Jakow Michailowitsch Sverdlov
Yakov Sverdlov ( Russian Яков Михайлович Свердлов , scientific. Transliteration Jakov Sverdlov Michajlovič * May 22 jul. / 3. June 1885 greg. In Nizhny Novgorod ; † 16th March 1919 in Moscow ) was a Russian revolutionary and political leader of the party the Bolsheviks and head of state of Soviet Russia for a little over a year .
Life
Origin and youth
Sverdlov came from a Jewish family. His grandfather was the dealer Israel Gauchmann, registered in Saratov in 1875 . In 1882 his father Michaim-Moshe Israelewitsch Gauchmann and his wife Elisabeth Solomonovna, coming from the Vitebsk Governorate , settled in Nizhny Novgorod under the name Moshe Swerdlow. After the birth of their son Yeschua-Salman Michailowitsch (1884) - the future French general - Jakow Michailowitsch was born the following year.
Father Moshe Swerdlow ran three small businesses: an engraving workshop, a publishing house and a printing company. Jakow attended five classes at a grammar school, but was expelled for revolutionary agitation and taken to a pharmacy by his father for training. Here he joined the Social Democratic Workers' Party of Russia (SDAPR) in 1901 and, in addition to his job, also worked as an agitator in Kostroma , Yaroslavl , Kazan and other places on the upper and middle Volga for the party.
Tsarism
For attending the funeral of a student (BI Rjurkowa) he was imprisoned for 14 days for the first time on May 5, 1902. Imprisoned again from April to August 1903, he was under police supervision until the end of the year. In the same year he married EF Schmidt, born in 1879, who gave birth to a daughter in 1904, but turned away from the revolutionary movement. The marriage lasted until his death.
After the party split in 1903, he joined the so-called faction of the majority (Russian: Bolsheviks ) around Lenin . On August 28, 1905, he received his first party function in the SDAPR city committee of Chelyabinsk , where, according to the party archives , he took part in three votes. He took part in the first and suppressed Russian Revolution from 1905 to 1907 in the Yekaterinburg area, where he was elected chairman of the Ural Territorial Committee of the RSDLP ( B ) in 1906. In September 1907 two years imprisonment sentenced that he served in Yekaterinburg, he then went to Moscow. Here he was exiled to the Tomsk region behind the Urals for three years by order of the Interior Minister in March 1910 , but was able to flee. In November he was arrested again in Saint Petersburg as an “agent of the Central Committee of the Bolsheviks”.
In 1911 Sverdlov's son Andrei was born from Klavdiya Timofejewna Novgorodzewa , who had joined the RSDLP in 1904.
Exiled for four years this time, he tried to escape three times, but was caught again and again. In 1912, at the age of only 26, Sverdlov was accepted as an additional member of the Central Committee by the members of the Central Committee (ZK) of the RSDLP (B) in accordance with the party statutes. He belonged to the editorial staff of the party newspaper Prawda (German: Truth), whereby he could use his father's printing press. During the First World War, like Lenin, he took the view that this war was an imperialist war on both sides, which in all countries should be transformed into a revolution against the rulers. He demanded that the Social Democrats should call on workers in all countries to fraternize as soldiers across the front lines.
In 1913 he was exiled to Turukhansk for five years , where he lived in a house with Stalin . In the same year daughter Wera was born. In 1915 the mother of his children moved in with him. With the February Revolution of 1917, he went to Moscow without his family.
Central Committee and the October Revolution
In Russia in March 1917 he was one of the party functionaries who, like Lenin, called for the transition to the socialist revolution. The Central Committee commissioned him in mid-1917 to take over the party's organizational management. The VI. The party congress elected him to the Secretariat of the Central Committee in August 1917 , and he assumed its chairmanship. He led the party work in preparation for the October Revolution and chaired the meeting on October 23, 1917, when the Bolshevik Central Committee decided "that the armed uprising is inevitable and fully matured". His real name was given here for the first time.
At the Soviet Congress immediately after the Bolsheviks came to power on October 25th / 7th. November 1917 Sverdlov was parliamentary group leader of the SDLPR ( B ) and was elected a member of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee (GZEK). Shortly afterwards, at Lenin's suggestion, he succeeded Lev Kamenev as chairman. Sverdlov headed the party as secretary of the Central Committee and, as chairman of the GZEK, was also the head of state of Soviet Russia , while Lenin, as chairman of the Council of People's Commissars, exercised the function of head of government. The GZEK government initially saw itself as interim rule until the Russian Constituent Assembly met . Sverdlov was one of the in Vitebsk selected Bolshevik deputies of the Assembly.
At the violent dissolution of the Constituent Assembly by the Bolsheviks in January 1918 and at the signing of the Brest-Litovsk Peace Treaty in March 1918, Lenin and Sverdlov took the same position. Since the Central Powers occupied the Ukraine as a result of the treaty , but the Bolsheviks intended to reinsert the Ukrajinska Narodna Respublika in Russia, Lenin received the anarchist Nestor Makhno in Moscow in June 1918 through Sverdlov's mediation . Lenin sounded out whether one could work with the anarchists.
In March 1918, Sverdlov led the negotiations at the Seventh Party Congress , which decided to rename the party the Communist Party of Russia , KPR (B). In April d. J. Sverdlov became chairman of a commission that drafted the Soviet state constitution of the Russian Soviet Federal Socialist Republic , which was passed by the Soviet Congress in July 1918.
Romanovs
On May 9, 1918, Sverdlov gave the order to move the royal family from their previous place of detention to Moscow. To this end, he sent Jakow Jurowski as a special commissioner with 150 Red Army soldiers to Tobolsk . This was due to a wish of Kaiser Wilhelm II , represented by Ambassador Wilhelm von Mirbach-Harff , who wanted the Tsar to sign the Brest-Litovsk Treaty. Lenin took this demand into account, and the Reich Treasury of the German Empire transferred a total of 43 million Reichsmarks to the Bolsheviks in June 1918 (today's value 100 million euros) to support their government. In return , the Entente financed the Social Revolutionaries to a lesser extent . Jurowski directed the train of the tsarist family to Yekaterinburg and arrested them in the Ipatiev house . In the so-called "house for special use" they were on 16./17. Murdered July 1918 by a firing squad led by Jakow Jurowski.
The murder of the tsar's family on Soviet territory by the Cheka , with a high degree of probability by the GZEK resolution, claimed further victims around this time:
- Mikhail Alexandrovich Romanov , the tsar's brother, who had already been arrested under Kerensky in August 1917 with his wife and child, was shot on June 18 in his exile in Perm . With the help of the prison doctor, his wife Natalia managed to escape from the Peter and Paul Fortress , and she emigrated to England with her daughter Nathalie. In winter the government announced the shooting of Mikhail.
- In Alapayevsk one day after the tsarist family, the tsarina's sister, Jelisaveta Fyodorovna , was killed together with six other Romanov grand dukes .
- On January 29, 1919, Grand Dukes Nikolai Michailowitsch , Pawel Alexandrovich , Dimitri Konstantinowitsch and Georgi Michailowitsch were shot in the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg . Maxim Gorky and the Academy of Sciences had petitions for clemency on her.
Red Terror
After "numerous acts of terrorism by the anti-Soviet civil war troops in which party and state officials were murdered" - although Press Commissioner V. Volodarsky was actually shot by Social Revolutionaries on June 20 - the GZEK decided on July 6, 1918, at Sverdlov's suggestion, to respond with “ red mass terror against the bourgeoisie and their agents”. On the same day, a Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal was founded with the participation of Left Social Revolutionaries .
On July 18, 1918, Sverdlov reported retrospectively to the GZEK Presidium that White Guard civil war troops had been approaching the city of Yekaterinburg ; “It was to be feared that the former tsarist family imprisoned there could be freed and used as living symbols of the struggle of the foreign intervention troops and the civil war troops against the Soviet power. The Soviet of the Urals had therefore given the order to shoot the Tsar , which was carried out on the night of July 17th ”. The Presidium of the GZEK approved the alleged decision of the Territorial Soviet, which also listed all other family members who had been killed in the Ipatiev House in its belated declaration of July 19.
On August 30, 1918, an assassination attempt on Lenin was carried out by the Social Revolutionary Fanny Kaplan . Sverdlov interrogated with Jurowski F. Kaplan overnight in the Lubyanka . The next day he immediately took over the management of the Sownarkom . The decree on “ red mass terror ” was passed on September 5th - the day before Lenin returned to office.
death
In February 1919, while Sverdlov was traveling to various conferences in preparation for the Eighth Party Congress, he fell ill with the Spanish flu . He died in Moscow on March 16, 1919.
Aftermath
Sverdlov's rise within the revolutionary movement, made possible by the party leader Lenin at a young age, has been compared in literature to the rise of Antoine de Saint-Just at Robespierre's side after the French Revolution . His Jewish origin was used by right-wing nationalists and anti-Semites to discredit the Bolshevik government as being dominated by Jews.
Sverdlov was the first Soviet politician to be given an honorary grave on Red Square in front of the Kremlin wall . The Sverdlov Communist University was named after him. In 1924, Yekaterinburg , the site of the tsarist murder, was renamed Sverdlovsk in his honor. In the center of the city there is still a monument to Sverdlov. The city has been called Yekaterinburg again since 1991, and the area continues to be Sverdlovsk Oblast .
Sverdlov's politicization and his work were the subject of the film Яков Свердлов ( Jakow Sverdlov ) from 1940, which was shown in Germany under the title The First President .
The Sverdlov class , a class of light cruisers of the USSR, was named after Sverdlov in the 1950s .
Sverdlov's son Andrei (1911–1969) was an NKVD agent and for a time Lavrenti Beria's personal advisor .
Web links
- Yakov Sverdlov in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Newspaper article about Jakow Michailowitsch Swerdlow in the press kit 20th Century of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economy .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Works, Vol. 26, p. 178
- ^ Nestor Makhno: My Visit to the Kremlin
- ↑ Elisabeth Heresch: Nicholas II. Cowardice, Lies and Treason . Ullstein, Berlin 1994
- ^ Decrees of the Soviet power . Vol. 3, Moscow 1964, p. 267
- ^ The First President in the Internet Movie Database , accessed April 22, 2020
- ↑ Film data on Jakow Sverdlov on kino-teatr.ru (Russian), accessed on April 22, 2020
| predecessor | Office | successor |
|---|---|---|
| Lev Kamenev |
Head of State of Soviet Russia 1917–1919 |
Mikhail Kalinin |
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Sverdlov, Jakow Michailowitsch |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Свердлов, Яков Михайлович (Russian); Sverdlov, Jakov Michajlovič (scientific transliteration); Sverdlov, Jacob Mikhailovich |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Russian revolutionary, Bolshevik and head of state of the Soviet Union |
| DATE OF BIRTH | June 3, 1885 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Nizhny Novgorod |
| DATE OF DEATH | March 16, 1919 |
| Place of death | Moscow |