Christian Rakovsky
Dr. Christian Georgievich Rakovsky (August 13 (August 1, Old Style), 1873 - 1941) was a socialist revolutionary, a Bolshevik politician and a Soviet diplomat. Born in Kotel, Bulgaria (part of Eastern Rumelia after the Treaty of Berlin, 1878), Rakovsky's political work would take him throughout the Balkans and into France and Russia.
Revolutonary 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 atthat time (around 1889) that he became a Marxist. Since he couldn't continue 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 relatiosnhip with Plekhanov led Rakovsky to a position between the menshevik and bolshevik factions of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party between 1903 and 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 montsh later, he was expelled from the country for close contact with the Russian revolutionaries there. He finished his education in 1894-1896 in Zurich, Nancy and Montpellier, where he wrote for La Jeunesse Socialiste and La Petite République and became close to Jules Guesde. he then went to St. Petersburg, Russia, where he hoped to settle down and engage in revolutionary activities, but he was soon expelled from the country, returning to Paris. He went back to St. Petersburg in 1900 and remained there until 1902, when he once again returned to Paris.
Although actively involved in many European countries' socialist movements, Rakovsky's focus remained on the Balkans and especially on his native Bulgaria and Romania. He was a founding editor of the Geneva-based Bulgarian language magazine Sotsial-Demokrat and the Bulagrian Marxist publications Den, Rabotnik, and Drugar. In 1897 he published Russiya na Istok (Russia in the East), a book sharply critial of the foreign policy of the Russian Empire.
After completing his education as a physician, Rakovsky returned to Romania, where he was drafted and served as a doctor. Afterwards he continued working in the international socialist movement, which led to his expulsion, at different times, from Germany, Bulgaria, Romania, France and Tsarist Russia.
During World War I, Rakovsky sided with the left wing of the international social democracy. He was one of the founders of 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 international socialist Zimmerwald Conference in September 1915. After Romania's entry into WWI on the side of the Entente in August 1916, Rakovsky was imprisoned until May 1, 1917, when he was freed by the Russian Army.
1917 Revolution and the Russian Civil War
Rakovsky moved to Petrograd in the summer of 1917. He first joined the internationalist faction of the mensheviks and then, in December 1917, the Bolsheviks. On March 9, 1918, Rakovsky signed a treaty with Romania regarding evacuating Russian troops from Bessarabia. In April-May 1918, Rakovsky negotiated with the Ukrainian governments of first Rada and then 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, Council of Peopls's Commissars. 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 Communist International in March 1919.
Trotskyist Opposition and Exile
After Lenin's incapacitation, Rakovsky joined Leon Trotsky's Left Opposition and came into conflict with Stalin. In July 1923, he was sent to London to negotiate a formal recognition of the Soviet regime by the British and French government. From October 1925 and until October 1927 Rakovsky served as the Soviet ambassador to France, when he was expelled from the country for signing a Trotskyist platform deemed unfriendly by the French government. After the defeat of the opposition in November-December 1927, he was expelled from the Communist Party 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 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 Bukharin, Alexei Rykov and Genrikh Yagoda on charges of conspiring with Trotsky to overthrow Stalin, the show Trial of the Twenty One. Unlike most of his co-defendants who were immediately executed, he was sentenced to twenty years hard labour. In the summer of 1941, after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, Rakovsky was shot on Stalin's orders in Orel along with Olga Kameneva and Maria Spiridonova. The Soviet government cleared Rakovsky and his co-defendants of all charges during perestroika in 1988.