Georgi Leonidowitsch Pyatakov

Georgi Pyatakov 1919

Georgi Leonidowitsch Pjatakow ( Russian Георгий Леонидович Пятаков , [ ɡʲɪˈɔrɡʲɪj lʲɪɐˈnʲidɐvʲɪtʃʲ pʲɪtɐˈkɔf ]), also Juri Leonidowitsch Pjatakow ; (* 6 ^{. Jul} / 18th August  1890 ^greg. In Kiev ; † 1. February 1937 in Moscow ) was a Russian revolutionary and Soviet statesman.

biography

He was the son of an engineer who later became the director and owner of a sugar processing factory. During his visit to a secondary school in Kiev, Georgi Pyatakov first turned to anarchism and in 1907 became a member of a terrorist group that was preparing an assassination attempt on the governor-general of Kiev . Due to a severe mental crisis that he suffered at the time, he temporarily turned away from the illegal activity. At the end of 1907 he finished secondary school and enrolled at the law faculty of St. Petersburg University. There he came into contact with the Marxist and Bolshevik ideology and joined the Bolsheviks in 1910 . In the same year his revolutionary activity was discovered by the university administration. Pyatakov was forcibly de-registered and exiled to Kiev.

There he took an active part in the establishment of the committee of the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party (RSDLP), which had recently been defeated by the Tsarist Ochrana , and became a member of this committee in 1911 and then its secretary. In June 1912 Pyatakov was arrested and in November 1913 sentenced to exile in the Irkutsk governorate . After a year, Pyatakov managed to escape together with Yevgenia Bosch , his future partner, first to Japan and then to Switzerland . There he worked for organs of the Bolshevik press and took part in the Bern Conference in 1915. In 1916 he was arrested by the Swiss police for these activities and deported to Christiania , where he witnessed the February Revolution in 1917 and immediately set off for Russia. After his return he became head of the Bolshevik City Committee of Kiev and a member of the Executive Committee of the City Soviet of Workers' Deputies. During the October Revolution , Pyatakov headed the Kiev Military Revolutionary Committee and became the most important figure in the Bolshevik seizure of power in Kiev and the surrounding area.

Despite his occasional polemic against Lenin , he was ordered to Petrograd in November 1917 and appointed chief commissioner of the State Bank of Soviet Russia. In this post he tried in vain to regulate the shattered finances of the state suffering from the First World War and the chaos and to initiate a stringent financial policy in the Marxist sense. Pyatakov was a left communist and was a declared opponent of Lenin's policies, who advocated the initiation of peace talks with imperial Germany . As a sign of protest against the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty , he resigned from his post in Petrograd and returned to Ukraine, where he voluntarily joined one of the partisan organizations fighting against the advancing German troops. In July 1918 he was elected secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine and was one of the initiators of the anti-German uprising, which was quickly crushed. In October 1918 he was appointed head of government of the Provisional Workers and Peasants Government of Ukraine, but remained in that post for only a few months before concentrating entirely on his role as communist leader in the spring of 1919.

In this position he became an active participant in the Russian Civil War and, after the advance of the white troops of Denikin, became a member of the revolutionary advisory council of the 13th Army. Then he became commissar of a division and, during the Soviet-Polish War in 1920, he became a member of the military-revolutionary advisory council of the 16th and 6th Soviet Armies. After the last troops of the White Army had been evacuated from the Crimea , Pyatakov was one of those responsible for the brutal mass shootings of czarist officers who stayed behind.

After the end of the civil war, Pyatakov became an important economist. From 1922 to 1923 he was deputy chairman of the state planning committee Gosplan , then deputy chairman of the Supreme Council for Economics , where he was responsible for the award of concessions . After Lenin's death, Pyatakov became a member of the Left Opposition and a supporter of Leon Trotsky . Pyatakov was against the New Economic Policy , which in his opinion was a deviation from "revolutionary romanticism" and "slowed the proletariat on the way to fulfilling its historical mission". Despite these positions, which he strongly represented, he remained one of the most important economic functionaries in the country.

After the left opposition had been crushed and Trotsky was disempowered, Pyatakov was expelled from the party in 1927, all of his posts were removed and sent to France as a commercial agent of the Soviet Union . Just a year later, after he publicly renounced Trotsky and Trotskyism , he was ordered back, re-accepted into the party and first deputy and then chairman (from April 1929 to October 1930) of the board of directors of the State Bank of the Soviet Union . 1930–1931 he was a member of the Presidium and from 1931–1932 first deputy chairman of the Supreme Council for Economics. Since 1932 he was deputy and since 1934 first deputy of the People's Commissar for Heavy Industry Grigory Ordzhonikidze . Pyatakov was a member of the Central Committee of the VKP from 1923 to 1927 and then again from 1930 to 1936 (b) .

He was arrested on September 13, 1936 as a member of an alleged Trotskyist organization and sentenced to death as a traitor at the show trial in January 1937 . He was shot on February 1, 1937 . Pyatakov was not rehabilitated until 1988 , although such a possibility was considered as early as the early 1960s.

Works

• Put 'k sčast'ju . Moscow 1920 (German: The way to happiness)
• K voprosu o kapitale gosudarstvennoj promyšlennosti . Moscow, 1925 (German: On the questions of capital in the state economy)

literature

• Gosudarstvennaja vlast 'SSSR 1923–1991 . Istoriko-biografičeskij spravočnik. Moscow, 1999 (Russian)
• Političeskie partii Rossii . Enciklopedija. Moscow, 1996 (russ.)

Web links

Commons : Georgi Pyatakov  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• 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.