburg and collaborated on the Volkszeitung which she published in Poznan. Now I approached her with a proposal for a trip to Poland. She at first suggested I should work abroad for the Party literary centre and soon I received an invitation to Berlin. I was not destined to stay there long. But during the few weeks that I did spend over literary work in libraries, I looked closely at workers’ meetings and organisations, with deep emotion made the acquaintance of Kautsky, and strengthened my links with Die Leipziger Volkszeitung, published by Mehring and Jaeckh. I had made contact with the latter from Switzerland, when I had sent him material on the Polish participants in the first International.
The day arrived when I crossed the frontier with a false passport, not knowing a word of Russian. The first person I met was Dzerzhinsky, the second Leon Jogiches (Tyszka), the main leader of our Party. I was immediately assigned to the editorial staff of the central Party paper, participated in the publication of the first legal Party daily, Trybuna, and threw myself into propaganda work among the Warsaw working masses. It was the first time that I had had to deal with the proletariat of huge factories. I made speeches to thousand-strong meetings, saw how the masses were thriving on the revolutionary struggle, and shook off the dust of SD traditions. Warsaw was an excellent school. If direct participation in the mass revolutionary movement was in itself sufficient to upset all that I had learnt in the school of German social democracy, this process was all the more fruitful since it involved the closest collaboration with such outstanding revolutionaries as Rosa Luxemburg, who had just arrived in Warsaw, Tyszka and Warski. I was most strongly influenced by Tyszka, who was the best editor I have ever met. [ … ] He and Rosa Luxemburg were soon arrested, together with Warski; only Marchlewski, Malecki and I remained on the paper. Simultaneously, the electoral campaign for the first Duma began. A group of workers and I had to ‘borrow’ the printing-presses of bourgeois papers to ensure publication of our clandestine central paper. [ … ] At the same time, we had to speak at legal meetings called by bourgeois parties. Our Party not only boycotted the elections, but also broke up electoral meetings, often by force of arms.
In March or April 1906 I was detained in Warsaw, but since I was picked up at random in the street – ‘I didn’t like the look of him’ – the comrades were able to bribe my release. Two weeks later I was again arrested. This time I was held for six months, which I spent quite agreeably in the Pawiak prison, learning Russian and reading Lenin, Plekhanov and Marx’s Theory of Surplus Value, which had just been published by Kautsky. In prison I wrote my first article for Neue Zeit (the theoretical organ of German social democracy) about the problems of the trade union movement in Poland, and I was terribly pleased when I received the edition of Kautsky’s journal with my article in it. On leaving prison, I was assigned by the Party to the Central Trade Union Commission: I edited its paper, and helped lead a series of strikes.
Thanks to the Russian which I had learnt in prison, I began to find my bearings in the arguments inside the Russian Party. Our Party largely steered clear of them. In general we supported the Bolsheviks, above all in their opposition to the Menshevik tendency towards coalition with the liberal bourgeoisie – in Poland liberalism was insignificant – but we undoubtedly underestimated the revolutionary role of the peasantry, being influenced by Polish conditions where the kulak still played a central part in the peasant movement. My experience of trade unions had strengthened my interest in the daily life of the working class and their immediate struggle for an improvement of their position. In spring 1907 I was again ‘put inside’, being straightaway transferred from Lodz to the ‘Tenth Pavilion’1 of the Warsaw citadel. [ … ]
In winter I was deported to Austria, and on orders from the Central Committee, I immediately made my way via Berlin to Terijoki where Warski and Tyszka were living after escaping from prison, where Dzerzhinsky was due to arrive, and where a large part of the Russian CC was centred. There I became more closely acquainted with the Russian leaders for the first time. We issued the central Party organ from there but only stayed for a few months. Police conditions forced the Polish CC to transfer us abroad. In spring 1908 Tyszka and I set off via Sweden for Berlin, where the central Party paper, the theoretical journal Przeglad Socjaldemokratyczny, and a number of other publications, were being edited. I helped in this work, but it did not occupy all my time, and I began to be a permanent contributor to the German left-wing social democratic press, involving myself fully in their movement.
This was 1908, the year of the Balkan crisis. A new Moroccan crisis was approaching and Stolypin’s Russia adopted an active policy in the Balkans, Constantinople and Persia. A revolution took place in Turkey, and international politics became the centre of at tention. I had become greatly interested in it even earlier during the Russo-Japanese war. Now I devoted all my energies to the study of contemporary imperialism and I followed its growth in the world’s press. I began to write daily about international political problems for Die Leipziger Volkszeitung, for Volksstimme of Frankfurt, for the Bremen Party newspaper, for Vorwärts (the central organ of German social democracy), for Neue Zeit (its theoretical journal), and for the Polish theoretical organ Przeglad. [ … ] I was compelled to occupy myself in detail with the colonial practice of European powers so as to refute those reformists in the Party who wanted it to join in the race for colonies. By the end of 1910 I had formed the conviction that faced by the threat of imminent war, radical social democracy ought to move from protests against capitalism in general directly to mass preparations for the revolutionary struggle.
During all these years, I carried out grass-roots propaganda and agitation among the German workers and I was very closely connected with the most militant sections of social democratic youth. Therefore the question of the struggle with imperialism immediately became identified for me with the question of the struggle to change the character of the German and international labour movement. What was needed was agitation for a general strike and the use of extra-parliamentary tactics. After moving to Berlin for personal reasons, and then to Bremen for two years, I had the opportunity of bringing my ideas on these topics closer to those of Rosa Luxemburg and the Dutch Marxist, Anton Pannekoek, and of checking them against the daily practice of the SD Party. German social democracy appeared to me as something completely different from what Russian and Polish revolutionaries imagined it to be, judging it only by Congress decisions and writings. [ … ]
In our lively discussions, which were reflected in the press, we expressed the conviction that the seizure of power by the proletariat was impossible without the destruction of the bourgeois state (Kautsky stigmatised this idea as ‘anarchist’ in a polemic with Pannekoek). But although we were now at the heart of the question of the dictatorship of the proletariat as a stage of transition from capitalism to socialism, we did not examine this idea further.
The period 1910–13, the time of the creation of left-wing radicalism in German social democracy, was for me extremely hectic. I wrote daily articles for the popular newspapers of Bremen and Leipzig. In addition, I compiled a twice-weekly bulletin on world politics for the Party press which was reproduced in fifteen papers. In 1912 I published a work on German imperialism which attempted to show its historical line of development and raised the question of a socialist revolution. Our struggle inside German social democracy led to a split between the centre, headed by Kautsky and Bebel, and the left, radical wing, the predecessor of the present Communist Party. Apart from Rosa Luxemburg and Pannekoek, those most closely involved in this were Clara Zetkin, August Thalheimer, Brandler, Walcher, Frölich and Pieck, all now members of the German Communist Party. We were linked not only by militant comradeship, but also by personal friendship. Whilst the nucleus of this party was being formed around us, the left-wing radicals, our hatred grew not only for the right-wing leaders, but also for the centrists. With every day that passed, we felt more keenly that we were not on the same road. But, finding a ready response in the industrial centres of Germany, we were convinced that the working masses would easily overcome the resistance of trade union and Party bureaucrats when, as the class struggle sharpened, they finally joined the movement. For that reason it never entered our heads that a split in the Party was a necessary condition for the triumph of the coming German revolution. [ … ]
My friend Thalheimer edited a Party organ in Göppingen in Wurtemberg. Göppingen, a small town with a rapidly developing metallurgical industry, was with Stuttgart the centre of the radical movement in southern Germany. Both the Stuttgart and Göppingen papers were completely under our control. The leadership of Wurtemberg social democracy relied on organisations in the non-industrial areas and was in endless conflict with these two radical groups. To bring the struggle to a successful conclusion, it decided to wring the neck of the Göppingen paper, which despite its small size was one of the staunchest organs of the left-wing radicals. So it made use of the fact that the Göppingen leaders had, through ignorance of the laws, committed a number of offences in setting up the press, for which they could be hauled before the courts. Under German law, co-operatives could only incur debts up to a fixed percentage of their capital. The printing-press, which was run on a co-operative basis, had greater debts than the law allowed and was in financial difficulties, as were many other Party presses. Thalheimer had not the slightest idea of this. Whilst he was on leave and I was deputising for him, the Wurtemberg leaders suddenly presented an ultimatum. They agreed to pay off the debts on condition that the paper was merged with reformist ones and that Thalheimer was dismissed. Should the paper not agree, the Wurtemberg CC would refuse any further assistance, and this would lead to bankruptcy and a charge of fraud. When I learnt all this, I recalled Thalheimer by telegraph. We mobilised the Party organisation and appealed to the all-German CC, not knowing that all this had been staged with the knowledge of Ebert, the second Party Chairman. Ebert arrived to resolve the matter with Braun, the present Prime Minister of Prussia.
At the joint session of the leaders of the Göppingen organisation and the representatives of the all-German and Wurtemberg CCs, we demonstrated that this was blackmail: the financial difficulties of the paper were being exploited to hand it over to opportunists. Then Braun and Ebert declared that they had come to settle the conflict, but since we were not responding, they would suspend the sitting. They refused to allow the facts we had established to be placed on record. But the Göppingen engineering workers barred the doors with tables and announced to Ebert that they would not let him out until this was done. Furious, he shouted: ‘The boil of left-wing radicalism in our Party is ripe for lancing, and this we shall do.’ The Göppingen organisation would not risk the complete collapse that would have undoubtedly ensued if its leaders had been sentenced for fraud, and so it submitted. It fell to Thalheimer and myself to carry on the struggle. All means were used against us, beginning with the fact that I, a foreigner, and moreover one who wandered from town to town for political reasons, did not pay regular Party dues, and ending with the allegation that as a result of the split in the Polish and Lithuanian Party, Unschlicht (the present Vice-Chairman of the RVS) and I had been expelled from the Party by the main leadership. (It was true that the Party opposition in Poland, led by Hanecki, Unschlicht, Malecki, Dombrowski and myself, had clashed with the main leadership, headed by Warski, Marchlewski and Dzerzhinsky, but it had not been over a question of principle; rather it was about organisation—it was a rebellion by the mass of workers, inspired by the Revolution, against the émigré centre which did not realise that one of the consequences of revolution is great autonomy for the workers.) Citing my expulsion from Polish social democracy, the German leadership announced that it no longer considered me a member of its Party. At the Chemnitz Party Conference, it played an excellent trump card: it derided this obscure personage of foreign extraction who dared to accuse the German CC of corruption. I was not, however, abandoned by the Bremen workers who, under the leadership of my friend Johann Knief [ … ] and Anton Pannekoek, defended my right to direct their paper, and for many years the Bremen Party organ presented a sight unparalleled in the labour movement: a man who was excluded from two parties clarifying not only general political questions, but also all the problems of Party tactics in one of the best Party papers. Soon a special commission of the Russian SD Party cleared me of all reproaches hurled in the heat of the Polish factional struggle, and I could have achieved at the next German Party Congress the honour of rejoining the Party, if history had not developed in such a way that it was no longer an honour to be a German social democrat. On 1 August 1914 the world war broke out and German social democracy sided with imperialism.
I was in Berlin at the time. From the moment of the assassination of the Austrian archduke it had been clear that we were on the brink of war. The weeks preceding the outbreak saw a furious campaign in the Bremen paper. Knowing that we should soon be silenced, we did everything to impress our cause on the workers and to urge them to fight against the threat of war. We formed a small group in Berlin under Liebknecht’s leadership, which strove to foment demonstrations and to provoke clashes with the police, so as to force the masses to intensify their efforts. The very fact that the brutal Berlin police did everything it could to avoid confrontation, clearly indicated that the government was bent on war. When the declaration came, the workers who were called to arms were disoriented. The Party was silent. The ale-houses were full of cannon-fodder trying to drown their anxiety. We radicals dashed about like madmen, cursing the Party for its failure to give the signal even for mass demonstrations. The most pessimistic feared that the SD bloc in Parliament would abstain, but not even the wildest pessimist imagined that it would vote for credits. When, on the evening of 3 August, a deputy, Henke, informed me as he left a meeting of the parliamentary group that they would vote for war credits, we immediately agreed that he should vote against and that I would write a declaration before the following morning to explain the motives for this vote. He would then attempt to rally a few left-wing deputies round this declaration. I was completely stunned, and it was only on the way back to the suburb where I lived that I grasped what had happened—a whole epoch in the labour movement had come to a shameful end. When I handed my outline declaration to Henke next morning, I could tell from his face that he would not swim against the current. Liebknecht, whom I had also met on 4 August, explained why he had decided not to oppose the motion: in his opinion, the government would very quickly proceed to a persecution of the Party, and then the whole Party would present a united front against the war. I could no longer believe this. The social democratic press was no more than a stinking cesspool poisoning the workers. It went over en bloc to the service of imperialism.
For the first few days, I, like many other comrades, had the feeling that there was no point in writing. Had forty years of socialist propaganda not been able to save even the leaders of social democracy from that fateful decision? But, naturally, this mood could only last for a short while. I resumed my activities and, despite censorship, began to expose the true nature of the war in the Bremen paper. I was greatly helped in this by a detailed knowledge not only of imperialist books and pamphlets, but also of the German military journals, which boasted how well German imperialism had prepared for the war. [ … ]
The split in the Polish organisation in 1912 had estranged me from Rosa Luxemburg. But I maintained the closest of relations with Liebknecht and Mehring, and they kept me informed of the beginnings of her group, which later grew into the Spartakus League. I also coordinated my activities with theirs. Since I was closest to the northwestern organisation, I made it my task to gather the revolutionary forces in Hamburg, Bremen and associated towns. In Bremen, despite the fact that Paul Frölich and Johann Knief had been called up, the nucleus of the old Party group was wholly committed to us. Henke, the local deputy and editor of the Party paper, did not always stand firm under pressure from the trade union bureaucracy, but he had not yet split with us and the paper was under our control. The organisation in Hamburg was entirely in the hands of the right-wingers, but Dr Laufenberg, the historian of the Hamburg labour movement and a man of great influence, as well as a young agitator called Wolfheim, full of the ideas of the American ‘Industrial Workers of the World’ organisation, were both active among the rank and file. I met both of them in Bremen in September, and we decided to undertake publication of propaganda pamphlets directed against the war. Laufenberg was mistrustful of Rosa Luxemburg’s theoretical position and did not want direct links with her group, but he pledged himself to co-ordinate our actions through me. In Berlin there existed a private school for Marxist propaganda, directed by a very eccentric, but very steadfast man called Borchardt. Before the war he had published a popular, propaganda news-sheet, Lichtstrahlen, which had been widely circulated among the working rank and file. Without hesitation, he put the school and the paper at the service of the anti-war group. Whilst pretending to lecture on the history of English imperialism to hundreds of workers, I in fact outlined the theoretical foundations for our struggle against Scheidemann’s treachery. The car hooters that signalled the approach of several automobiles during these lectures, made the audience think that we would be taken directly from there to the hospitable premises of the Berlin police on the AJexander-platz. My work could not remain secret for long. [ … ]
I wrote many letters to my old friend Konrad Haenisch, one of the best men in the radical movement who, after the first few weeks of war, had gone over to the patriotic ‘socialist’ majority. I attempted to dissuade him, and our correspondence fell into the hands of the Hamburg reformists, who had it printed as a pamphlet and distributed it throughout the organisation. The atmosphere deteriorated. Liebknecht persuaded me to go to Switzerland to improve our links with the Italian communists and the French internationalists.
This I succeeded in doing, and I came to an agreement with Robert Grimm, editor of the Party organ Berner Tagwacht, about a secret exchange of letters between us and correspondence for his paper. He put his daily entirely at the disposal of the German opposition and we agreed that it should be distributed throughout Germany until the government banned it. I also met Angelica Balabanova, who lived in Switzerland to keep open communications with the Italian CC. I could not trace Vladimir Ilyich – on his release from the Austrian prison, he had retreated into the mountains1 – but the manifesto which he released in the name of the CC had an enormous impact on me with its incisive statement of the problem. I was in full agreement with its assessment of the war and of the International, but being still under the influence of the state of German social democracy, I considered that the path to civil war was still a long one, and that it was premature to raise the question of a split. Trotsky, who was then in Zurich, agreed with me on the latter point, but was very optimistic as regards the prospects of revolution, and he reproached me for pessimism in a lecture which I gave to the Union of Foreign Workers in Zurich. I also had long conversations with Pavel Borisovich Akselrod, who, being an opponent of the policy of the SD parties, found a thousand explanations for it which, in reality, tended to defend patriotic ‘socialism’. After gathering all the documents unknown in Germany, I returned at the moment when the German Reichstag was meeting for the second time.
Now Liebknecht decided to vote openly against war credits and to make a suitably revolutionary declaration. Mehring and Rosa Luxemburg believed that he should do this only if a few other left-wingers joined him. They feared that if he voted alone, this would dispirit the masses by demonstrating his complete isolation. But of the people on whom one might have relied, Lensch deserted to the patriotic ‘socialists’. Hope remained only for Rühle and Henke. It was my task to persuade the latter. Liebknecht and I met him, and Liebknecht read out a plan of his declaration. Henke began to make objections. Liebknecht immediately agreed to entrust me with the formulation of the declaration, promising to accept it if Henke would do the same. I returned home and set about my task. The three of us met again in Josty’s Café a few hours before the Reichstag session of 2 December, and the other two declared themselves pleased with my outline. Nevertheless, Henke announced that he would not vote against the credits and was quite open about his motives for this decision: the trade union bureaucracy in Bremen had grown stronger, there were still no signs of movement among the workers, he was a family man and could not take risks. When Liebknecht replied that a few children could not determine a revolutionary’s position, Henke angrily retorted that it was easy for him to talk since he was financially independent, but in any case he doubted whether even Liebknecht would go alone against the Party. Liebknecht made no answer. We set off for the Reichstag. And I watched from the gallery as Liebknecht rose to throw down his lone challenge to the imperialist world.
All the press started buzzing. They began to depict him as a madman. Even those so-called left-wingers who had not been able to bring themselves to join his protest began to hiss in the corners. But everything that was alive and revolutionary in the Party raised its head. The struggle had moved out of conspiratorial gatherings and Party circles into the open. A banner had been raised around which the workers could unite. The correspondence which I sent secretly to the Bremen paper and which was published under the pseudonym ‘Parabellum’ attracted the attention of the social democratic and bourgeois press, for they wore an external sign of the consolidation of the opposition, and they openly developed its ideology. Speculation in the SD press about its author and nods in my direction raised the question as to whether it was worth risking arrest, whether it would not be wiser to attempt to create a conspiratorial base for the opposition in Switzerland. The comrades expressed themselves in favour of the latter course and I made my way there.
This time I found Vladimir Ilyich and Zinoviev at once. We established unity on all basic points; disagreement came only over the slogan for national self-determination. As for the open proclamation of the split, Lenin considered it a tactical question that could not be decided in isolation from the strength of the opposition in each country. I settled in Berne, where I gave lectures on imperialism at the Party school, wrote for the Berne and Zurich Party organs, as well as for the Bremen paper and Borchardt’s Lichtstrahlen, and organised clandestine communications with Germany through my wife who was a doctor in the Moabit Hospital in Berlin. Daily contact with Lenin and discussions with him finally convinced me that the Bolsheviks were the only revolutionary party in Russia, and as early as the International Conference of Women in April 1915, I helped in the struggle against Clara Zetkin’s centrist policies. At the same time we worked together among the young people who published L’Internationale de la Jeunesse, and among the Swiss social democrats.
When Trotsky, Balabanova and Robert Grimm took the initiative in preparations for the Zimmerwald Conference, contact had already been established with part of the German left, the so-called north German left-wing radicals, the Swedish left, and part of the Swiss left. My wife, who had arrived for a few weeks in Switzerland, took back with her to Germany an invitation to the conference. We made very careful preparations. I wrote some theses which were subjected to rigorous criticism by Lenin; he insisted that they should be of an agitational nature and extremely concise. There were, however, no disagreements on matters of principle.
When the conference assembled, the following spectrum of opinions was present. The right wing was represented by the German centrists led by Ledebour. The centre consisted of the French, the Italians, Kolarov for the Bulgarians, Rakovsky, Trotsky, Marlov, the Spartakus group led by Meyer, and Lapinski from the left wing of the PPS. On the left flank were our group with Lenin and Zinoviev for the Bolsheviks, Berzin on behalf of the Letts, myself for the regional Polish SDs, Borchardt for the German radicals, Nerman and Höglund on behalf of the Swedes, and Fritz Platten for the Swiss left-wing social democrats.
I was entrusted by our group with the opening speech. A reply was made by Ledebour who was later pilloried by Lenin and Zinoviev. The clash concerned two questions—the necessity of voting against war credits, and the urgent need to abandon propaganda circles for mass street demonstrations against the consequences of war with the aim of expanding the struggle into one against the war itself. To defend our point of view, we delegated Lenin to represent us on the commission. Despite the inadequacy of the resolutions adopted by the commission, we decided to sign its appeal unanimously, believing that the moment for a break with the centre would only come when the labour movement had acquired a much broader base. After the conference was ended, we held our own conference of the Zimmerwald left, at which we decided to publish this appeal with a rider sharply criticising its half-hearted-ness, and to create our own organisation with myself as secretary. The action fund of this organisation was set up in the following way. Vladimir Ilyich contributed twenty francs on behalf of the Bolshevik CC, Borchardt another twenty francs in the name of the German radicals, and I borrowed ten francs from Hanecki to contribute for the Polish social democrats. The future Communist International, therefore, had fifty francs at its disposal to conquer the world, but ninety-six francs were needed to print a pamphlet about the conference in German. So forty-six francs had to be borrowed from Shklovsky, a manufacturer of mineral salts, who employed Zinoviev and Safarov. We regained this sum from the sale of our pamphlet. The Zimmerwald left operated in complete harmony, combating centrist elements in all countries. Its secretariat distributed circulars on all changes in the position and tactics of the centrists. These were compiled by me and, after they had been critically examined by Lenin and Zinoviev, I copied them out by hand and hectographed them. We could not as yet afford the luxury of a typewriter. During this time Lichtstrahlen was appearing daily, and we had in it a legal organ with a large circulation in Germany. In 1916 our friends in Bremen collected 200 roubles in subscriptions from workers to publish a small journal called Arbeiterpolitik, half of which I wrote in Switzerland; Zinoviev, Kollontai, Bukharin and Evgeniya Bosch were among the Bolsheviks who also contributed. [ … ]
At the Kienthal Conference in 1916, we were already an important force. The prolonged war had led everywhere to a shift to the left [ … ]. In Poland, our organisation was engaged in a heroic struggle against the German occupation, whilst in Germany, despite the arrest of Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, the Spartakus League was swelling into a genuine movement. In France, Monatte and Rosmer had supplanted the more moderate Merrheim. We had succeeded in making contacts inside America. In England, the opposition of the working class had sharpened. Thanks to these developments, we were able at Keinthal to impose on the former Zimmerwald participants our anti-pacifist position and to parry attempts at holding negotiations with the second International. The Spartakus representatives and those from the Italian CC voted with us on a whole series of fundamental questions. After the conference, at a session of the Zimmerwald Bureau, we made a direct attack on Robert Grimm who, as Secretary of the Zimmerwald alliance, was conducting an opportunistic policy in Switzerland. Through the Zimmerwald left, Bolshevik ideological influence was spread to all countries.
After the Kienthal Conference I moved to Davos, from where I maintained communications with Ilyich and Germany. Lenin was in direct communication with France, England, America and the Scandinavian countries. We often met when he stopped to see us on journeys from Berne to Zurich. In Zurich, he made Bronsky and myself keep in touch with Swiss workers, considering that even the most left-wing of the Swiss Party leaders were waverers.
One day over dinner in the Basle Sanatorium in Davos, between the meat course and the dessert, a Swiss doctor informed me in his nasal voice that agency telegrams about a revolution in Petrograd had been pasted up in the town. This was said with such equanimity that neither I, nor Paul Levi who was my guest, believed him. Nevertheless, we were seized with apprehension and, without waiting for coffee, ran into town, where we read the first agency telegrams. When we returned home, Bronsky telephoned me and asked us to come and see Vladimir Ilyich immediately. There was no train until the following day. Vladimir Ilyich met us with his mind made up about two things: we had to break with Zimmerwald and return to Russia. On the former question, in spite of his arguments that to remain in Zimmerwald would mean giving the impression of a bloc with the Mensheviks, Zinoviev and I won the following concessions: not to sign any joint declaration with Martov, but not to leave Zimmerwald either. As for the second question, on instructions from Ilyich, Levi and I asked the Frankfurter Zeitung correspondent, whose name was Datmann or Dietmann, to sound out the German envoy as to whether Germany would agree to allow some Russian émigrés to pass through Germany in exchange for a corresponding number of prisoners of war. Soon we heard that the German Ambassador was ready to discuss this question. Then Martov and I gave Robert Grimm a free hand in the negotiations. But his report on them convinced us that this ambitious politician might become embroiled in general political discussions. Therefore we declined his services and entrusted further conduct of the negotiations to Platten, who conscientiously saw them through to the end. All the tales about participation by Parvus in these talks have no basis in fact. His attempts to intervene were rejected by Lenin, which does not exclude the possibility that the German government asked for his opinion. The legend of the ‘sealed train’ is equally without foundation. The train was not sealed at all—we merely pledged ourselves not to leave the coach. Platten dealt with communications with the Germans. As for me, being an Austrian subject and moreover barred from Germany (my wife had just been arrested), I used a false passport to cross to Stockholm without the knowledge of the German authorities. I remained there with Hanecki and Vorovsky as CC agent in charge of communication abroad. This ushered in a period of activity encompassing only a few months but full of extremely interesting episodes.
In Stockholm, an international atmosphere had sprung up with the outbreak of the Russian Revolution. It was taken by German social democrats as an opportunity to negotiate about peace. Within a short time, all their attempts at making contact with the Kerensky regime, the Mensheviks and the SRs were concentrated there. The Danish social democrats led by Borberg acted as their assistants. The Executive Committee of the first Congress of Soviets sent representatives in the shape of Rozanov and Meshkovsky. In their turn, the social democrats of the Entente countries employed as their agent Branting, the leader of Swedish social democracy.
The International Bureau of the second International began to stir and its chief, Huysmans, set up his office there. Preparations began for the summoning of the Stockholm Conference of the second International. Delegations arrived from all countries. There were Austrians, under the leadership of Renner and Victor Adler, who was seriously ill; there were Hungarians led by Kunfi; there were Belgians. We attempted to forge links with the leftist elements in all these delegations. The most amusing incident concerned the Austrian delegation. The honourable Renner had brought in his case letters from Austrian comrades sympathising with us. Unknown to him, one of the letters contained the information that he had been granted a secret audience by the Austrian Emperor immediately before his departure. We hastily printed this news, to Renner’s great discomfiture.
The man who made the most profound impression of me was the Belgian leader, De Brouckère, whom I had known before the war as one of the best left-wing Marxists, and who now could talk and think of nothing except war to the end. Kunfi told us of the revolutionary situation in Hungary. He was the only social democrat who believed in an imminent revolution in Central Europe. It was the independent German social democrats who cut the most pitiful figure. They professed to be very revolutionary but were afraid of giving more concrete information about the position in Germany. We naturally drew closer to the Spartakus League which was represented by Fuchs, and to other like-minded groups, who corresponded with us secretly. Johann Knief, who had gone underground and was scouring the country, managed to transmit to us news of the revolutionary movement in Germany which we telegraphed to Pravda, to the great joy of Vladimir Ilyich. For the information of the Western European social democratic press, we began to publish a twice-weekly hectographed bulletin entitled Correspondence from Pravda. Great use was made of this in the workers’ press. Soon it was superseded by the weekly Vestnik Russkoy Revolyutsii. Both the bulletin and the Vestnik entailed great difficulties. Not only were our resources very meagre, which forced us to print these publications in a primitive way (the whole technical staff consisted of Hanecki’s wife and mine), but we were deprived of news, for the Petrograd censors would not allow the Bolshevik press to reach the outside world. Hanecki, however, soon discovered that this ban did not apply to papers printed in Finland and we were able to receive not only Tiomes, the organ of the Finnish Party, but also Volna, the Helsinki Bolshevik paper. As the latter consisted largely of reprints from Pravda, we were supplied with all essential information. [ … ]
The Zimmerwald Conference was due to take place in September. We made thorough preparations for it so as to do battle with the Mensheviks and force the Zimmerwald parties into taking a definite position on the struggle between the proletarian and petit-bourgeois tendencies in the Russian Revolution. Ermansky and Akselrod spoke for the Men-sheviks. Our delegation consisted of Vorovsky, Hanecki, Semashko and myself. The argument was embittered mainly by Akselrod’s open defence of the disgraceful measures taken against us by the Kerensky regime. With his back pressed tight against the wall, the leader of the German independents, Haase, attempted to shift the discussion to the question of whether we accepted the use of violence against other socialist parties. We made it perfectly clear that if we came to power, we would both admit and practise violence with regard to other would-be socialist parties who betrayed the Revolution. Thus the delegates were asked whether they would link themselves with the petit-bourgeois parties who used violence against the fighters of the proletarian revolution. We were supported not only by the Spartakus representatives but even by old Ledebour, who could not stomach Haase’s argument and spoke openly in our defence. The conference ended by adopting a resolution calling for mass revolutionary support for the Russian Revolution. It must be mentioned that Vladimir Ilyich was insisting in his letters from Petrograd on a split with the Zimmerwald parties, believing that it was time to lay the foundations of the third International. We could not decide on this step, which we thought premature.
As the struggle in Petrograd reached its climax, we spent sleepless nights awaiting news of the outcome. This arrived late one night, and towards morning the Hungarian journalist Gutman brought us the telegraphed version of Vladimir Ilyich’s speceh at the opening of the second Congress of Soviets. Hanecki and I immediately prepared to leave, but we were detained by a telegram informing us that a representative of German social democracy was on his way to see us. This representative turned out to be none other than Parvus, who passed on assurances that the German social democrats would immediately enter the struggle for peace with us. He privately declared that Scheidemann and Ebert were ready to call a general strike if the German government, under pressure from the military, did not agree to an honourable peace. We openly printed an account of these talks in the Swedish Party paper, and Hanecki and I set off for Petrograd, armed only with a document from Vorovsky certifying that we were members of the Foreign Bolshevik Bureau. Not knowing who was in control of the frontier, we sent a Finnish comrade ahead to transmit information we had collected about the uproar caused by the October Revolution. He returned with the news that the frontier was in the hands of our comrades, and we crossed at night. We found an ardent and devoted young sailor called Svetlichny from the Respublika, who immediately put us in touch with Helsinki, since there was a railway strike in Finland and it was impossible to proceed without permission from the strike committee. When we had obtained a special train, we invited some Russian workers to join us from Gaparanda—they had arrived from America and were waiting for an opportunity to travel further into Russia. On the way, we read the Petrograd bourgeois press which exaggerated dissensions in the Bolshevik CC. It was with a very heavy heart that we drew into Petrograd, but when we saw from the carriage window detachments of Red Guards doing rifle practice, we went wild with joy. We reached Smolny as if in a dream and within a minute were in Lenin’s office.
The ten years I have since spent in the ranks of the Russian Revolution are too fresh for me to be able to give a coherent account of them. I will limit myself, therefore, to listing the basic episodes in my work. No sooner had I arrived in Petrograd than I was sent back to Stockholm for preliminary talks with Riezler, the German emissary. After this, I accompanied Trotsky to Brest-Litovsk. When the talks broke down I was appointed a member of the Petrograd Defence Committee. After the Brest treaty had been signed, I directed the Central European Department of the Commissariat for Foreign Affairs and the External Relations Department of TsIK.
At the outbreak of the German revolution, Rakovsky, Ioffe, Bukharin, Sokolnikov and I were sent as the VTsIK delegation to the first Congress of German Soviets. I was prevented from entering the country legally, so I travelled illegally. I helped to organise the first Communist Party Congress in Germany, and after the assassination of Rosa Luxemburg and Liebknecht, I remained secretly in Berlin as one of the Party leadership. Arrested on 15 February, I languished in prison until December. Nevertheless, I succeeded in issuing seven small pamphlets on topical questions of the German labour movement, in being an active leader of the German Communist Party, and in establishing and strengthening relations with the Austrian and British labour movements. I also achieved a better understanding with Talat Pasha, Enver Pasha, oriental specialists in German political circles, and the former Foreign Minister Hintze. When released from prison, I returned to Russia via Poland, on the basis of an agreement concluded between Pilsudski and the Soviet government.
In March 1920 I was appointed Secretary of the Comintern. I was one of the chief organisers of the Comintern’s second Congress, where I presented a report. After this I was sent to the Polish Front as a member of the Polish Revolutionary Committee.1 Defeat found me in Siedlce. Then Zinoviev and I arranged the first Congress of the Peoples of the East, where I made another report. In October 1920 I returned clandestinely to Germany to be present at the Congress which was due to endorse the union of the left-wing independents and the Spartakus League. In January 1921 I devised the tactics of the united front1 with a so-called ‘open letter’. On my return, I presented a report on tactics to the third Comintern Congress, and at the fourth Congress I made a speech about united fronts and workers’ governments. In 1922 I led the Comintern delegation at the Congress of the Three Internationals. At the end of that year, I was sent as Chairman of the Russian trade union delegation to the Hague Congress on the dangers of war. In early 1923 I was dispatched to Oslo to forestall a split in the Norwegian Communist Party. Having done this, I went to Hamburg as an observer at the Congress of the second International. I participated in the campaign against the seizure of the Ruhr and in the Leipzig Congress of the German Communist Party. I returned to Russia but in October was directed by the Comintern to give guidance in the forthcoming rising. I arrived on 22 October after the start of the retreat, and I approved this decision of the German CC. On my return to Russia, I sided with the opposition during the discussions of 1924. At the thirteenth Party Congress I spoke out against the impending change in the Comintern’s tactics. I was excluded from the CC after being a member since 1919. At the fifth Comintern Congress I denounced the planned changes in its tactics and was expelled from its Executive Committee.
During all the years of the Revolution, I was a contributor to Pravda and Izvestiya. I wrote mainly on foreign policy and the international labour movement. Collections of my articles and extracts from my pamphlets can be found in: Five Years of the Comintern (two volumes); The German Revolution (three volumes); and articles on current international politics form the volume entitled The Year 1924. Part of my pre-war works were published in German in 1920 under the title In den Reihen der russischen Revolution. Since 1925 I have been Rector of the Chinese Sun Yat-Sen University, and I am one of the editors of the Large Soviet Encyclopedia.
The brilliant, noisy Radek (born Sobelsohn) made himself noticed well before 1914 in international socialist circles for his extremist positions and outrageous radicalism, and for the scandals he unleashed in his native land, Poland, and in his country of adoption, Germany. His autobiography gives the measure of his character: loquacious, extremely intelligent and sharp, unstable, clever and opportunist, leaving in the shade without a scruple that which does not flatter, and choosing the events in his life which show him off to advantage. He turns to his own profit the scandals he caused, and presents himself as a victim of the opportunist and centrist leaders of the German social democratic movement—which is not entirely without foundation. But the leaders of the German left—Rosa Luxemburg, Clara Zetkin, G. Ledebour, hated him quite as much as he hated them. Although Rosa Luxemburg’s rupture with Radek was not unconnected with the split in the Polish Party in 1912, it was all the same a reflection of her lack of esteem for a man who had been accused of theft, in Poland in 1908. Radek caused much ink to be spilt in 1912–13, moreover, not only about this alleged theft but also about the Göppingen affair.1 He succeeded none the less in having a grand jury assembled, known as the ‘Paris Commission’, which absolved him of all the charges, and he also gained the support of Lenin, Trotsky and Karl Liebknecht.
With his audacity and lack of scruple, he soon took upon himself to move in the highest circles of the international socialist world. He was not afraid of the authorities, and he spared no one – not even Kautsky, or, on the left, Lenin – in his violent attacks. Radek left no one indifferent to him, and the enemies he gained were fierce enemies. On the other hand, the disputes he stirred up lent him a certain charisma in the eyes of the German left, who took him as one of their theoreticians. He was an inexhaustible publicist and a man of encyclopedic knowledge, picked up in the course of his multifarious and heterogeneous reading. He had put all his passion into the study of Marxism and of international problems. He and Pannekoek were the leaders of the Bremen radical group.
During the war he remained the spokesman of the extreme left and untiringly pursued his constant activity as a publicist from Switzerland, where he had taken up residence. It was at that time that he drew closer to Lenin, at whose side he took part in the Zimmerwald Conference, where he put forward the extremist resolution. He began to make his place in the Bolshevik group while at the same time remaining a militant worker in the German workers’ movement. In 1916, he and Paul Levi attempted to create within it a pro-Bolshevik splinter. In 1919 he expressed his attachment to Germany in an autobiographical letter: ‘If I follow my inclination, I feel more connected to the German working class than to the Russian. I think in German words and my feelings are expressed by German poets.’2 His activities were not approved of by the traditional left wing of the German social democratic movement and he had to overcome Clara Zetkin’s hostility in order to be able to take part in the Kienthal Conference. A year later, at the third Zimmerwald Conference held in Stockholm between 5 and 12 September 1917, he and Hanecki were representing the reunited SDKPiL.
At the end of November 1917 Radek returned to Moscow and took up an important position at the Commissariat for Foreign Affairs, in the Smolny Palace, where he was in charge of international propaganda.1 He was succeeded in this post by Béla Kun. The British diplomat R. Bruce Lockhart, who was in daily contact with him, described him thus:
A little man, with a huge head, protruding ears, cleanshaven face (in those days he did not wear that awful fringe which now passes for a beard), with spectacles and a large mouth with yellow, tobacco-stained teeth, from which a huge pipe or cigar was never absent, he was always dressed in a quaint drab-coloured Norfolk suit with knickers and leggings. ... He looked like a cross between a professor and a bandit. … He was the virtuoso of Bolshevik journalism and his conversation was as sparkling as his leading articles. Ambassadors were his game and Foreign Ministers his butts. … He was a Puck full of malice and with a delicious sense of humour. He was the Bolshevik Lord Beaverbrook.2
Lenin relied on Radek’s energy and knowledge of German affairs, and so he took part in the Brest-Litovsk talks. In March 1918 he returned to Narkomindel, and became head of the Central Europe section. He was entrusted with fraternisation propaganda aimed at the German army, and with the recruitment of revolutionary militants among the prisoners of war. When he tried to get into Germany in December 1918 to attend the Congress of German Councils as the official delegate of the Soviets, he was turned back at the frontier, but succeeded in smuggling himself over the border. As a delegate of the Bolshevik Party, he took a hand in the creation of the German CP and succeeded in reuniting the Spartakists and his reticent friends from Bremen. Rosa Luxemburg required some convincing, however, before she would accept collaborating with Radek. His awareness of the situation in Germany made him realise very quickly that any attempt to seize power would end in failure, and that was why he tried to hold back the over-enthusiastic Liebknecht. After the assassination of the latter and Rosa Luxemburg, Radek himself was arrested in February 1919, and spent eleven months in the Moabit prison, the ‘political chamber’ where he played the double role of adviser to the leader of the German CP, Paul Levi, and semi-official representative of the Bolshevik Government to German politicians and military chiefs.1
1919 marks the peak of Radek’s career: at the eighth Congress of the Russian CP he was elected in absentia to the CC, and on his return to Russia he took on the secretaryship of the Comintern. He was deprived of this post in 1920, for he and Paul Levi had taken a stand against the decision of IKKI to invite to the second Congress of the Comintern the left-wing members of KAPD. Nevertheless he was elected a member of IKKI by the same congress and at the following congress he was elected to the ‘small commission’ of IKKI (to become the Presidium), where he remained until 1924. Upon his return from Germany in 1921 he became a convinced opponent of Levi. In 1922 he and Bukharin led the Comintern delegation to the conference of the three Internationals in Berlin, that is to say of the second and third Internationals and of the ‘Vienna Union’.
He was in Germany on three occasions in 1923: at the KAPD Congress in February; at the Congress of the second International in Hamburg in May, where his main concern was to extricate the KAPD from its complicated situation vis-à-vis the Comintern (in Zinoviev’s absence, Radek went to Moscow to persuade Stalin of his point of view, and the demonstrations planned for July were cancelled, which Radek approved post facto, being hostile to any kind of putsch politics); and he was in Germany again in October, directing, apparently against his better judgement, the Comintern team which was entrusted with the job of preparing for the insurrection. The lack of support for the KAPD and Hitler’s Munich putsch reduced his efforts to naught.
In the Comintern, Radek’s cleverness became legendary from this time on. He was more of an improviser than a theoretician, his mind was cynical and sarcastic: as the Austrian socialist Oskar Blum once remarked, ‘the whole world was for Radek a large colonial problem’2 Balabanova had known him well since the Zimmerwald Conference, and described him thus:
Radek was to me a strange psychological phenomenon, but never a puzzle .... Today he would prove that the events on various fronts had to be so and so; tomorrow, just when the contrary had happened, he would attempt to prove that it could not have happened otherwise. … He was … a strange mixture of amorality, cynicism and of spontaneous appreciation for ideas, books, music and human beings.’3
Victor Serge, on the other hand, found him ‘monkey-like, sardonic and droll … realistic to the point of cruelty’.1 It was however Trotsky who drew the subtlest portrait of Radek in an article published in May 1929:
Radek is indisputably one of the best Marxist journalists in the world. … He has an ability to react with exceptional speed to new phenomena and tendencies, even to the first symptoms of anything new. … But his journalistic strength is his political weakness. Radek exaggerates and goes too far. He measures in yards where he should be looking at inches—and thus he always finds himself either to the left or the right (more usually the right) of the correct line.2
The direction of Radek’s thought, none the less, always remained to the left. In 1918 he was a left-wing communist and never hesitated to express opposition, although he did perform opportune about-turns. He advised Lenin against the march on Warsaw in 1920, and in 1923 he was a member of the opposition and adhered to the ‘Declaration of the 46’ by a personal statement. His stands lost him his post in the Comintern in 1924, and he was made responsible for the failure of the Comintern’s tactics during the German revolution, which was all the more convincing since he had been in a position to evaluate the situation accurately. Although he belonged to the left opposition, Radek continued to oscillate from right to left. He tried several times, between 1924 and 1926, to reconcile the left opposition with Stalin. He remained basically hostile to Zinoviev, his most bitter enemy. Thus in 1925 he came out against the formation of the United Opposition and sought to persuade the left opposition to form a bloc with Stalin against Zinoviev.
At the thirteenth Congress of the Russian CP he was not re-elected to the CC and in 1926 he was relegated to the directorship of the Sun Yat-Sen University in Moscow. Radek had studied the Far Eastern question and had definite views on it, as on the specific nature of the Chinese revolution. His thesis was that China had no feudal system and no landowning caste, and that consequently the agrarian revolution should be directed not against the impoverished gentry but against the bourgeoisie. China was not ripe for a proletarian revolution, but on the threshold of a democratic revolution of which the aim should be the establishment of a democratic dictatorship. He thus tolerated the alliance of the Chinese CP with the Kuomintang. But as early as 1926 he noticed a change in the attitude of the latter party. He warned the Politburo and demanded a change in its China policy—but in vain. Once again, however, events proved him right. He then sought to place the critique of the Comintern’s China policy at the centre of the United Opposition’s struggle (he had joined this group despite his mistrust and aversion for Zinoviev). The columns of Pravda and Izvestia were thenceforth closed to him, and in May 1927 he was relieved of his duties at the Sun Yat-Sen University.
In December 1927, at the fifteenth Congress, he was expelled from the Party with seventy-four other members of the opposition and exiled to Siberia. He threw himself impulsively at first into ultra-leftism, then made an abrupt about-turn. In July 1929 he joined Preobrazhensky and Smilga to lead a group which published a declaration supporting the struggle against ‘rightist opportunism’ and condemning all splinter groups, as well as repudiating Trotsky. He was readmitted to the Party and rallied to Stalin. He then became director of the CC’s information bureau, which meant in effect that he was Stalin’s personal adviser on foreign affairs, as well as one of the best-known commentators in the Soviet press on international political questions. In 1936, he and Bukharin collaborated on the drafting of the Soviet Constitution. During that year, he and Pyatakov demanded the death sentence for Kamenev and Zinoviev, but by the end of the year he too was arrested and accused of maintaining secret relations with Trotsky, and of having formed a ‘reserve centre’ to take over from Kamenev and Zinoviev. At his trial, which began on 23 January 1937, he maintained an extremely ambiguous attitude. He was both insolent and cynical, but it was not clear whether he was insisting on incriminating himself and other potential victims (Tukhachevsky, for example) or whether he was trying to discredit the procedure of the trial and the regime in general. On seeing Radek leave the courtroom, someone said: ‘He’s a devil, not a man.’ He was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment.
It is not known when he died, but it is assumed that he was murdered by his co-prisoners in 1939 or thereabouts. According to a different story, he may have stayed in Moscow after his sentence, and continued to work on Izvestia, before dying of a heart attack while being evacuated to Kuibyshev during the German offensive in 1941.1
G. H.
(autobiography)
I was born on I August 1873 in the Bulgarian town of Kotel. As early as the first half of the nineteenth century, Kotel had become an important economic and political centre. The family into which I was born belonged to the most prosperous class in town. My father engaged in agriculture and trade, and for the sake of the latter spent a few weeks in Constantinople every year. He was a member of the so-called ‘Democratic Party’, was noted for his inquisitiveness, had received a Gymnasium schooling and knew Greek. None of this, however, was of any benefit to me in my future development.
It was different with my mother. She came from a family which had played a vital part in the political and cultural history of the Bulgarian people. From it had come Captain Georgy Mamarchev, a former officer in Dibich-Zabalkansky’s Russian army, who had made the first attempt at a concerted rising against the Turkish yoke. The rising was crushed and Mamarchev arrested. He was exiled to Asia Minor, and then to the island of Samos, where he died. He was the uncle of the famous revolutionary figure Savva Rakovsky, who dominated the Bulgarian political and cultural scene from 1840 until 1867. Whilst in Rumania in 1841, he had raised a partisan detachment to invade Bulgaria. He was arrested and sentenced to death, but escaped to France. An amnesty gave him the opportunity of returning to his native town, but not for long. Soon both father and son were flung into the Constantinople prison. The vengeance of their political opponents was also heaped on the now defenceless family, including my mother who was still then a girl. The family were excommunicated and forbidden all contact with neighbours, so that when there were no matches, at a time when a fire was lit by bringing embers from next door, they had to pay for the political sins of their father and brothers by starving and freezing. Although I reached the age of awareness many years after Savva Rakovsky’s death, the reminiscences of my mother and grandmother were still sufficiently vivid to stir my imagination.
From early childhood I conceived a strong and passionate sympathy for Russia—not merely because the revolutionary activity of my grandfathers and uncles had been mainly connected with Russia, but also because I had witnessed the Russo-Turkish War. I was not more than five then, but the dim vision of Russian soldiers marching through the Balkans became imprinted on my childish memory. Our house was one of the best in town and therefore became the quarters of high-ranking officers. I met General Totleben, the architect of the siege of Plevna. I met and accompanied Prince Vyazemsky, one of the commanders of the Bulgarian militia division, who was later nursed for more than forty days in our house after being wounded. Among the officers there were also people in contact with underground organisations, and there was a legend in our family that they kept saying, ‘We are liberating you, but who will liberate us?’ The war upset our family life as well: our estate was inside Romania, and we all had to be evacuated to Romanian Dobruja.
I received my initial education in Kotel, and continued it in Dobruja under my mother’s supervision. I spent the last year of primary school in Varna, and then went to the Gymnasium there. It was the period when even the youngest students were passionately interested in politics. I, too, began to take notice of social questions. In 1887 the political ferment at the Gymnasium came to a head, aided by discontent with a few teachers. A riot erupted, which it took a company of soldiers to suppress. I was one of those arrested and excluded from all Bulgarian schools. I spent one year in my father’s house in Mangalia, reading indiscriminately everything that came to hand. In 1888 I was given permission to attend a Gymnasium again, and I went to Gabrovo, where I entered the fifth form. I spent less than two years here, for before the end of the sixth form I was again excluded from all Bulgarian schools, and this time it was for good.
It was in Gabrovo that my political ideas were moulded and I became a Marxist. My mentor was Dabev, one of the veterans of the Bulgarian revolutionary movement. Balabanov, a friend of mine who subsequently died a tragic death in Geneva, joined with me in publishing a clandestine, hectographed newspaper called Zerkalo, in which there was something of everything: Rousseau’s educational ideas, the struggle between rich and poor, the misdeeds of teachers, etc. We also obtained a few illegal publications printed in Geneva and translated into Bulgarian, which we distributed among the peasants. Whilst still in the fifth form, I had stood up in the church at Kotel and preached about the ‘first Christian church of St James’—in other words about Christian communism. But in general our activities were confined to the Gymnasium.
In autumn 1890 I set off for Geneva to enter the medical faculty. I chose medicine because we imagined that it would enable us to meet the people directly. At that time we only knew of individual influence.We still did not think of activities on a mass scale. It seemed to us that the regime of the Bulgarian dictator, Stambulov, would last for ever.
During the first few months after my arrival in Geneva, I became acquainted with the Russian political émigrés and, in particular, the Russian social democratic circles. A little later, I met Plekhanov, Zasulich and Akselrod, and for many years their influence on me was decisive. I spent three years in Geneva, from 1890 to 1893. Although I enrolled as a student and even took the examinations, I was completely indifferent to medicine. My interests lay outside the university. I quickly became involved in activity among the Russian students, and directed Marxist self-education circles with Rosa Luxemburg, who lived for a short while in Geneva.
I did not confine myself, however, to purely Russian concerns. Together with other foreign and Russian comrades, we organised the socialist elements among the Geneva students. We also developed links with socialist students in other countries, particularly Belgium, where the first International Congress of Socialist Students was held in the winter of 1891–2. I did not succeed in attending this congress myself, although I corresponded with the organizers. Yet all the prepratory work for the second congress, which took place in Geneva, devolved in effect upon me. On all the most difficult problems, I consulted Plekhanov. I was also in touch with the Geneva and French labour movements. In Geneva I was close to the Polish and Armenian revolutionary circles as well, but my main preoccupation was with Bulgaria. I translated Deville’s book L’évolution du Capital, adding a long introduction which contained an analysis of economic relations in Bulgaria. Later, we edited a Bulgarian journal in Geneva, which in name, format and external appearance was a direct imitation of the Russian émigré journal Sotsial-Demokrat. But this was understandable since Plekhanov was also the inspiration behind our journal. I translated a number of his articles directly from the manuscript. When the first Marxist journal, Den’, was launched in Bulgaria, and the first SD weekly paper Rabotnik was founded, as well as Drugar (‘Comrade’), I became a permanent contributor to them all, but particularly to the latter. Sometimes half an edition would be filled with my articles written under various pseudonyms. In 1893 I was a delegate to the Socialist International Congress in Zurich. This Geneva period in my life strengthened my Marxist convictions and my hatred for Russian Tsarism.
Whilst still a student in Geneva, I visited Bulgaria more than once to give a series of lectures attacking the Tsarist government. In 1897, when I graduated from the university, a book of mine was published in Bulgaria entitled Russiya na Istok (‘Russia in the East’), which for years to come provided ammunition not only for the Bulgarian Socialist Party against Russian Tsarism, but also for all so-called russophobe tendencies in the Balkans. I was following Plekhanov’s dictum: ‘Tsarist Russia must be isolated in its foreign relations.’ But the Bulgarian bourgeois press had already drawn attention to me during my first visits to Bulgaria. The russophile papers had waged a campaign against me while I was still a student. In autumn 1893 I entered the Medical Faculty in Berlin with the aim of acquainting myself more closely with the German labour movement. There I wrote articles on Balkan affairs for Vorwärts. I also joined the clandestine, socialist student groups and became particularly close to Wilhelm Liebknecht. Through him, I met the other leaders of German social democracy. He had a great influence on me, and we corresponded until 1900. He was greatly interested in the Balkans, and the Russian, Polish and Romanian revolutionary movements. In Berlin all my political life was centred on the Russian colony. This was the time of the flowering of Russian Legal Marxism. The Russian colony lived on arguments: about Populism and Marxism, about the subjectivist school and about dialectical materialism. But I also became involved in more specialised debates (for example against the Zionists).
After six months in Berlin I was arrested, and deported a few days later. I spent the summer term of 1894 at the Medical Faculty in Zurich, in which town P. B. Akselrod was also living, and the winter of 1894–5 in Nancy. I maintained contact with the Bulgarian movement and corresponded with Plekhanov and V. A. Zasulich, the latter living in London.
The last two years of my student career were spent in Montpellier. Besides associating with Russian and Bulgarian students, I also began to draw closer to the French socialists and to collaborate on the Marxist journal La feunesse Socialiste, edited in Toulouse by Lagardelle, as well as on the daily organ La Petite République when it passed under the control of Jules Guesde. The debate among Russian students in Montpellier revolved around the same topics as in Berlin. In addition, the Zionists here had many followers, against whom I waged an unceasing campaign. I was also a member of a French student circle and spoke at closed workers’ meetings. Even in Nancy I had been kept under observation by the French police and as a result of this I could not, of course, expand my activities.
The end of my student days coincided with events that burst upon the European political scene: the rebellion in Armenia and on the island of Crete. In a series of articles I attempted to draw the attention of the French Socialist Party and the French proletariat to the advisability of interceding on behalf of the Armenians, Cretans and Macedonians. I believed in general that ignorance and a lack of understanding of Eastern questions were one of the defects of the international socialist movement, and I devoted a report to this problem which I presented on behalf of the Bulgarian SD Party at the London International Socialist Congress in 1896. It was subsequently reprinted by Kautsky in Neue Zeit.
I concluded my medical education with a doctoral dissertation on The Causes of Criminality and Degeneracy, in which I essayed a Marxist approach to the subject. It caused a sensation among students and professors which was echoed in the local press and, later, in specialist literature throughout the world.
It was in Montpellier that I began to take a closer interest in the Romanian labour movement. Although I was technically a Romanian citizen, I only came into formal contact with Romanian comrades at a late stage. I also began writing articles in French for some Poles from the PPS whom I had come across at the London International Socialist Congress. Of the other revolutionary parties, I was particularly drawn towards the Armenians, with whose Secretary I had been closely connected whilst still in Geneva.
In 1893 I had the good fortune to see and hear Engels in Zurich. We maintained an occasional correspondence when I was in Geneva—he sent a letter to our Bulgarian Sotsial-Demokrat. Subsequently I always approached him through V. A. Zasulich, for whom he had a deep love and respect.
When I graduated from the university in 1896, I was confronted by the question: what now? I had mainly worked for the Bulgarian Socialist Party but, on the other hand, I was a Romanian citizen. Yet my greatest wish, which was strengthened by the fact that I had married a Russian girl from Moscow, E. P. Ryabova, a revolutionary Marxist and a close friend of Plekhanov and Zasulich, was to work for the cause in Russia.
After visiting all the main centres of Bulgaria, where I read reports on various topics, and after passing a qualifying examination so that I could practise medicine in Bulgaria if the need should ever arise, I decided to settle temporarily in Romania as a stepping-stone on the way to Russia. In addition I was due for military service, and after taking preliminary medical examinations in Bucharest, I was enlisted as a doctor in the medical corps. In February 1899 I received two weeks’ leave and went to St Petersburg, where my wife was already living. At this time the Russian Legal Marxist press had acquired its own journal, Nashe Slovo, later Nachalo. An article by me on political parties in Bulgaria was featured in the first of these under the nom de plume ‘Radev’. A bitter polemic was then being waged in St Petersburg between Marxists and Populists. I used my stay to speak on the same subject at one of the branches of the Free Economic Society. Since I did not conceal my name, it was not difficult for the police to trace me. But by the time they had learnt my address, I had already left.
Military service did not interfere with my literary work. I continued diligently to provide contributions for Bulgarian socialist journals. The Party organ was no longer Den’ but Novoye Vremya, a monthly edited by Blagoev. Besides this, I published in Bulgarian a book entitled On the Political Significance of the Dreyfus Case, as well as a polemical pamphlet against spiritualists called Science and Miracles. I recast my doctoral dissertation, turning it into a popular book which was actually passed by the Tsarist censorship under a new title, The Hapless Folk, and with the signature of a female doctor, Stanchova. It also appeared in Bulgarian, but with the name of its true author. At the same time I was preparing a book called Contemporary France, which had been commissioned by the Znaniye publishing house in St Petersburg.
During my short stay in the capital, I had counted on meeting Lenin, who was then in Pskov, but this was not to be. My military service ended on 1 January 1900. Once divested of my officer’s uniform, I could openly express my views in the Romanian socialist press and at a workers’ meeting in Bucharest. But I did this only to become aware of the utter decline of the labour movement following the betrayal of its leaders, who had deserted en bloc to Bratianu’s Liberal Party. As I was longing to return to Russia, however, my activity in Romania was limited to this one speech. Whilst I was still in the country, I acted as a forwarding point for a voluminous correspondence between, on the one hand, Zasulich and Plekhanov, and on the other the St Petersburg Marxists. Zasulich herself came to Romania before I left—I supplied her with a Romanian passport in the name of Kirova so that she could cross into Russia, and I intended following her a few months later. By that time, the dispute had already begun between Bernstein’s followers, in particular Struve, and the revolutionary Marxists. Plekhanov was especially incensed by the desertion of his close comrade. He wrote to me in Romania, saying that a bloc must be formed even with Mikhailovsky against Struve, and suggested that on my arrival in St Petersburg I should help him collaborate on Russkoye Bogatstvo under the name ‘Beltov’.
When I reached St Petersburg, I discovered that Struve had veered sharply to the right. He bitterly reproached Zasulich for returning to Russia since, if discovered, she might compromise her ‘friends’. This greatly distressed her, for she had been very attached to him since 1896 when he had stayed for a few weeks in London after the end of the International SD Congress. Things developed to such a pass that while Mikhailovsky, Karpov and Annensky, not to mention our Marxists (Tugan-Baranovsky, Veresaev, Bogucharsky, etc.,) would meet her in my wife’s flat, Struve for a long time refused to see her.
As for Plekhanov’s plan of contributing to Russkoye Bogatstvo, we discussed it in the Russian circle and rejected it as unsuitable. We thought it would be more advisable for him to write for Zhizn, published by Posse and Gorky.
I myself was extremely happy to be in St Petersburg. I inhaled great gulps of winter air and dreamt of prolonged activity in Russia. With my wife and some comrades (including A. N. Kalmykova and N. A. Struve, who was further to the left than her husband), we drew up plans for propaganda among workers and students. Very soon, however, I was ordered to leave Russia within forty-eight hours. This expulsion upset all my plans. I had no desire to return to the Balkans, for the closer I came to the Russian revolutionary movement, the more my interest in the Balkans decreased. It was suggested that I should go to Revel under police supervision and wait for a boat, which I did, accompanied by my wife. It was there that I completed Contemporary France, which was published under the pseudonym ‘Insarov’ (a name chosen for me by my St Petersburg friends).
Among those who were directly involved in efforts to win an extension of my stay in St Petersburg was N. I. Gurovich, who subsequently proved to be an agent provocateur. Before my departure, he assured me that, thanks to his connections at court (either with the brother or the brother-in-law of Baron Frederichs), he was convinced he would be able to arrange my return within a short period of time. He repeated this when he came to Paris in summer 1900, and his assertions about the possibility of my return became more frequent. Finally, he asked me for money ‘to bribe the relatives of Baron Frederichs’. Of course, this was no problem and I was soon back in Russia. Before I left, I enrolled as a student at the Law Faculty in Paris, thinking that, after all that had happened in St Petersburg, I would not be able to remain there long and that I would have to return to France.
In St Petersburg it was like a desert. After the student disorders of spring 1901, a large number of progapandists had been banished from the capital, among them many Legal Marxists. The only link which remained for me was with the clandestine world, where Lenin’s pamphlet What is to be Done? soon became the main topic of discussion.
I redoubled my collaboration on the ‘thick’ Russian journals, which continued until 1904, mainly under the pen names of ‘Insarov’ and ‘Grigoriev’. But this still could not satisfy my longing for real activity, and after the misfortune of my wife’s death I returned to Paris in 1902, where I began to sit law examinations with the intention of settling there, adopting French citizenship, and taking a militant part in the revolutionary movement.
It was at this time that I practised medicine freely for the only time in my life. I was a doctor for six months in the village of Beaulieu in the department of the Loire. I formed political as well as professional ties with the peasantry, particularly after an official banquet where I made a speech which greatly displeased the Senators and Deputies present. It was suggested that I should stay in Beaulieu, but the death of my father in summer 1903 forced me to return home. From that moment, I reverted to work with the Balkan parties, especially the Romanian labour movement.
During the winter of 1903–4 I returned to Paris, and I was there when the Russo-Japanese war broke out. I was one of the speakers at a huge meeting attended by representatives of all the revolutionary parties. My speech earned the reproaches of the chairman, my mentor Plekhanov, for its defeatist spirit. He had come to Paris before the declaration of war to give a paper, and as he was then expelled from the country, we had to prevail upon Clémenceau to intervene and obtain a temporary entry visa. I remember how, on the day following the meeting, Plekhanov, Jules Guesde and I were lunching together, and Plekhanov complained of my defeatism. Jules Guesde sententiously replied: ‘Social democracy can never be anti-national.’ Many a time after this Plekhanov reminded me of this phrase. Three months later I returned to Romania, and then to Bulgaria, where the split between the tesnyaki (those wanting a tight Party structure) and the shirokiye (who wanted a looser structure) was an accomplished fact. I sided firmly with the tesnyaki.
In the same year I attended the International Socialist Congress in Amsterdam, where I had mandates from the Serbian as well as the Bulgarian SD Parties. I was actively involved in the deliberations of the commission on tactics. Whilst I was in Amsterdam, I was invited by the Russian delegation to address a workers’ meeting about the assassination of Plehve.
I returned once more to Romania, where the events of 9 January 1905 roused the working class. We founded the weekly newspaper Romania Muncitoare (‘The Workers’ Rumania’), which gave birth to a political organisation with the same name. Unlike the dissolved Romanian SD Party, which had mainly consisted of intellectuals and members of the petite-bourgeoisie, we paid the greatest attention to the formation of trade unions so as to provide a proletarian base for the SD Party. It was an extremely opportune moment. The working class readily responded to the call of România Muncitoare. The strike movement grew to such an extent that even the Bucharest police asked us for help in organising their strike. More and more trade unions came into being. Both capitalists and the government were taken completely by surprise, and the first strikes were ended quickly and successfully. But the employers retreated only the better to prepare a counter-attack.
The years 1905 and 1906 were marked by acute class conflict in Romania. The press of all shades of opinion saw me as the inspiration for this movement, and by concentrating their campaign against me, a foreigner by birth, supposed that they could discredit the whole labour movement. Two events infuriated the Romanian government and ruling classes even more: the arrival in Constanza of the battleship Potyomkin, and the peasant rebellion of spring 1907. The government suspected a hidden motive behind the appearance of the Potyomkin and my help in organising its sailors—that of using the latter to provoke a revolution in Romania and thereby further the revolution in Russia. We, however, set ourselves the more modest goal of politically educating the Potyomkin’s crew. Between the ship’s arrival and the peasant rebellion, there occured another event which put the government even more on its guard. A ship loaded with arms from Varna (dispatched by Litvinov, as I later learnt), and bound for Batum, ran aground on the Romanian coast and was seized by the authorities. I had a meeting with the crew, among whom was the Bolshevik delegate Kamo. I learnt from him that it was a case of treachery, as the captain himself had turned the ship towards the shore. But whatever the reason, this extremely valuable cargo of at least 50,000 rifles, formally destined for the Macedonian revolutionary organisation in Turkey, was now in the hands of the Romanian government. The press began to claim that it had really been intended for a rising in Dobruja and pointed a finger in my direction.
In February 1907 the peasant rebellion broke out. It was directed at first against Jewish tenants in northern Moldavia and was prompted by the antisemitic outbursts of Romanian liberals and nationalists. After plundering the Jews’ farmsteads, however, the peasants turned on the Romanian tenants and then the landlords. The position became critical. The whole country, that is all the villages, was engulfed in the flames of the rising. The government massacred peasants and demolished villages with artillery. Its second action was to take rapid reprisals against the labour movement, which had kept the town authorities on constant alert on the eve of the peasant rising. So as to render the movement harmless, a whole series of measures were taken in the towns: searches, confiscation of socialist newspapers, closure of trade union premises, and the arrest of workers’ leaders. I was the first to be detained. This was soon followed by the blatantly illegal act of deportation. For the next five years, the class struggle of the Romanian workers raged around the question of my return, which they had set as a practical objective. From exile I continued to participate in the leadership of the Romanian labour movement and to write for Party and trade union organs, in addition to producing pamphlets and the SD journal Viitorul Social I also prepared two books: one in Romanian, From the Kingdom of Arbitrariness and Cowardice, and one in French, La Roumanie des boïars. The first was intended for the Romanian workers, the second for the information of socialist parties and public opinion abroad, but both dealt with the persecution of Romanian workers and peasants.
I returned secretly to Romania in 1909. I was arrested and deported without a trial. I resisted and a free-for-all ensued until I could be bundled into the carriage. At the border, the Hungarian authorities refused to admit me, and I was shuttled backwards and forwards like a parcel between the two countries until finally, after diplomatic negotiations between the Romanian and Austro-Hungarian governments, I was allowed into Hungary. Both my comrades and I had been counting on a series of prosecutions against me which they could use for agitation in the workers’ organisations. Even earlier, in March or April 1908, the Romanian government had brought two charges against me in my absence. In doing so (and in order to justify my deportation, since there was no law in Romania which empowered the government to deport its own citizens), it resorted to unbelievable legal chicanery, and did not even shrink from fabricating evidence against me. We struggled to have my case tried while I was in the country, but the government preferred to let me go free abroad, rather than hold me in prison and try me, thus providing a weapon which could be turned against it and the bourgeoisie.
Although the fact of my arrest had been withheld, it nevertheless found its way into the papers, whereupon the government categorically denied it. The Romanian working class, which knew from experience that the government was capable of all sorts of illegality, saw its attempt to conceal my arrest and my non-admittance into Hungary as an indication of its criminal intentions towards me. Their indignation grew until on 19 October 1909, after a remark by Bratianu reported in the evening papers that he would ‘rather destroy me than let me back into Romania’, they organised a street demonstration which ended in a bloody battle with the police. Apart from the dozens of injured, roughly thirty workers were arrested, among them the leaders of trade union and political labour movements, who were beaten up in the Bucharest police cellars the same night. All these outrages provoked protests not only inside Romania – in working-class areas both large and small, and in the bourgeois-democratic press – but also abroad. The conflict between the government and the workers became more acute. There was an unsuccessful attempt on Bratianu’s life, in which it transpired that even the police were implicated. This attempt was the signal for new repressions against the workers and for emergency laws banning strikes and suspending the right of association. The government could no longer remain in office and it departed, cursed by the workers, to be replaced by a Conservative government headed by Carp.
In February 1910 I secretly re-entered Romania. This time I managed to reach the capital and, after contacting the comrades, I gave myself up to the judicial authorities. Yet again the government preferred to pack me off abroad rather than open wide the gates of prison. Since I was barred from entering Hungary, it twice tried to hustle me across the Bulgarian border and failed. The way was still open for them to deport me to Russia, but they could not resort to this, and only the sea was left. I was put aboard a steamship, armed with a Romanian passport, and sent off to Constantinople. Here too, however, I was arrested after a few days by the Young Turk authorities on the demand of the Romanian police, but the intervention of Turkish socialist deputies released me from prison. I arrived in Sofia and organised the daily socialist newspaper Napred, the main task of which was opposition to the bellicose Bulgarian nationalism which was inciting war in the Balkans. Of course, I became a target for all Bulgarian nationalists.
In the meantime, a change in my favour was about to take place in Romania. The main enemy of the labour movement was the Liberal Party, which represented not only landlords and tenant capital, but also most industrial capital. After a few concessions to the peasants, which brought a little calm to the villages, the conservatives decided that for the time being they need not fear fresh outbursts from the peasantry and that the labour movement could be of use to them in their struggle with the liberals. Whatever the reasons, after my second return and second deportation, the conservatives declared that they were ready to allow a review of my case. The decree on my exile was rescinded and a special court restored my political rights. This was in April 1912.
We were not fated to enjoy for long the period of ‘peaceful’ party organisation. In autumn 1912 the First Balkan War broke out, and not a year had passed after its conclusion before the omens of world-wide conflict could be read by all. From August 1914 until August 1916, when Romania entered the war, its SD Party had to sustain a very hard struggle. We had to defend the country’s neutrality against two pro-war parties—the russophiles and the germanophiles. The argument was not confined to unprecedentedly bitter polemics in the press, at meetings and street demonstrations. It occasionally assumed more tragic proportions. In 1916 a massacre of workers took place at Galatzi, in which eight people were killed. I was arrested and accused of organising an ‘insurrection’ against the authorities. This provoked an outburst of indignation among the workers. A general strike was declared in Bucharest, which threatened to spread to the whole country. The government was obviously afraid of sparking off disorders on the eve of war and freed me, as well as the other arrested comrades.
During the period 1914–16, my activities were not limited to a struggle with the Romanian bourgeoisie and landowners. As a member of the Romanian Central Committee, I did everything in my power to build up contacts with those parties, groups and individual comrades abroad who remained faithful to the precepts of the International.
In April 1915 I was invited by the Italian Socialist Party to an international anti-war meeting in Milan. On the way home, I broke my journey in Switzerland to meet Lenin and the Swiss workers’ party. Even before this, I had been in contact with Trotsky who was then editing Nashe Slovo in Paris, and for which I also wrote. These discussions and meetings ended in the summoning of the Zimmerwald Conference.
During the preceding summer, a conference had met in Bucharest of all the Balkan socialist parties with a platform based on explicitly internationalist and class principles. Consequently the party of the Bulgarian Social Democratic opportunists (the shirokiye) was excluded from the conference. A ‘Revolutionary Balkan Social Democratic Labour Federation’ was formed, comprising the Romanian, Bulgarian, Serbian and Greek parties. A Central Bureau was elected, and I became its Secretary. Thus even before the Zimmerwald Conference, the Balkan parties had indicated their implacable hostility to imperialism.
I participated in the Berne Conference of Zimmerwald delegates in spring 1916, where I spoke with Lenin at an international workers’ meeting. But I did not have an opportunity of attending the Kienthal Conference, since Romania’s borders had been closed in readiness for war. Hostilities commenced in August 1916, and within one month I was under arrest.
The Romanian government dragged me with it when it retreated from Bucharest to Iassy, where I was freed by Russian troops on 1 May 1917. The first town which I visited after my release was Odessa. Here I began my struggle against the war and ‘defencism’, and I continued this campaign after arriving in Petrograd. Although I had not yet joined the Bolshevik Party and I disagreed with them on some points, I was threatened with deportation if I continued my activities.
During the Kornilov days, I was hidden by the Bolshevik organisation at the Sestroretsk cartridge factory, and from there made my way to Kronstadt. When Kornilov had been defeated, I decided to go to Stockholm, where a conference of the Zimmerwald left was due to meet. I was still there when the October Revolution broke out. In December I was in Petrograd, and at the beginning of January I left for the south as an organiser and Commissar for the Sovnarkom of the RSFSR, escorted by a detachment of sailors led by Zheleznyakov. I spent a certain time in Sebastopol and after organising an expedition to the Danube to fight against the Romanians who had already occupied Bessarabia, I accompanied it as far as Odessa. Here a Supreme Autonomous Collegium was set up for the struggle against counterrevolution in Romania and the Ukraine, and as its Chairman and a member of Rumcherod (the Central Executive Council of Romanian Soviets), I remained in Odessa until the town was captured by the Germans. Thence I went to Nikolaev, the Crimea, Ekaterinoslav (where I attended the second Congress of Ukrainian Soviets), Poltava and Kharkov. After my arrival in Moscow, where I spent no more than a month, I departed for Kursk with a delegation which was to hold peace talks with the Central Ukrainian Rada. There we learnt of Skoropadsky’s coup d’état. We concluded a ceasefire with the Germans, who were continuing their offensive, and then the Skoropadsky government proposed that we should go to Kiev. Here the task of our delegation was to explain to the workers and peasant masses the true policy of the Soviet government, contrasting it with the policies of Skoropadsky, the Central Rada, and the other agents of German imperialism and the Russian landlords. In September, I was sent on an emergency mission to Germany to continue negotiations with the German government about a peace treaty with the Ukraine.
From there, I was due to go to Vienna, where a republic already existed, and whilst in Berlin I received the agreement of the Austrian government, whose Foreign Minister at that time was the leader of Austrian social democracy, Victor Adler. But the German authorities refused to allow this. Indeed, I was soon expelled from Germany with Ioffe (our Ambassador), Bukharin and other comrades. We were still on our way to the border under German escort when, at Borisov, we received news of the German revolution.
Shortly afterwards, the TsIK included me in the delegation which was to attend the first Congress of German Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies—the other members being Marchlewski, Bukharin, Ioffe, Radek and Ignatov. We were detained, however, by the German military authorities in Kovno and after a few days’ ‘imprisonment’ sent back to Minsk. After a short stay there, and also in Gomel, where German control was tottering, I arrived in Moscow. I was summoned from there by the Ukrainian CC to become President of the Provisional Revolutionary Government of the Workers and Peasants of the Ukraine. The third All-Ukrainian Congress of Soviets was convened in March 1918 and there I was elected Chairman of the Ukrainian Sovnarkom. I held this post until mid-September at first in Kharkov, then in Kiev and, after the evacuation of Kiev, in Chernigov.
In mid-September I went to Moscow and, whilst retaining my chairmanship, I was also put in charge of the Political Directorate of the RVS of the Republic. I directed this institution until January during the dark days of the thrusts by Denikin, Kolchak and Yudenich.
When Kharkov was liberated from the Whites, I was soon designated Chairman of the Sovnarkom of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic and member of the RVS of what was then the South-Western Front. Here we had gained the advantage against Denikin and were now conducting the war with the Poles. Subsequently, this area was renamed the Southern Front and its RVS was led by the late M. V. Frunze, whose colleague I remained. I held the chairmanship of the Ukrainian Sovnarkom simultaneously with the chairmanship of other bodies: the Extraordinary Commission for the Struggle against Banditry, the Emergency Sanitary Commission, the Special Commission for Fuel and Food, and the Ukrainian Economic Council. I remained continuously in the Ukraine until July 1923, with the exception of the period when I accompanied Chicherin, Litvinov and others to the Genoa Conference.
In July 1923 I was named Plenipotentiary in England, where I conducted negotiations for the recognition of the Soviet Union by the British government. Later I headed the Soviet delegation which concluded the well-known agreements with MacDonald, only to see them repudiated by the new Conservative government.
From London I directed talks with Herriot, and then with Herriot and de Monzie, which led to the recognition of the Soviet Union by the French government. Since the end of October 1925 I have been Ambassador in Paris.
Since 1918 I have been a member of the TsIK, at first of the RSFSR and then of the USSR, and I was a Presidium member until 1925. Since 1919 I have also had a seat on the CC of the RKP. Until 1924 I was a member of the following Ukrainian bodies: the TsIK, the CC and the Politburo.
Khristian Rakovsky enjoyed international notoriety and authority before 1917, and brought to the Russian Revolution all his militant fervour and experience, his stature and talents, his courage and clarity; his view of affairs, moreover, was on a European level, and profoundly inter-nationalistic. He was Bulgarian by birth, Romanian by nationality, French by education and Russian by his relations, feelings and culture; and he was characterised by a subtle mind, a ‘profound nobility of soul’ (Trotsky) and a wide culture combined with great efficiency, little taste for violence and a very special regard for human relationships.
The essential aspects of his life are presented in the following words, spoken at his trial in 1938: ‘Citizens, since my earliest youth I have carried out my duties as a soldier in the fight for the emancipation of labour with honesty, loyalty and devotion.’ Everywhere his eventful life took him, he played an active part in workers’ movements: in Bulgaria, where he was one of the pioneers of socialism; in Russia, where he became the enfant chéti of the Osvobozhdeniye Truda group leaders, Plekhanov and Vera Zasulich; in France, where he acquired a following among the supporters of Jules Guesde; and in Romania, where from 1905 on he became the leader of the reawakening workers’ movement. He was involved at various times in all the branches of these parties’ internal life, from practical organising to major political decisionmaking. Rakovsky’s autobiography, centred as it is on his involvement in the Russian movement, gives but a pale image of the multifarious sides to his eventful life. His rich and colourful existence was affected, down to his choice of profession, to his revolutionary faith and socialist beliefs, by his endless peregrinations and by his multiple activities, which also made him, according to Trotsky, ‘one of the most truly international figures in the European socialist movement’.
Rakovsky was an untiring propagandist, a learned essayist and a highly talented polemicist: his works number several hundred pamphlets, articles and studies. His writings and speeches have appeared in many languages and in countless papers and reviews. He sought not effects but effectiveness, and was not averse to using anonymity, or many different pseudonyms, even when circumstances did not demand such discretion. Rakovsky dealt with all manner of questions, from Marxist theory to history, philosophy and art, down to the practical details of the workers’ struggle. In Bulgaria he was one of the best-known Marxists of his day, and according to D. Blagoev, his historical works and philosophical polemics ‘constituted a remarkable weapon in the theoretical and practical struggle against the adversaries of socialism, of which the most vulgar and fierce were the russophiles’.
His role in Romania was similar; there, he centred his writings mainly on the theoretical and practical problems of the workers’ movement. In Russia, the lengthy studies which he published in the major reviews of the period showed him to be extremely knowledgeable about France. As Anatole de Monzie remarked about a book published by Rakovsky (in Russian) under the title Contemporary France, ‘this work is evidence both of impeccable erudition and of warm sympathy for the Third Republic’—though in fact, the sympathy was for French republican and democratic traditions.
In France and Germany he was a permanent contributor to most of the major socialist organs of the day, and he specialised in Balkan affairs and their problems with regard to peace. It must be remembered that Rakovsky’s most original contribution before 1914 was his study of the question of nationalities in the Balkans. He was a bitter opponent of all forms of nationalism and elaborated a socialist solution to the problem which launched the struggle for a federation of Balkan democratic republics.
His writings and his predominant role in Balkan socialism were not, however, the sole sources for his international notoriety. While he was still a student, he was one of the promoters of the International Socialist Students’ Assizes. He was a familiar face at international socialist congresses from 1893 on. He was a delegate to the ISB, and was entrusted by the International, at the time of the Balkan crises, with confidential missions aimed at ending divergences and co-ordinating socialist action in the dangerous ‘powder-house of Europe’. He was the bogeyman of all Balkan governments, and had his card in the files of all the police forces in Europe. He was expelled seven times—from Germany, from Russia, and most frequently of all, from Romania. Each time, he took refuge in France, and in 1901 he thought of naturalising. In France, his strong personality, his eloquence and subtlety, his manner and bearing, his whole style of life not only conquered many socialists, but won over a number of politicians of various shades of opinion. In Paris, too, he formed the friendship which was to concern every aspect of his subsequent destiny: in 1903, he met Trotsky. Trotsky’s visit to Romania as a war correspondent in 1913 served to strengthen the links that became active collaboration after the outbreak of world conflict. Rakovsky gave financial support to Trotsky’s paper, Nashe Slovo, and the two worked together on the same platform amongst the internationalists. Rakovsky was keenly active in support of Balkan neutrality, and he attempted to regroup all the socialists from the neutral countries and to work out a common platform for action. Using the social democrats as a go-between, Germany attempted to make use of Rakovsky’s neutralist propaganda. First Parvus, then Südekum came to Bucarest to win over to their cause the author of the celebrated reply to Charles Dumas, which had savagely criticised the Union Sacrée in France. Rakovsky’s criticisms, coming from a known francophile, offended French socialists, who gave credence to the violent smear campaign launched in France by the Romanian right wing which accused him of being a German agent. Rakovsky had taken part in the first anti-militarist and pacifist congress in Milan in spring 1915, and he was also one of the moving spirits of the Zimmerwald Conference, where he supported Trotsky’s theses and was on the commission which drew up the resolution.
In the years 1915–16, Rakovsky found himself under a considerable amount of attack: on the left, Lenin accused him of centrism, found his position harmful and declared there was no common way with men of Rakovsky’s sort; on the right he was the bogeyman of the Bulgarian and Romanian nationalists—and the latter threw him into prison as soon as Romania entered the war. A little pamphlet denouncing the ‘crimes of the Romanian oligarchy’ and published in Paris by the Committee for the Resumption of International Relations was dedicated to ‘Comrade C. Rakovsky, the valiant leader of Romanian social democracy, who, after having been insulted, outraged and calumnied during two years of chauvinistic lunacy, now has to atone in jail for the crime of not having wished to renounce his ideals’.
Rakovsky was freed in May 1917 by Russian soldiers on the Romanian Front who had been won over to the Revolution, and he then put himself at the service of the Russian Revolution. He joined Martov’s internationalist group. At that time he differed from the Bolsheviks on fundamental questions, and he kept his earlier reservations about Lenin. The two men had known each other personally since 1900, but after the schism in 1903 Rakovsky had withdrawn from the Russian revolutionary movement and had not made a public issue of his hostility towards Lenin. He simply ignored him while keeping up a close relationship with Plekhanov, Akselrod and other Menshevik leaders. Their meetings and talks with Lenin during the war, in Switzerland, did not bring any real change in their relationship. It was Trotsky’s influence that made Rakovsky change his attitude and join the Bolsheviks on the eve of the October Revolution. Thenceforth he was entrusted with missions of ever greater importance, and the main theatre of his activities during the Civil War was the Ukraine. He was given the hot seat in this critical area because of his political stature, which was called for by both the military situation and the divergences between the Ukrainian communists. Only Rakovsky could rise above the crowd and arbitrate between the two hostile and warring factions, namely the left-wing communists, known as the ‘ultra-internationalists’, and the Ukrainian communists, or Separatists.
Thus in the summer of 1919, the Politburo dismissed the military leaders on the Ukrainian Front after a military defeat, but did not extend this measure to Rakovsky because ‘he was a great political figure’. During the Polish campaign, Lenin sent Rakovsky and Smilga as political commissars to Tukhachevsky. It was strange that Rakovsky, one of the founders of the Comintern, was not called to play his part as a leader of that organisation like other foreign communists, but served the cause as a member of the CPSU in the Soviet Federation. At the third Congress of the Ukrainian Soviets, he was appointed President of the Council of People’s Commissars. As head of the USSR’s second republic, with the most wide-ranging authority, Rakovsky ‘was to exercise all his talents—administrative, legal, medical, pedagogic and economic’. He was a member of the Russian CC until 1925, and took an active part in the major struggles and divergences in the period 1921–3. He supported the confederate principle in the construction of the Soviet Union, and fought Stalin’s policies of russification and his plans for centralisation. At the thirteenth Congress, he attacked him forthrightly. Rakovsky’s work on the question of nationalities, his own unimpeachable internationalism and the position he held lent his views great weight and made him a considerable opponent for the General Secretary. The question of nationalities was however only one side to their differences. With his critical mind and attachment to the principles of workers’ democracy, Rakovsky was one of the most active and distinctive figures in the left-wing opposition, led by his old friend Trotsky.
In July 1923 he left his post in the Ukraine to take up a diplomatic career. Indeed, nobody seemed better qualified for this than Rakovsky, for the main objective of Soviet diplomacy was to break down the isolation of the USSR. In summer 1918, he had been entrusted with the task of arranging a truce with the Ukrainian Rada; he had like Ioffe and Bukharin been one of the delegation that went to Berlin; and it was Rakovsky who had concluded the agreement with Lithuania. In the context of the year 1923, however, his transfer to the diplomatic service was only a clever manoeuvre to get him out of the way. He was a member of the Soviet delegation at the Genoa Conference, and in 1923 was made Ambassador to Britain. In 1925 he was put in charge of the Paris Embassy. He carried out his ambassadorial duties with ingenuity and gusto.
Despite his being far away, he remained active in the opposition. He was recalled to Moscow in 1927, where he continued the struggle and involved himself in all the activities of the opposition. At the fifteenth Congress, he acted as spokesman for the indomitable oppositionists. On being asked to yield to the CC, he gave this reply, which demonstrates well the courage, obstinacy and generosity of his character: I am beginning to be an old man. Why should I spoil my autobiography?’ He was expelled from the Party with the other oppositionists, and deported first to Saratov then to Astrakhan; but he continued none the less to lead the opposition and to draw up his political writings in the form of letters. With his lucid mind he made a penetrating analysis of the decadence of Soviet power in an article known in English as The ‘Occupational Hazards of Power’. Rakovsky signed the opposition declaration at the sixteenth Congress, remaining unshakable even after the mass capitulation of 1929. He was sent to Barnaul, in Kazakhstan, as a minor official in the Gosplan, but still remained firm: he composed critical analyses and sent them to the CC. Stalin’s entourage did not publish these works, but had to take them into account; Molotov himself took on the task of refuting them in the newspaper Bolshevik. Rakovsky’s health was ruined by the Kazakhstani climate and in 1932 rumours reached Europe that he had died.
In April 1934 Rakovsky capitulated. It was out of conviction that he did what neither intimidation nor the harsh conditions he endured in detention had been able to force him to do. He considered that the international situation threatened the Soviet Union, and that in these conditions he had no alternative but to rally to the leadership. Stalin gave Rakovsky’s letter enormous publicity and did not try to hide his satisfaction at this turn of events. He had succeeded in checkmating a man whom he found especially odious, who enjoyed a reputation for integrity and independence, and who was to cap it all the best friend Trotsky had.
Rakovsky then found himself entrusted with a Red Cross mission to Japan which turned out to be a frame-up. He was arrested and charged with espionage; with Bukharin, Rykov and Krestinsky he was one of the main defendants in the third and last big Moscow trial which opened on 2 March 1938. Rakovsky was the eldest defendant to appear before Vyshinsky, the judge, but he was a broken, exhausted old man. What had been a slanderous implication about Rakovsky during the First World War became the main charge against him: that he had been a German spy since 1914. At the time of the trial, Rakovsky was a veteran of fifty years standing in the ranks of revolutionary socialism, and his disciples included every important figure in the socialist movement of the Balkans; among them was Georgui Dimitrov, General Secretary at that time of Comintern. He was sentenced to twenty-five years imprisonment and died in a concentration camp, probably in 1941.
Rakovsky’s sentence was first and foremost a way of getting at Trotsky. It was both a political and moral execution. Rakovsky’s name was struck out of the history of the USSR and only very recently has it reappeared in the histories of the Bulgarian and Romanian workers’ movements; yet a so-called ‘historical school’ in the West still repeats the slanders of the Romanian chauvinists of 1915 and the insinuations made by Vyshinsky.
G.H.
Larissa Mikhailovna Reisner, the daughter of the communist professor M. A. Reisner, was born on I May 1895 in the Polish Kingdom in Lublin, where her father was lecturer at the Pulawy Agricultural Institute. She spent her childhood in Germany and went to primary school in Berlin and Heidelberg. There she grew up in an atmosphere dominated by her father’s connections with émigré Russian revolutionaries and the leaders of German social democracy. These years sowed the seeds of a lifelong attachment to German culture, and a few years spent in Paris with her parents widened the scope of her cultural interests.
She went to school in Russia just after the suppression of the 1905 Revolution, and already at the Gymnasium she displayed her literary abilities and revolutionary temperament. She took to literature at an early age, and a strong formative influence was a friend of her parents, Leonid Andreyev, who guided her through literary history. He did not, however, greatly influence her ideas, as can be seen from the drama Atlantis which she wrote at the age of seventeen and which was printed by the ‘Shipovnik’ publishing house in 1913. The theme of this drama was the attempt of a man to save society by personal sacrifice. The sources from which she drew material for the play – including Pellman’s History of Communism – clearly indicate the nature of her ideas at that time.
From the very beginning of the war she was acutely distressed by the collapse of international social democracy and the Russian intelligentsia’s conversion to chauvinism. She fully agreed with her parents’ split with Andreyev on these grounds. For Professor Reisner it was unthinkable that one should hold aloof from the anti-war campaign and this impelled him to publish the journal Rudin, which both by outspoken articles and brilliant caricatures of the deserters to the patriotic camp represented a graphic protest against the war by an isolated, intellectual, revolutionary group. The moving spirit behind Rudin was Larissa, who printed in it not only brilliant, well-turned verses, but also a whole series of pungent sketches. At the same time, she shouldered the burden of arguments with the censorship and the raising of funds. When the latter ran out, Rudin had to close, and Larissa began to contribute articles to Gorky’s Letopis. In 1917, even before the Revolution, she became associated with workers’ circles. The February Revolution set her immediately among the opponents of a coalition with the bourgeoisie. A telling pamphlet against Kerensky printed in Novaya Zhizn provoked not only a broadside from the bourgeois press but even frightened the editorial board of Gorky’s journal. She also became involved in large-scale workers’ organisations and educational circles among the Kronstadt sailors.
The October Revolution met with a ready response from her. During the first months she was busy preserving works of art, not in the spirit of a protector of the old against barbarians, but in order that the best of our cultural heritage should be saved to inspire the creators of the new culture. The outbreak of civil war destroyed all the attractions of this work. She longed for direct combat, and Sviyazhsk, near Kazan, where the Red Army was being forged in its struggle with the Czechs, saw her in the front line with a rifle in her hand, as veterans of this campaign recounted.1
Similarly she later participated in the whole campaign of the Volga flotilla. A veteran of these battles and former Tsarist officer, F. Novitsky, has told2 of the respect this young revolutionary earned among experienced soldiers by her intrepidity in the most dangerous situations. After the defeat of the Czechs and the liberation of the Volga, it was inconceivable that she should be separated from the Red Navy, and she was named one of the Commissars on its Staff. Her enthusiasm and sensitivity, allied with her imperturbable and clear-headed reasoning, enabled her to win the respect of top-ranking Tsarist officers like Admirals Altvater and Berens who, after joining the Soviets, needed a dynamic person to help them identify with the Revolution.
When our flotilla was again pressed into service against Denikin, Larissa saw action with it from Astrakhan to Enzeli. After the end of the Civil War, she lived in Petrograd and attempted to study at first hand the life of the working masses in a factory. She was driven to the verge of despair by the Kronstadt rebellion and the beginning of NEP and, full of unease about the future of Soviet Russia, she went to Afghanistan as wife of the Soviet Plenipotentiary there, F. F. Raskolnikov. In Kabul, she did not remain a mere spectator of the diplomatic struggle between the Soviet representatives and British imperialism. She sought the most active involvement by ingratiating herself with the Emir’s harem, since it played an influential role in Afghan politics. From the vantage-point of Afghanistan, which was considered an Indian outpost by the British, she was able to make a study of Britain’s policy in India and the Indian nationalist movement.
When she returned from Kabul in 1923, she published The Front and Afghanistan. The Front will always remain one of the most brilliant literary portrayals of the Civil War. It is remarkable for the sensitivity and attention with which the author observes not only the heroes and leaders of the war, but also the masses who were directly responsible for victory.
In October 1923 she went to Germany with a dual goal. Ostensibly she would evoke for the Russian workers the civil war which was in the offing there as a result of the economic chaos and the seizure of the Ruhr by the French. At the same time, in case of a seizure of power in Saxony, she was to serve as liaison officer between the local German social democratic organisation and the Comintern representatives in Dresden. Events in Saxony, however, did not develop as had been hoped. After the defeat there, life in Berlin became extremely difficult and she helped to ascertain the moods of the people for the Comintern men who lived as a tight, conspiratorial group. She stood in queues of unemployed at labour exchanges and in front of shops; she went to factory assemblies, social democratic meetings, and hospitals; she participated in the first demonstrations we managed to organise despite the dissolution of the Communist Party by the government.
At the first news of the Hamburg rising she hurried there, but it was a short-lived affair and she only arrived after it had been crushed. She collected details of the heroic resistance of the Hamburg proletariat from the families of fugitives, and she found her way into the courtrooms where summary justice was meted out to the vanquished. She had her material checked by outstanding participants in the rising, returned to Russia, and wrote Hamburg at the Barricades, which was printed in the first number of the journal Zhizn. It is a unique work of its kind, for neither the Finnish uprising1 nor Soviet Hungary2 has produced its like. The German censorship and the imperial court banned the German edition of the book and ordered it to be burnt. An aesthete protested against the ban in the liberal Frankfurter Zeitung in view of the book’s great artistic merit, but the class-ridden legal system of the German counter-revolution knew what it was doing in destroying the book which preserved the spirit of the Hamburg uprising for the German proletariat.
Hardly had she recovered from the harsh conditions of the conspiratorial life she had had to lead in Hamburg, than she was off to the Urals to study the living conditions of the proletariat there. This trip not only fulfilled a literary goal. She had already had her doubts about NEP and now she set them against real life. In the backbreaking labour of the engineering workers and the masses, and in the work of administrators scattered in settlements throughout the Urals, she found the answer to the question as to whether we are building socialism or capitalism. She returned full of faith in our future and threw herself into a study of our economic construction. She tore herself away from her books to visit the Donbass and the textile region. Her book Iron, Coal and Living People depicts the Russian proletariat at work. From the artistic point of view it is remarkable for the fact that Larissa, who had grown up among the Acmeists and had had a very refined style, was now beginning to write more simply and straightforwardly for the sake of the working masses. This was not artificial vulgarisation but the fruit of the greater rapport with the workers which she achieved during her trips as a propagandist with the Moscow garrison.
In 1925, ill with malaria since the Persian expedition, she set out for treatment in Germany, but even illness could not prevent her from contacting the Hamburg proletariat. She slipped away from the malaria hospital to take part in a demonstration by the Hamburg communists, and after recovering slightly she toured Germany, studying the conditions of the working class and the social changes which had resulted from stabilisation. She not only visited the workers’ quarters, the barracks of mass poverty, but also found her way into the Junkers technical laboratory, the Krupp offices, the huge Ullstein newspaper plant and the coal mines in Westphalia. Her book In the Country of Hindenburg is not merely a number of artistic sketches, but a masterful, large-scale socio-political canvas painted by someone deeply sympathetic to the struggle of the working class.
As soon as she finished this work, she set about examining material on the Decembrists. Her sketches of Trubetskoy, Kakhovsky and Shteingel evoked warm praise from the best Russian Marxist historian and also represented the peak of her artistic achievement. She never saw these works in print. She contracted typhus at a time when her head was full of plans for a book about the life of the Urals workers at three periods in history: during the Pugachov revolt, under capitalism and then under Soviet power. She also had in mind a large-scale book on the history of the proletarian liberation movement. Her body had been so ravaged by malaria that it was unable to withstand the illness, and on 9 February 1926 she passed away in the Kremlin hospital. She was on the threshold of a great creative career.
In her died a valiant communist who had been directly involved in the liberation struggle and whose lot it had been to write a vivid evocation of it. In her died a communist deeply attached to the Russian working class, but who was also able, thanks to her great culture, to become associated with the revolutionary movement in East and West. In her, lastly, died a profoundly revolutionary woman, a precursor of the new human type which is born in the throes of revolution.
K. Radek
In the words of Lev Nikulin, ‘Nature gave her everything: intelligence, talent, and beauty.’ She was indeed of an uncommon stamp, and her destiny was far from ordinary. She was a Commissar in the Fifth Army—the army of Ivan Smirnov, Putna and Tukhachevsky, the army that repulsed the Czechoslovaks in their wanderings towards Moscow, which held back Kolchak, shook him badly and retook Siberia. She was a Commissar on the General Staff of the Red Fleet, and a member of the Red Fleet’s expedition from Astrakhan to Enzeli. She was the wife of Fyodor Raskolnikov, Vice-President of the Kronstadt Soviet, first Soviet Minister Plenipotentiary to Afghanistan (she left him, however, on their return from that country). She was sent by the Russian CP’s Central Committee to Saxony in 1923, was a belated but enthusiastic witness of the Hamburg insurrection, that unfortunate twist to the failed German revolution of 1923; and she died of malaria in 1926 at the age of thirty-one. Even in her death, Larissa Reisner belonged to the realm of legend: for she contracted the disease in Persia, and died of it at about the time when many men, such as Lutovinov, who could not stand the contrast between the days of revolution and civil war and the rule of the Central Committee, where Stalin was still apparently only primus inter pares, were committing suicide. Raskolnikov, a morbidly jealous husband, had treated her roughly, and she became Radek’s companion.
Larissa Reisner was, then, a character of some stature. Radek’s biography gives her life its true dimension, for it recounts a destiny rather than a mere life. It is significant that Radek, whose style is frequently so verbose, fantastical and humorous, should have given here only a concise outline. The biography can be complemented with what Trotsky wrote in My Life (though there are, as can be seen, two small inaccuracies in it):
Larissa Reisner occupied an important place in the Fifth Army, as she did in the Revolution as a whole. This beautiful young woman, who had dazzled many a man, flew over events like a flaming meteor. With the looks of an Olympian goddess, she combined a brilliant and subtle mind with the courage of a warrior. When Kazan was occupied by the Whites, she disguised herself as a peasant and got into the enemy camp to spy on them. Her bearing, however, was too extraordinary, and she was arrested. A Japanese officer in the espionage section interrogated her. During a break in the interrogation, she succeeded in slipping out by the door, which was not properly guarded, and disappeared. From then on she worked in reconnaissance. Later, on board warships, she took part in the fighting. She has written essays on the Civil War which will stand as pieces of literature. She has described with no less brilliance the industries of the Urals and the workers’ uprising in the Ruhr. She wanted to see everything, to know everything and to take part in everything. In a few short years she became a writer of the first rank. Having passed unharmed through the trials of fire and water, this revolutionary Pallas was abruptly carried off, in the calm of Moscow, by typhus: she was not yet 30.
A participant in and witness of many of the decisive events of the Revolution, Larissa Reisner will remain in history as an observer. Radek is right to insist that On the Front is one of the best works to come out of the Civil War. These 130 pages are far more effective than volumes of history in evoking the war, from Kazan to Petrograd. That is true to the extent that the selection of works published in the USSR in 1965 contained a very mutilated version of On the Front: the original is too close to the truth.
J.-J. M.
Mikhail Nikolayevich Tukhachevsky was born in 1893, the son of a landowner who was reduced to poverty before the 1905 Revolution. He received his initial education at the First Gymnasium in Penza and then the Tenth Gymnasium in Moscow.
Having an innate leaning towards military affairs, he decided to enter the Cadet Corps. He was exempted from the first six classes of the First Moscow Military School after passing an examination, and in autumn 1911 he entered the seventh form, graduating one year later. From there he went to the Alexander I Military Academy, successfully completing his studies in 1914. On the declaration of the imperialist war, he was commissioned into the Semyonovsky Regiment of the Imperial Guard as a second lieutenant and went off to war.
In 1914 he saw action at Lublin in Galicia, at Ivangorod and Krakow. In 1915 he fought at Lomja, and on 19 February he was captured during a German attack. He made five attempts at escape, covering in all nearly 1,000 miles on foot. Finally, in October 1917, he succeeded in crossing the Swiss-German border, after which he returned to Russia where he was promoted company commander.
Tukhachevsky joined the RKP(b) on 5 April 1918, and his work in building up the Red Army began during the first days of its existence. He also made a name for himself as a strategist. Many large operations were carried out under his leadership, and his revolutionary biography is most closely connected with heroic struggles on all fronts.
During spring 1918 he worked for the Military Department of the VTsIK and inspected many Red Army formations. In May 1918 he was appointed Military Commissar for the Moscow region. Then, on his own request, he was dispatched to the Eastern Front to take command of the First Army. The build-up of the regular Red Army was at its most critical stage. During the Muraviov mutiny in July, Tukhachevsky was arrested by the latter and only escaped execution thanks to some quickwitted Red Army soldiers who realised the situation.
During this period of organisation, plans were laid for an operation to break through the Czechoslovak front at Simbirsk. This was accomplished on 12 September by units of the First Army under Tukhachevsky’s command. Then followed a drive at the enemy’s rear in Syzran and a rapid advance on Samara, in which Khvesin’s Fourth Army also participated as it advanced from Saratov. Later came the Buguruslan and the Belebey operations.
In December 1918 Tukhachevsky began preparations for the Orenburg campaign, but then he was appointed Deputy Commander of the Southern Front and soon Commander of the Eighth Army. With the latter he advanced as far as the northern Donets River after which, in March, he was transferred back to the Eastern Front to command the Fifth Army during our retreat to the Volga. This army was included in Frunze’s Southern Group offensive, and Tukhachevsky mounted the Buguruslan, Bugulma, Menzenlinsk and Birsk operations.
The situation on the Eastern Front was critical and the Urals had to be crossed. Tukhachevsky carried out a bold manoeuvre, electing not to go by the Ufimsk-Zlatoust road, but to make a wide detour along the Yurezan river valley towards Zlatoust with the main force of his army whilst protecting his left flank with an auxiliary operation against Krasnoufimsk. It was a complete success and opened up the way to Siberia for the Red Army.
Later followed the Chelyabinsk and Kurgan operations, as well as the strategic retreat to the river Tobol. By redoubling the efforts of the Fifth Army and mobilising the local Siberian inhabitants of the Chelyabinsk and Kurgan regions, a new campaign was planned, this time against Omsk. It was distinguished by its rapidity of advance—between 14 October and 14 November the troops covered up to 400 miles, that is an average of thirteen miles per day. This operation ended in the complete rout of Kolchak’s troops. Tens of thousands of prisoners were taken, and Kolchak’s army effectively ceased to exist as an organised force. To ensure the final elimination of the enemy, a relentless pursuit was immediately set in train, aided by close collaboration from the Siberian Red partisans.
At the end of November, Tukhachevsky was transferred to the Southern Front as Commander of the Thirteenth Army, but before he could take up this position he was made Commander of the South-Eastern (Caucasus) Front to cope with fresh instability on the rivers Don and Manych. He arrived there on 3 February. By 14 February he had already reorganised and regrouped the troops and launched the decisive advance. On 26 March Novorossiysk was captured, after which Denikin’s army disintegrated.
In April he was preparing to mount an operation in support of the newly established Soviet authorities in Baku, when he was summoned from Petrovsk to Moscow to take charge of the Western Front. On 14 May came the first advance. This overran the Polotsk base which was later used as a springboard for further attacks. The second phase of the offensive began on 4 July and within one month our troops had advanced from the Berezina to the Vistula. There, as result of a failure to coordinate the tactics of the armies of the Western and South-Western Fronts, the Poles inflicted a serious defeat on the former. A new offensive could not be mounted for lack of supplies and so the armies of the Western Front fought a slow and stubborn retreat as far as the present Polish-Soviet border.
The result of the 1920 campaign was the liberation of Soviet Byelorussia. In autumn 1920 Tukhachevsky crushed the Bulak-Bulakovich invasion. In March 1921 he was appointed Commander of the Seventh Army to suppress the Kronstadt mutiny, which was accomplished on 17 March. In May of the same year he took command of the troops in Tambov province to quell the long-drawn-out Antonov rebellion. There he introduced new methods of co-ordinating military activities with the consolidation of local Soviet authority, and the rising was crushed methodically in accordance with a forty-day timetable.
In autumn 1921 Tukhachevsky was made Head of the RKKA Military Academy. In January 1922 he took over command of the Western Front. In spring 1924 he was promoted Deputy Chief of Staff of the RKKA, which post he held during the army reorganisation. In 1925 he was appointed Commander of the Western Military District and also a member of the RVS of the USSR. In November he was made Chief of Staff of the RKKA. He combined this work with the post of chief tutor in strategy at the Military Academy, directing the training of top-ranking officers. He has been a member of the General Staff since 1920.
In 1921 and 1922 he was elected to the VTsIK, has been a member of all convocations of the TsIK, and was a member of the Belorussian TsIK in 1924 and 1925. He was chairman of the commission which drew up the RKKA Field Service Regulations. He has also written works on military science.
G. Novikov
Tukhachevsky ranks with Gamarnik, Frunze and Yakir as one of the finest examples of military leaders engendered by the Civil War: he was a fiery orator, a captain with daring and sometimes adventurous views, and a military theoretician with exalted, sweeping ideas. He came out of the First World War with the rank of lieutenant, joined the Bolshevik Party in April 1918, and was sent in June to the Eastern Front where he took command of the First Army, and then at the end of the year to the Southern Front to command the Eighth Army. He began to show his mettle in March 1919 when he was sent back to the Eastern Front to take command of the Fifth Army. Kolchak was only 85 kilometres from Kazan, 100 km from Simbirsk and 85 km from Samara. Under Tukhachevsky’s command, the Fifth Army pierced Kolchak’s lines, crossed the Urals and poured into Siberia. Order No. 167 dated 7 August 1919, from the RRVS, attributed this success to the ‘clever command of Army Leader Tukhachevsky. …’
From then on Tukhachevsky began to work out a ‘Marxist’ military theory, the ‘Proletarian Concept of War’, together with Frunze, the former commander of the Southern Group on the Eastern Front, with Gusev and a few others. The theory was marked by hostility towards the Tsarist military experts, by the necessity for the emergence of Red Commanders, the development of a mobile partisan war, by tactics systematically based on constant and total offensive, and finally, the last stage, by the constitution of an international revolutionary military General Staff.
These ideas were part of the Polish campaign of June-August 1919: an astounding advance, given the limited technical means at its disposal, took the Red Army to within 30 kilometres of Warsaw: but faced with an Army without reserves, with wretched air support spread out over 200 km of front, weakened by lack of discipline in the command of the South-West Front (Stalin and Yegorov), the Poles were saved by the ‘miracle of the Vistula’. In a long report which he drew up in 1923, Tukhachevsky analysed in a cool and sober manner the reasons for this defeat, but declared none the less that a Red Army victory would have sparked off a European revolution. …
In March 1921, he organised the liquidation of the Kronstadt revolt, and in May 1921 he organised the repression of the peasant riots in the Tambov region.
He then began a military ‘career’ which was to take him to the heights of glory and to the depth of ignominy. Novikov has set out the first steps in Tukhachevsky’s fall. … He remained head of the Red Army’s General Staff until May 1928, when he was appointed Commandant of the Leningrad district forces. In June 1931 he was appointed Director of Munitions in the Red Army and then Vice-Commissar for Defence and Vice-President of the RRVS. He remained in the first of these posts until May 1936 and in the second until May 1937.
At that time he supported a systematic modernisation of the Red Army, while Voroshilov, who was to become his hierarchical superior, was still dreaming of cavalry battles; in 1930 Tukhachevsky turned directly to Stalin to impose modernisation plans blocked by Voroshilov and the General Staff. At the end of 1931 he insisted on the need for developing armoured divisions; and in February 1934 he emphasised the importance of the air force. In May 1932 Stalin gave his approval to some of these points.
It seems that Tukhachevsky was ‘opposed’ to the total subordination of the military apparatus and, among other things, of the army’s Intelligence Service, to the apparatus and Intelligence Service of the GPU. Barmin saw him in 1934–5 and noted ‘his broad masculine face, his calm assurance and attentive way of speaking’; but he also noticed the deferential tone of voice with which he punctuated his telephone conversations with Voroshilov, saying ‘at your orders, Kliment Yefremovich’. And Barmin adds: ‘Other observations led me to the conclusion that his will had weakened and that in this vast system of bureaucracy, he too had become a functionary.’
In any case he was not spared in the purges. In January 1937, Radek made an unmistakable allusion to him at the second Moscow trial. The man who has been presented as a Napoleonic conspirator (but all that he seems to have had in common with Bonaparte was his sharp glance and military talent) ‘waited’ for his arrest. He and seven colleagues were arrested on 8 June 1937, tried in camera by a nine-man tribunal, and sentenced to death for high treason on behalf of Nazi Germany. Stalin had his entire family wiped out, and interned his youngest daughter, not twelve years old. Marshal Tukhachevsky was rehabilitated after 1956. Two volumes of his works have since been published in Moscow. …
J.-J. M.
Mikhail Solomonovich Uritsky, the son of a Jewish merchant, was born in 1873 in the town of Cherkassy. At first he was brought up by his mother (his father died young), in a strict, religious atmosphere, and he studied the Talmud. But then under the influence of his sister he became fascinated by Russian literature. He entered the Cherkassy preparatory school, went on to the Belaya Tserkov Gymnasium, where he lived in great poverty, supporting himself by giving lessons, and then entered the Law Faculty of Kiev University.
Uritsky became involved in the revolutionary movement at an early age and organised an SD circle while still in the Gymnasium. In 1897, when he graduated from university, he volunteered for military service but after only eight days was arrested on a charge of membership of the SD Party. That was the beginning of a number of years in prison or exile. Exiled first to Yakutsk province, he returned to revolutionary activity in St Petersburg under the pseudonym of ‘Dr Ratner’ He was soon rearrested, being deported to Vologda and then Archangel provinces. After a short time came freedom, then arrest, prison, exile and finally emigration.
After siding with the Menshiviks at the time of the Party split, he adopted an internationalist position on the outbreak of war and collaborated with Trotsky on Nashe Slovo, where he proclaimed his determined opposition to the war. He returned to Petrograd after the Revolution and joined the Bolsheviks. He was immediately given responsible tasks and elected to the Central Committee. In October 1917 he unhesitatingly spoke in favour of a rising against the Kerensky government and took the most active part in its overthrow as a member of Military Revolutionary Committee. After this he was appointed Commissar in charge of the Constituent Assembly. An opponent of the Brest peace, he nevertheless submitted to the decision to sign the treaty for the sake of Party discipline. Appointed head of the Petrograd Cheka, Uritsky waged an unremitting campaign against counter-revolution. He was killed on 30 August 1918 by the student A. Kanegisser.
With his pince-nez and broken neck, Uritsky looked the perfect intellectual. He and Volodarsky, both members of Mezhrayonka, shared the honour of being considered by the SRs as the most execrable representatives of Bolshevism; as a result, he was assassinated by one of them on 30 August, the same day that some SR Pimpernel attempted to murder Lenin.
Uritsky made Trotsky’s acquaintance in 1900 during the first deportation, on the banks of the Lena. He remained his friend until death.1 A Menshevik from the schism in 1903, he associated himself with Trotsky, outside splinter groupings, in 1905, and in 1910 was a member of Plekhanov’s so-called Party Mensheviks’.
On his return to Russia immediately after the February Revolution he joined the Mezhrayonka (he did not join the Bolshevik Party straight away, as his anonymous biographer would have us believe). If one is to believe Sukhanov, Uritsky first supported unity between all socialist splinters and even proposed on the evening of 17 March that a workers’ delegation, complete with military band, should meet Tseretelli, declaring that ‘Tseretellis don’t come every day’.
Then he changed rapidly. In August he joined the Bolshevik Party, like all members of the Mezhrayonka, was elected to the CC and during the October discussions held reservations about the lack of practical preparedness, but none the less supported the move to insurrection. For this he was chosen, on 16 October, as one of the five members of the RVS nominated by the CC to go on to the Petrograd Soviet RVS. He played a major role in the RVS and sometimes signed its documents under the style of ‘president’.
During the discussion of the Brest-Litovsk peace terms he was one of the most consistent left-wing communists, one of the four who refused right through to vote for the Brest treaty terms. He reproached Lenin with ‘seeing things from Russia’s point of view, not from the international point of view’. He stated, ‘After having taken power, we have forgotten about world revolution. [ … ] Our capitulation to German imperialism will retard the awakening Western Revolution.’ At the seventh Congress of the Bolshevik Party he proclaimed: ‘A defeat could promote the development of a socialist revolution in Western Europe much more than this obscene peace.’ At the same Congress Lenin accused him to taking his criticisms from left-wing SR newspapers.
Granat’s biographer praises Uritsky’s discipline on this occasion. He is rather overstating himself. In fact, Uritsky was the most extreme of the left communists. On 23 February it was he who read to the CC the declaration of the left communists who were resigning from their positions in Party and Government. Uritsky left his post as a member of the inner cabinet of People’s Commissars, as well as the CC, where he remained to the end the most virulent spokesman of those who had resigned. He demanded the right for the left wing to propagandise within the Party, even after the signature of the peace treaty. He was one of the three editors of the left-wing communist splinter weekly, Kommunist, launched in Petrograd in February 1918. At the seventh Congress it was again Uritsky who read out the declaration of the left communists who refused to enter the CC and even to participate in the elections. Elected an alternate member of the CC, he, with Bukharin and Lomov, refused to work on it. Many months passed before Uritsky ‘submitted’.
After being appointed President of the Petrograd Cheka, he responded with firmness to the left-wing SR insurrection. The SRs took their revenge and assassinated him on 30 August. Although he appeared to feel a strong antipathy towards Stalin, whom he had attacked several times in the CC and at the seventh Congress, where he opposed his appointment to the Programme Commission, Uritsky was left a small place in official Soviet history. But this man, whose religious upbringing no doubt made him give his political principles a rigorous moral value, has remained in the chronicles of the revolution only as a fervent internationalist with no face and no voice.
J.-J. M.
V. Volodarsky was born in 1890 in the locality of Ostropol, Volhynia province. He came from a poor Jewish family. Under the impact of the agrarian agitation of 1905 he joined the revolutionary movement, participating first in the ‘Small Bund’ and then ‘Spilka’ (the Ukrainian SD Party). He composed and printed illegal appeals, as well as holding short meetings. After entering the fifth form of the Dubno Gymnasium, he was expelled one year later for ‘political unreliability’.
In 1908 he was clapped in prison but soon released. From 1908 until 1911 he was active as an agitator in Volhynia. In 1911 he was arrested and deported to Archangel province for three years. He used his enforced idleness to study for the school-leaving certificate; he passed the examinations and then in 1913 returned home under an amnesty. Police persecution, however, drove him abroad. He went to Philadelphia in the United States, where he found work as a cutter in a garment factory. He joined the International Trade Union of Tailors and became a militant agitator, propagandist and journalist, at first among workers in Philadelphia and then in New York. He was a most active collaborator on Novy Mir with Bukharin and Chudnovsky.
After the February Revolution he returned to Russia, soon joined the Bolshevik Party, and gradually rose to the first rank of Party activists, at first working as a district agitator, and then as chief agitator for the Petrograd Committee. He was elected to the Presidium of the Petrograd Soviet and, after the October Revolution, to the Presidium of the VTsIK, taking a direct part in the congresses of soviets. He was sent by the Party to the Ukraine to attend the Congress of the Army of the Romanian Front, and on his return he was entrusted with the editorship of the Petrograd Krasnaya Gazeta. With the formation of the Petrograd Commune, he was elected Commissar for Press, Propaganda and Agitation. On 20 July 1918 he was murdered on his way to a meeting.
In 1920 a collection of his speeches was published.
This ‘pale, tall young man with a bad complexion and glasses’ (John Reed) is today thoroughly forgotten. The SR assassins who shot him down on 20 June 1918 blocked his path to history in which he was destined to play more than a minor part.
At the age of fourteen he was already a militant, at eighteen a professional revolutionary agitating in Volhynia. From his youth, Volodarsky was distinguished for his talents as an orator, which served him well in the American Clothes-Workers’ Union and Socialist Party, of which he was a member during his exile in the United States (1913–17).
He returned to Russia in April 1917 and promptly joined Mezhrayonka. He did not wait for the merger to come about (in August) but joined the Bolshevik Party in May. The Party badly needed agitators, but only had a handful—Zinoviev, Slutsky, Kollontai, Chudnovsky, Lunacharsky. Volodarsky was elected to the Petrograd Committee as soon as he joined the Party, and then to the Ispolkom. He was responsible for the Peterhof-Narva area, which included the huge Putilov works and its 30,000 metal-workers—the spearhead of the capital’s proletariat. In a few weeks Volodarsky won Putilov over to the Bolsheviks. ‘From the moment he set foot in Narva district’, the worker Minichev recounted, ‘the ground began to shake under the feet of the SR gentlemen at Putilov, and after two months or so the workers followed the Bolsheviks’. At the time of the July days, Volodarsky’s speech to the Mezhrayonka conference was instrumental in preparing the merger with the Bolsheviks.
He had less success on 3 July when the CC gave him the task of persuading the First Machine Gun Regiment not to demonstrate. … During the July-August repression, the Petrograd Committee relied heavily on Volodarsky. Boris Ivanov writes: ‘Volodarsky now carries almost single-handed the tasks of propaganda and agitation in quasi-illegal conditions’. But he put on an assured front. At the Petrograd Conference on 16–20 July he maintained that the demoralisation was a shallow, passing mood, and opposed the liquidation of the slogan ‘All Power to the Soviets’ which Stalin had proposed.
He was deeply involved with the masses among whom he plunged each day; and as one of the leading Bolsheviks in the Soviet, coming behind Trotsky and Kamenev, he expressed the people’s fear of decisive action by opposing the move to insurrection. ‘We must know that once in power we shall have to lower wages, increase production, introduce terror. … We do not have the right to refuse these means, but neither should we hasten to use them.’ And he added: ‘Only a revolutionary explosion in the West can save us.’ He suggested putting the question to the Congress of Soviets. Once the decision for insurrection had been taken, however, he fought for its success. The History of the Russian Revolution, ‘edited under the supervision of M. Gorky, V. Molotov, K. Voroshilov, S. Kirov, A. Zhdanov and J. Stalin’, pays Volodarsky the following tribute: ‘On the tribune one could see more frequently than the others the slender figure of Volodarsky, one of the best Bolshevik agitators. He was a passionate speaker and very popular with the workers and soldiers.’ Before contradictory meetings with the Mensheviks or the SRs, the Petrograd Committee’s telephone never stopped ringing: ‘Send us Volodarsky. There’ll be a lot of people at the meeting.’
He was a member of the Soviet TsIK elected on 26 October, and one of the fiercest opponents of the conciliators—led by Zinoviev and Kamenev, who had been his political ally until very recently. Volodarsky led the fight, at the all-night meeting of the TsIK on 1 November, against the ‘coalition government’. He succeeded in getting his motion passed nem con. … Entrusted with preparing the Constituent Assembly elections in the capital, he declared to the Petrograd Committee on 8 November, ‘If the Constituent Assembly does not have a Bolshevik majority, then we shall have to make ready for a third Revolution’.
In the following months he fell from public view somewhat. Profoundly hostile to the Brest-Litovsk agreement, remaining a ‘left-wing communist’ to his fingertips on this issue (although never included by historians in their lists of left-wing communists of the period) he abstained out of a sense of discipline from any splinter activity. He remained silent. On the Petrograd Soviet Executive Committee he remained silent, in working sessions as in plenary sessions of the Soviet; and on the TsIK he remained silent, going so far as to abstain on a vote on the peace treaty on 24 February. On 25 February, at the Petrograd Soviet, the left-wing SR Frishman described the Bolsheviks as ‘traitors to the revolution’. Volodarsky jumped up, delivered a flamboyant speech which concluded with these words:
I declare in the name of those opposed to the peace terms: we accept this treaty, however ruinous, however annexationist, we shall sign it and march at your sides, at the sides of those who did not fear to take on an enourmous responsbility in order to save the fate of the revolution. [ … ] we shall march forward beneath this heavy cross on a road of thorns towards socialism.
Hardly had he resumed his place in the front rank of the Petrograd Bolsheviks than he was killed, one evening in June, on his way to a meeting. He was not yet twenty-eight years old and according to Boris Ivanov, ‘He had no private life. He lived alone in order to give himself more completely to the Revolution’. He was a popular figure and the Bolshevik leaders in Petrograd, much to Lenin’s indignation, had to calm the communist workers in the former capital to prevent them from replying to Volodarsky’s assassination with a wave of mass terror.
J.-J. M.
1 Alin, Lénine à Paris. Souvenirs inédits, p. 53.
1 The legal Menshevik daily paper in St Petersburg.
1 K. A. Gvozdev, with B. O. Bogdanov, led a strong Workers’ Group of ‘liquidators’, elected to the Central War Industry Committee in November 1915.
1 Alin,Lénine à Paris, p. 54.
1 See R. K. Debo, ‘The Making of a Bolshevik: Georgii Chicherin in England, 1914-1918’ Slavic Review XXV, no. 4 (December 1966), pp. 651-62.
2 L. Trotsky, My Life (New York, 1960), p. 348.
3 L. Fischer, The Soviets in World Affairs (Princeton, 1960), p. 12.
1 Les Bolchéviks et la Revolution d’octobre (Paris, 1964), p. 239.
2 See M. Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle (New York, 1969).
1 O. Blum, Russische Köpfe (Berlin, 1923), p. 103.
2 Dnievnik. Pisma Rodniym, 2nd ed. (Moscow, 1958).
3 V. Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, p. 221.
1 Trotsky, My Life, p. 220.
1 See Fischer, The Soviets in World Affairs.
2 op. cit., p. 182.
1 ibid., pp. 229–30.
1A national gathering found in medieval Russian histroy, at which peasants brought their petitions and complaints to the ‘little father’ in Moscow. In the nineteenth century, the summoning of such a body was mainly advocated by some populists.
1 The name given to that part of Poland ceded to Russia at the Congress of Vienna in 1815.
1 The political prison.
1 Radek’s information was incorrect. Lenin was freed from detention following the intervention of Victor Adler and was allowed to leave Galicia.
1 In fact, Radek was not a member of the Polish Revolutionary Committee, which was composed of Dzerzhinsky, Marchlewski, Felix Kohn, Unschlicht and Prountiak.
1 Radek transformed this into the ‘Schlageter tactics’, after the name of a German killed by French occupation troops, which unleashed the fury of the nationalists. These tactics led to ‘National Bolshevism’ in Germany.
1 See J. P. Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg, vol. 1 (Oxford, 1966).
2 Unpublished letter, Hoover Library, Stanford.
1 E. H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, vol. 1 (Macmillan, 1950).
2 R. Bruce Lockhart, Memoirs, p. 255.
1 O.-E. Schüddekopf ‘Karl Radek in Berlin’, Archiv für Sozialgeschichte, vol. 2 (1962), pp. 87-166.
2 Russische Köpfe, p. 87.
3 A. Balabanova, My Life (London, 1938), p. 246.
1 op. cit., pp. 108, 137.
2 In Contre le courant, no. 31-2 (10 June 1929), p. 4.
1 For a critical analysis, see W. Lerner, ‘The Unperson in Communist Historiography’, South Atlantic Quarterly, LXV, no. 4 (autumn 1966), pp. 438–45.
1 See e.g. A. Kremlev, Krasnaya Zvezda 14 February 1926.
2 Izvestiya, 12 February 1926.
1 The uprising by Finnish socialists took place on 28 January 1918. It was crushed with the help of a German expeditionary force in April and May 1918, the final remnants surrendering on 4/5 May.
2 The Hungarian Soviet Republic was formed in March 1919 and was suppressed by foreign intervention the following July.
1 Trotsky called him ‘my old friend’ when recalling their meeting in 1917. It was not a phrase he much used.