Boris Georgievich Bashanov

This article or the following section is not adequately provided with supporting documents ( e.g. individual evidence ). Information without sufficient evidence could be removed soon. Please help Wikipedia by researching the information and including good evidence.

Boris Georgijewitsch Baschanow ( Russian Борис Георгиевич Бажанов , French Boris Bajanov , * 1900 in Mogilew-Podolsk , today Ukraine , † 1982 in Paris ) was one of the most important witnesses to the early Soviet Union and especially the bloody power struggle between and around Lenin and Trotsky and Stalin .

Life

As a high school graduate, Bashanov was wounded in the turmoil of revolution and counter-revolution. He studied physics and was elected functionary and secretary to the Bolsheviks . His organizational talent let him rise within a short time at the age of 23 to the second man in the state as "Organizational Secretary of the Politburo of the CPSU ", ie Stalin's head of organization. There he witnessed the innermost center of power for five years until 1928 and shaped it significantly.

It is true that Bashanov's abundance of power (for Stalin largely renounced the rule and dealt primarily with personnel policy in the Kremlin and party ) predetermined him to become Stalin's successor, but his lack of blackmail made him unsuitable. Even before the extensive "purges" ( Tschistka , murder of possible competitors, climax 1937/38) began, he managed the extremely difficult escape across the border to Persia and via India to England. He went to the asylum in Paris.
In the Russian-Finnish winter war, Bashanov built up an armed force with 450 volunteers from the 500 prisoners of war Soviet soldiers; but because the war ended soon, he returned to Paris. His soldiers were granted Finnish citizenship.

Immediately before the German invasion of the Soviet Union , Hitler's minister Alfred Rosenberg and his deputy Georg Leibbrandt had Baschanov brought to Berlin in mid-June 1941 to ask him whether he would be available as a Russian leader. Bashanov asked the Nazis the counter-question about their war plan; whether they wanted to wage war against communism ( Stalinism ) or against the Russian people; in the former they would win the war, in the latter they would lose. Rosenberg pointed out that such questions would be decided by Hitler himself, he would be asked; and he decided, as Bashanov learned two months later: Russia would be a German colony and be administered by Germans. - Baschanow lived in Paris for the following decades and died in 1982. His grave is in the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris .

The Russian historian Roi Medvedev took Bashanov's books as a source in his multi-volume work on Stalin, but accused him of exaggeration in some places.

Fonts

• Stalin. The red dictator . Berlin: Aretz, 1931. (Authorized translation from French.)
• I was Stalin's secretary . Frankfurt / M .: Ullstein, 1977.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ I was Stalin's secretary . Frankfurt / M .: Ullstein, 1977, p. 247.
2. ^ Roi Medvedev: The Judgment of History - Stalin and Stalinism , Volume I, Berlin, 1992 pp. 9, 75, 80, 86.