Christian Georgievich Rakovsky

Christian Rakowski (before 1923)

Christian Rakovsky ( Russian Христиан Георгиевич Раковский ; Bulgarian Кръстьо Раковски ( Krastjo Rakowski ), Romanian: Cristian Racovschi ; born August 1 ^{. Jul} / 13. August  1873 ^greg. In Kotel , Bulgaria ; † 11. September 1941 in the Oryol Oblast ) was a Bulgarian socialist revolutionary, Bolshevik politician and Soviet diplomat. He was the nephew of the revolutionary Georgi Rakovsky .

Life

youth

Rakowski grew up multilingual in a wealthy Bulgarian family in Kotel / Eastern Rumelia . Because of "socialist activities" he was expelled from the grammar school in Gabrovo at the age of 15 and the right to attend public educational institutions in Bulgaria was withdrawn from him. In 1890 he went to Geneva , studied medicine and got to know political emigrants like Plekhanov and Luxemburg . He wrote articles for the Bulgarian Social Democrat and represented the Bulgarian party at the International Socialist Congress in Zurich in 1893. Because of his close contact with Plekhanov, he later took a position between the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks of the Social Democratic Workers' Party of Russia (RSDLP), of which he was a member from 1903 until 1917 was.

In the fall of 1893 he enrolled at a Berlin university, produced articles for Vorwärts and became acquainted with Wilhelm Liebknecht . Because of his contacts with Russian revolutionaries, he was expelled from the country and continued his education in Zurich , Nancy and Montpellier , where he received his doctorate in 1897 with a dissertation on Causes of Crime and Degeneration . Here he met Jules Guesde and in 1896 was again the Bulgarian representative at the Socialist Congress, this time in London. As a doctor he did military service in the Romanian army. In 1899 he traveled to Saint Petersburg , but had to escape arrest after a speech. In 1900 he entered again, this time was expelled and went to Paris. He then studied law and made contact with the Serbian social democracy. In 1904 he represented Serbs and Bulgarians at the Socialist Congress in Amsterdam and prevented an "opportunist" ( Leon Trotsky ) resolution by Victor Adler and Émile Vandervelde .

Romania

After finishing his studies, Rakovsky went to Romania and bought land in the vicinity of Mangalia , a small town not far from the border with Bulgaria. He lived as a landowner and doctor and founded the newspaper România Muncitoare (Working Romania) of the Romanian Social Democratic Party (PSDR), of which he was a co-founder. In June 1905 he negotiated with the mutinous sailors of the Russian armored cruiser Potemkin, which had appeared off the coast of Constanța . The sailors were given asylum while the ship was being returned. He was expelled as a supporter of the Romanian peasant uprising of 1907 , represented his party at socialist congresses in Stuttgart, Copenhagen and Belgrade and was able to re-enter in 1912. In 1913 Leon Trotsky stayed with him as the Russian correspondent for the Balkan Wars . He then sought Romania's neutrality during World War I and was a participant in the Zimmerwald Conference in 1915 . After Romania's entry into the war, he was imprisoned as a German spy (Bulgaria, his country of origin, stood on the side of the central powers ), but after the February Revolution of 1917 he was liberated from the Russian garrison in Iași on May 1st . Rakovsky went to Russia.

Russia

Initially persecuted by the Provisional Government , he was sent to Stavropol and Odessa as an emissary by the RSFSR government after the October Revolution . Rakovsky emerged as the president of the pro-Soviet "revolutionary government of the workers and peasants of Ukraine", which was formed after the Bolsheviks had gained territories. He should negotiate with the Ukrajinska Narodna Respublika and also with the hetmanate Pavlo Skoropadskyjs . After Trotsky, he was involved in the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty . Sent to Berlin in September 1918 for further negotiations on the Ukraine, he was expelled along with Adolf Abramowitsch Joffe and Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin , arrested on the way, but freed again by the November Revolution.

After the proclamation of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic in January 1919, he became its head of government and external commissioner. At the same time he acted as political commissar of the "Revolutionary Military Council of the Southwest Front" in the Russian Civil War . In March 1919 he took part in the founding congress of the Comintern as a representative of the Federation of Communist Parties of the Balkans .

In 1920 there was a conflict with the Ukrainian Communist Party when Rakovsky and other members of the government were removed from their offices and only reinstated after Moscow intervened. Still a Romanian citizen, he was charged by a military tribunal in 1921 with “crimes against the security of Romania” and sentenced to death in absentia in 1924.

In 1922, Rakovsky took part in the Genoa Conference , where he was involved in negotiating the Rapallo Treaty , and the Lausanne Conference.

After the formation of the Soviet Union in December 1922, he campaigned for a largely independent policy of the Union republics and for the continuation of the revolution in south-eastern Europe. As a member of the “ left opposition ” around Trotsky, he was removed from Ukraine by Josef Stalin in mid-1923 and was supposed to negotiate in Great Britain and France on the formal recognition of the Soviet Union. In the case of Great Britain, this failed after the publication of the " Zinoviev Letter" and the subsequent overthrow of the Labor government in October 1924. After France recognized the Soviet Union, he became ambassador there from October 1925 to October 1927. Because he had signed up for a Trotskyist platform, he was expelled from the country. The writer Panait Istrati accompanied his return journey .

After the defeat of the left opposition in November / December 1927, Rakowski was expelled from the CPSU . He exiled to Astrakhan and later to Barnaul . Although stigmatized as an " enemy of the people ", he occasionally spoke publicly, continued to criticize Stalin and in 1928 wrote an analysis of the rise of Stalinism with the text The "Occupational Risks" of Power , which anticipated many of the thoughts later expressed by Trotsky in The Revolution Betrayed .

Show trial

Rakovsky spent 6 years in exile. He was one of the last leading Trotskyists to break with the latter and return to Stalin. He was allowed to return to Moscow, became Soviet ambassador to Japan in autumn 1934 and was re-admitted to the party in 1935. On August 21, 1936, he formally apologized in a letter to Pravda “for his mistakes”. Under the heading “There shall be no mercy”, he accused Trotsky and his supporters of being “agents of the Gestapo ”.

In the course of the Great Terror , he was arrested on January 27, 1937. In March 1938 he was together with Bukharin, Alexei Rykov , Genrich Jagoda , Nikolai Krestinsky and other old Bolsheviks defendants in the 3rd Moscow Trial , the Trial of the 21 . Unlike his co-defendants, who were mostly shot immediately , he was sentenced to 20 years of forced labor in the Gulag . Rakowski had also testified against Krestinski.

After the German invasion of the Soviet Union ( Operation Barbarossa ) he was ordered by Stalin in the Oryol Oblast together with the ex-wife of Lev Kamenew , Olga Kamenewa , Maria Spiridonowa and 150 other political prisoners from the NKVD on September 11, 1941 in the central prison of Oryol shot.

During perestroika , Rakovsky was rehabilitated in 1988.

Rakovsky Protocols

In 1950, the book Sinfonia en Rojo Mayor was published in Spain , which ostensibly contained the interrogation protocols by Rakowski, noted by an NKVD doctor Dr. Josef Landowsky , contains. The book is circulating under the title Red Symphony on esoteric or right-wing extremist sites on the Internet. It is mostly quoted for the purpose of proving an imaginary Masonic- Jewish world conspiracy concept . According to this, the Warburg and Rothschild banks are said to have financed both Lenin and Hitler . The British historian Antony Sutton later claimed the same thing .

Works

• Christian G. Rakowski: The causes of the degeneration of the party and the state apparatus (letter to Walentinow) (August 6, 1928), in: Trotsky writings , Volume 2.1, Hamburg 1988, appendix.

Articles and essays in European newspapers:

• Russia in the east
• Sketches from modern France
• Metternich and his time
• The Russo-Japanese War
• Socialists and war

Web links

Commons : Christian Rakovsky  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Rakowski Archive in the Marxists Internet Archive (English), here also more detailed biographical information
• The reawakening of the International. Speech given at the international mass meeting on February 8, 1916 in the Volkshaus in Bern
• Newspaper article about Christian Georgijewitsch Rakowski in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .
• Steffen Dietzsch: Bukharin, Nikolai Iwanowitsch, Karl Radek et al. , in: Kurt Groenewold , Alexander Ignor, Arnd Koch (Eds.): Lexicon of Political Criminal Trials , Online, as of September 2015

Individual evidence

1. ^ Trotsky, Leo: The Balkan Wars 1912–1913 . Arbeiterpresse Verlag. Essen 1996.
2. ↑ Istrati's remarks on Rakovsky (Italian).
3. ↑ William L. Chase, Enemies Within the Gates , Document 16 ( Memento of the original from September 15, 2006 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (English). 
4. ↑ Process Report on the criminal case of the anti-Soviet "Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites" , evening sitting on 3 March 1938 interrogation of Krestinski ( Memento of the original on 27 September 2007 at the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link is automatically inserted and not yet tested. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . 
5. ↑ Mauricio Carla Villa: Sinfonia en Rojo Mayor (capitulo XI .: Radiographia de la Revolucion) de José Lankowsky . Editorial NOS. Madrid 1950; a German translation by Dürer-Verlag, Buenos Aires is published as a facsimile by the Facsimile-Verlag Bremen - Verlag Wieland Körner KG, 2nd edition 2007.
6. ↑ Birk Meinhardt, Arier im Astralleib , in: Süddeutsche Zeitung of March 15 and 16, 2008, p. 3.
7. ^ Antony C. Sutton: America's Secret Establishment: An Introduction to the Order of Skull and Bones . Liberty Press, Billings, Mont., 1986, quoted in HJKrysmanski : A Conspiratorial Society? Secret Societies and Paranoia in America (PDF; 263 kB).