Christian Rakovsky
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Image:Rakovsky01.jpg Dr. Christian Georgievich Rakovsky (Кристиян Георгиевич Раковски; Кръстьо Раковски - Krastyo Rakovski in Bulgarian or, in Romanian spelling, C[h]ristian Racovschi; August 13 (August 1, Old Style), 1873, Kotel, in Eastern Rumelia—September 11 1941, nearby Oryol, in the Soviet Union) was a Bulgarian-born socialist revolutionary, a Bolshevik politician and a Soviet diplomat. Rakovsky's political work would take him throughout the Balkans and into France and Imperial Russia.
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Revolutionary beginnings
Rakovsky, a polyglot physician, was the son of wealthy Bulgarian parents. In 1887 and then again in 1890, he was expelled from high school for political activities. It was at that time (around 1889) that he became a Marxist. Since he couldn't complete his education in Bulgaria, in September 1890 Rakovsky went to Geneva to continue his studies and become a physician.
While in Geneva, Rakovsky became close to Georgy Plekhanov, the founder of Russian Marxism, and his circle, eventually writing a number of articles and a book in Russian. His close relationship with Plekhanov led Rakovsky to a position between the Menshevik and Bolshevik factions of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, one he kept from 1903 to 1917. He also briefly worked with Rosa Luxembourg while in Geneva.
In the fall of 1893, Rakovsky enrolled in a medical school in Berlin, where he wrote articles for Vorwärts, and became close to Wilhelm Liebknecht. Six months later, he was expelled from the country for maintaining close contacts with the Russian revolutionaries there. He finished his education in 1894-1896 in Zürich, Nancy and Montpellier, where he wrote for La Jeunesse Socialiste and La Petite République and became close to Jules Guesde. Rakovsky then went to Saint Petersburg, where he hoped to settle down and engage in revolutionary activities, but he was soon expelled from the country and had to move back to Paris. He went back to the Russian capital in 1900, and remained there until 1902, when he once again returned to Paris.
Although actively involved in many European countries' socialist movements, prior to 1917 Rakovsky's focus remained on the Balkans and especially on his native country and Romania. He was a founding editor of the Geneva-based Bulgarian language magazine Sotsial-Demokrat and the Bulgarian Marxist publications Den, Rabotnik, and Drugar. In 1897 he published Russiya na Istok (Russia in the East), a book sharply critical of the Russian Empire's foreign policy.
After completing his education as a physician, Rakovsky returned to Romania, where he was drafted and served as a doctor. He settled in Romania after buying land near Mangalia, a town in Dobruja (in 1913, his property was home to Leon Trotsky - when the latter visited the Balkans as a press envoy in the Balkan Wars). Afterwards he continued working in the international socialist movement, which led to his expulsion, at different times, from the German Empire, Bulgaria, Romania, France and Russia.
During World War I, Rakovsky sided with the left wing of the international social democracy. He was one of the founders of the Romanian Social Democratic Party and the Revolutionary Balkan Social Democratic Labour Federation (comprising the left leaning socialist parties of Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia and Greece) and he became the first secretary of its Central Bureau. He was instrumental in the convening of the anti-war international socialist Zimmerwald Conference in September 1915. After Romania's entry into the war on the side of the Triple Entente in August 1916, Rakovsky was imprisoned until May 1, 1917, when he was freed by the Russian Army after the February Revolution of 1917.
1917 Revolution and the Russian Civil War
Rakovsky moved to Petrograd (the new name of Saint Petersburg) in the summer of 1917. He first joined the internationalist faction of the Mensheviks and, in December 1917 (after the October Revolution), the Bolsheviks. On March 9, 1918, Rakovsky signed a treaty with Romania regarding evacuating Russian troops from Bessarabia, which allowed for the Moldavian Democratic Republic to join Romania. In April-May 1918, Rakovsky negotiated with the Ukrainian People's Republic's Tsentral'na Rada, and then with the Hetmanate of Pavlo Skoropadsky.
After the collapse of the German Empire in November 1918, and subsequent Soviet offensive in Ukraine, Rakovsky became President of the pro-Bolshevik Provisional Revolutionary Government of the Workers and Peasants of the Ukraine and, in March 1919, Chairman of the Ukrainian Soviet government, Sovnarkom. He also simultaneously served as Soviet Ukraine's Commissar for Foreign Affairs and a member of the South West Front's Revolutionary Military Council, contributing to the defeat of the White Army and Ukrainian nationalists during the Russian Civil War. He was also one of the founding members of the Comintern in March 1919.
Trotskyist opposition and exile
After Vladimir Lenin's illness and incapacitation, Rakovsky joined Leon Trotsky's Left Opposition and came into conflict with Joseph Stalin. In July 1923, he was removed from his Ukrainian post and sent to London to negotiate a formal recognition of the Soviet regime by the British and French governments. Rakovsky served as the Soviet ambassador to France between October 1925 and October 1927, when he was expelled from the country for signing a Trotskyist platform deemed unfriendly by the French government - in his trip back to the Soviet state, he was joined by Romanian writer Panait Istrati. After the defeat of the Left Opposition in November-December 1927, he was ousted from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and exiled, first to Astrakhan and then to Barnaul.
Submission to Stalin and the Show Trial
Rakovsky spent 6 years in exile and was one of the last leading Trotskyists to break with Trotsky and surrender to Stalin. After Adolf Hitler's rise to power in Germany and under intense pressure from Stalin, Rakovsky formally "admitted his mistakes" in April 1934 and was allowed to return to Moscow. In the fall of 1934 he was appointed Soviet ambassador to Japan and in 1935 re-admitted to the Communist Party.
Rakovsky was arrested in 1937, during the Great Purge. He was put on trial in March 1938 with Nikolay Bukharin, Alexei Rykov, Genrikh Yagoda, Nikolai Krestinsky and other Old Bolsheviks, on charges of conspiring with Trotsky to overthrow Stalin, the third Moscow Show Trial known as the Trial of the Twenty One. Unlike most of his co-defendants who were immediately executed, he was sentenced to twenty years of hard labour. After the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union (Operation Barbarossa), Rakovsky was shot on Stalin's orders outside along with Olga Kameneva, Maria Spiridonova and over 150 other political prisoners. The Soviet government cleared Rakovsky and his co-defendants of all charges during Perestroika in 1988.
External links
- Christian Rakovsky Internet Archive
- Stelian Tănase on Christian Rakovsky - excerpt in ASYMETRIA (in Romanian)
- Trotsky's unfinished biography of Rakovsky (in Russian)
- Two testimonies on Rakovsky (in Italian)bg:Кръстьо Раковски
es:Christian Rakovski fa:کریستین راکوسکی ru:Раковский, Христиан Георгиевич uk:Раковський Христіян