Boris Souvarine

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Boris Souvarine

Boris Souvarine (* 1895 in Kiev ; † November 1, 1984 in Paris ; actually Boris Konstantinowitsch Lifschiz , Russian Борис Константинович Лифшиц ) was a French political activist and writer of Russian-Jewish origin.

Life

The worker's son, whose family immigrated to France in 1897, initially worked as a goldsmith. Before 1914 he joined the French Socialist Party. From 1920 he was one of the leading heads of the French Committee of the Third International (Comité de la Troisième Internationale, with Fernand Loriot and Charles Rappoport ). Within the French Socialist Party SFIO, Souvarine advocated a Marxist-revolutionary line, that is, for the exit from the Second International. At the Strasbourg Congress in February 1920, the SFIO actually decided to leave the Socialist International . Souvarine then essentially submitted the application to join the Third International, which was passed by a majority at the SFIO congress in Tours in December 1920 and which led to the split in the French labor movement.

In 1921 the leading functionary of the founding Communist Party of France ( PCF ) became a member of the presidium of the Communist International (Comintern).

Souvarine lived mainly in Moscow at that time. Within the PCF he stood in opposition to the “center” around the functionaries Frossard and Cachin , and after 1923 also to Albert Treint . Souvarine was close to Leon Trotsky and, in a text from March 1924, opposed the "mechanical, bureaucratic and irresponsible centralism" within the French communist movement. As a result, L'Humanité announced on July 19, 1924 Souvarine's expulsion from the Third International.

The rest of Souvarine's life was devoted to the struggle against bureaucratic communism. From 1925 Souvarine's magazine Le Bulletin Communiste appeared again. In 1930 he was a founding member of the Cercle communiste démocratique and the magazine La Critique sociale .

Souvarine's seminal Stalin biography was published in 1935 . With significant analytical power, she pointed out the myths and reality of the Soviet coercive system, which Souvarine understood as the “negation of socialism and communism”. In 1936 Souvarine published a travelogue about the Soviet Union under the pseudonym "Motus".

Souvarine was arrested by the Vichy government in Marseille in 1940 , but was able to emigrate to the USA. After his return to France (1948) he continued to work as an independent left-wing publicist.

Works (selection)

  • Stalin , Munich 1980

literature

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Souvarine, Boris
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Lifschiz, Boris (real name); Lifschiz, Boris Konstantinowitsch (full name); Suvarin, Boris; Suwarin, Boris
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French political activist and publicist
DATE OF BIRTH 1895
PLACE OF BIRTH Kiev
DATE OF DEATH November 1, 1984
Place of death Paris