Grigory Yakovlevich Sokolnikov

Grigory Sokolnikov

Grigori Sokolnikov ( Russian Григорий Яковлевич Сокольников born when Girsch Jankelewitsch Brilliant , Russ. Гирш Янкелевич Бриллиант ; born August 3 ^{. Jul} / 15. August  1888 ^greg. In Romny , Poltava Governorate , today Ukraine ; † 21st May 1939 in Verkhneuralsk ) was an early Bolshevik and Soviet politician.

Life

Sokolnikow was born in 1888 as Girsch (Hirsch) Jankelewitsch Brilliant as the son of a Jewish doctor in Romny , Poltava Governorate . In 1905 he joined the Bolsheviks in Moscow and was exiled to Siberia in 1908 . After six months he fled back to Moscow and from there to Paris , where he studied at the Sorbonne . Shortly after the February Revolution of 1917 , he returned to Russia with Lenin . After the October Revolution he replaced Leon Trotsky in Brest , signed the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty in 1918 as the representative of Soviet Russia and prepared the expropriation of the Russian banks. During the Russian Civil War he led several successful operations against the White Army in Turkestan , including against General Denikin .

In April 1920 Sokolnikow returned to Moscow, where he worked for Pravda . After Sverdlov's death he was considered the closest follower of the Troika Trotsky- Zinoviev - Kamenev . In the same year he took part in the Second World Congress of the Communist International . In November 1922 he was appointed People's Commissar for Finance. Under his aegis, the ruble was made convertible. This fact, as well as the upswing after the end of the Russian Civil War, earned him the reputation of a “Soviet wit ”.

In addition, by decision of the Politburo of the Central Committee in August 1923, he was appointed to a commission headed by Grigory Zinoviev to prepare an armed uprising in Germany together with Felix Dzerzhinsky , Lev Kamenew , Yuri Pjatakow , Karl Radek , Josef Stalin , Leon Trotsky and Georgi Chicherin ( German October ). In 1926 he switched to the economic planning committee as deputy chairman . In 1928 he became chairman of the state oil company.

In 1929 Sokolnikov was sent to London as an ambassador . Because King George V refused to see him because of the murder of his cousin, Tsar Nicholas II, by the Bolsheviks, his credentials were only accepted by Crown Prince Edward eight days later . Already at this point there were the first signs of distrust on the part of the Soviet leadership towards Sokolnikov.

In 1935 Sokolnikow became the first deputy of the People's Commissar for Forestry. He was arrested in 1936 and sentenced to ten years in prison during the Moscow trials for alleged membership in an "anti-Soviet Trotskyist center". In May 1939 he was killed by an NKVD employee disguised as a fellow prisoner because he spoke to other prisoners about the show trial character of the Moscow trials.

Web links

Commons : Grigory Sokolnikov  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• The Moscow News: The Revolution Devours Its Children ( Memento January 9, 2005 in the Internet Archive )
• Biography (russian)
• Biography (English)
• 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. ^ Jon Jacobson: When the Soviet Union Entered World Politics , Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994, p. 24.
2. ↑ http://www.linksnet.de/de/artikel/18553
3. ^ Time, December 30, 1929.
4. ↑ Archived copy ( Memento of the original from September 27, 2007 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. 
5. ↑ This emerges from an internal investigation by the KGB in 1956. Corresponding document publication see: Nikita Petrov (ed.): Ivan Serov - Pervyi predsedatel 'KGB , Moscow: Materik, 2005, pp. 313-315.