Christian Rakovsky. Left opposition in the RCP (b) and the CPSU (b)

Born on August 1, 1873 in Kotel on the territory of modern Bulgaria into a merchant family. Being an ethnic Bulgarian, he had a Romanian passport. He studied at a Bulgarian gymnasium, from where he was expelled twice (in 1886 and 1890) for revolutionary agitation. In 1887, he changed his own name Kristya Stanchev to the more sonorous Christian Rakovsky. Around 1889 he became a convinced Marxist.

In 1890, Christian Rakovsky emigrated to Geneva in Switzerland where he entered the Faculty of Medicine. Although Rakovsky was listed as a student and even took exams, he was completely indifferent to medicine. In Geneva, Rakovsky became acquainted with the Russian Social Democratic movement through Russian emigrants. In particular, Rakovsky became closely acquainted with the founder of the Marxist movement in the Russian Empire, Georgy Valentinovich Plekhanov. Participated in the organization of the international congress of socialist students in Geneva. In 1893, as a delegate from Bulgaria, he attended the Socialist International Congress in Zurich. He contributed to the first Bulgarian Marxist magazine “Day” and the social democratic newspapers “Rabotnik” and “Drugar” (“Comrade”). According to Rakovsky’s own autobiography, this was a time of intensifying his hatred of Russian tsarism. While still a student in Geneva, he traveled to Bulgaria, where he read a number of reports directed against the Russian government.

In the fall of 1893 he entered medical school in Berlin, but due to close ties with revolutionaries from Russia, he was expelled from there after just six months. In Germany, Rakovsky collaborated with Wilhelm Liebknecht in Vorwärts, the central press organ of the German Social Democrats. In 1896 he graduated from the medical faculty of the University of Montpellier in France, where he took an active part in student performances. Among other things, in France, the Bulgarian revolutionary wrote articles in French in La Jeunesse Socialiste and La Petite République. After the split of the RSDLP into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks at the Second Congress in 1903, he took an intermediate position, trying to reconcile both groups on the basis of a consensus. Between 1903 and 1917, along with Maxim Gorky, Rakovsky was one of the links between the Bolsheviks, with whom he sympathized in terms of their economic program, and the Mensheviks, in whose activities he found positive political aspects. In addition to the Russian revolutionaries, Rakovsky worked for some time together with Rosa Luxemburg in Geneva.

After completing his studies in France, Rakovsky arrived in St. Petersburg to offer his services in coordinating the actions of workers and Marsky circles in Russia and abroad, but was soon expelled from the country and went to Paris. In St. Petersburg, Rakovsky visited Miliukov and Struve. Even then there were rumors about Rakovsky that he was an Austrian agent. In 1900-1902 he again stayed in the Russian capital, and in 1902 he returned to France.

Although Rakovsky's revolutionary activities during this period affected most European countries, his main efforts were aimed at organizing the socialist movement in the Balkans, primarily in Bulgaria and Romania. On this occasion, he founded in Geneva the left-wing Romanian newspaper Sotsial-Demokrat and a number of Bulgarian Marxist publications - Den, Rabotnik and Drugar (Comrade). In 1897, Rakovsky published the book “Russia na Istok” (“Russia in the East”) - a deeply critical study of Russian foreign policy, which raised the problems of mutual territorial claims between Russia and Romania regarding Bessarabia.

Returning to Romania, Rakovsky settled in Dobruja, where he worked as an ordinary doctor (in 1913 he hosted Leon Trotsky). In 1910, he was one of the initiators of the restoration, under the name of the Social Democratic Party of Romania, of the Socialist Party of Romania that existed until 1899, which actually ceased to exist after the “compassionate” left its membership, agreeing to a compromise with the royal power. The SDPR actually became the basis for the creation in 1910 of the Balkan Social Democratic Federation, which united the socialist parties of Bulgaria, Serbia, Romania and Greece. The very fact of the existence of a united federation of leftist parties was a protest against the policy of aggression and mistrust established in the Balkans as a result of the Balkan Wars. Christian Rakovsky, who was the first secretary of the BKF, at the same time continued to take an active part in the pan-European socialist movement, for which he was repeatedly expelled from Bulgaria, Germany, France and Russia.

During the First World War, Rakovsky, like some other socialists who initially took a centrist position in discussions regarding methods of political struggle, supported the left wing of international social democracy, which condemned the imperialist nature of the war. Rakovsky, along with the leaders of the left socialists, was one of the organizers of the international anti-war Zimmerwald Conference in September 1915. According to D. F. Bradley, through Rakovsky, the Austrians financed the Russian-language newspaper “Our Word”, published in Paris by Martov and Trotsky, which was closed in 1916 by the French authorities for anti-war propaganda. In 1917, the French General Nissel called Rakovsky in his report “a well-known Austro-Bulgarian agent.” However, the general’s personal opinion cannot be confirmed by any documents.

After Romania entered the war in August 1916, he was arrested on charges of spreading defeatist sentiments and spying for Austria and Germany. He remained in custody until May 1, 1917, when he was released by Russian soldiers stationed in Eastern Romania.

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After his release, Rakovsky arrived in Russia, joined the RSDLP (b) in November, and conducted party work in Odessa and Petrograd. During the Kornilov days, Rakovsky was hidden by the Bolshevik organization at the Sestroretsk cartridge factory. From there he moved to Kronstadt. Rakovsky then decided to go to Stockholm, where the Zimmerwald Conference was to be convened. The October Revolution found him in Stockholm.

Arriving in Russia in December 1917, at the beginning of January 1918 Rakovsky left as a commissar-organizer of the Council of People's Commissars of the RSFSR to the south along with an expedition of sailors led by Zheleznyakov. After spending a certain time in Sevastopol and organizing an expedition there to the Danube against the Romanian authorities, who had already occupied Bessarabia, he went with the expedition to Odessa. The Supreme Autonomous Collegium for the fight against counter-revolution in Romania and Ukraine was organized here, and as chairman of this college and a member of the Rumcherod, Rakovsky remained in Odessa until the city was occupied by the Germans. From Odessa Rakovsky came to Nikolaev, from there to Crimea, then to Ekaterinoslav, where he participated in the Second Congress of Soviets of Ukraine, then to Poltava and Kharkov.

After arriving in Moscow, where he remained generally no more than a month, in April 1918 Rakovsky went to Kursk with a delegation that was supposed to conduct peace negotiations with the Ukrainian Central Rada. In addition to Rakovsky, Stalin and Manuilsky were plenipotentiary delegates.

In Kursk, the delegates received a message about Skoropadsky's coup in Kyiv. A truce was concluded with the Germans, who continued their offensive. Skoropadsky's government invited the Bolshevik delegation to come to Kyiv. During the period of the Ukrainian State, he conducted secret negotiations in Kyiv with the removed from power figures of the Central Rada regarding the legalization of the Communist Party in Ukraine.

In September 1918, Rakovsky was sent on a diplomatic mission to Germany, but soon, together with the Soviet ambassador in Berlin, Joffe, Bukharin and other comrades, he was expelled from Germany. On the way from Germany, the Soviet delegation was overtaken by the news of the November revolution in Berlin. Trying to return to Berlin, Rakovsky, along with others, was detained by German military authorities in Kovno and sent to Smolensk.

Since 1919, member of the Central Committee of the RCP(b). From March 1919 to July 1923 - Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars and People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs of Ukraine. In 1919-1920 - member of the Organizing Bureau of the Central Committee. One of the organizers of Soviet power in Ukraine.

As part of the Soviet delegation, he participated in the work of the Genoa Conference (1922). In June 1923, at the initiative of Rakovsky, a resolution was adopted by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, according to which foreign companies could open their branches in Ukraine only after receiving permission from its authorities. All commercial contracts concluded in Moscow were cancelled. A month later, this decision of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine was canceled. At the XII Congress of the RCP(b) he resolutely opposed Stalin’s national policy. In particular, he stated that “it is necessary to take away nine-tenths of their rights from the union commissariats and transfer them to the national republics.” In June 1923, at the IV meeting of the Central Committee of the RCP (b) with senior officials of the national republics and regions, Stalin accused Rakovsky and his associates of confederalism, national deviationism and separatism. A month after the end of this meeting, Rakovsky was removed from the post of chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of Ukraine and sent as ambassador to England (1923-1925). On July 18, Rakovsky sent a letter to Stalin and, in copies, to all members of the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission of the RCP (b), members of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, a letter in which he indicated: “My appointment to London is for me, and not only for me alone, only a pretext for my dismissal from work in Ukraine.” At this time, a scandal related to the “Zinoviev letter” broke out. From October 1925 to October 1927 - Plenipotentiary Representative in France.

In opposition

Since 1923, he belonged to the Left Opposition and was one of its ideologists. In 1927, he was removed from all positions, expelled from the Central Committee, and at the XV Congress of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) was expelled from the party among 75 “active opposition figures.” At a special meeting at the OGPU he was sentenced to 4 years of exile and exiled to Kustanai, and in 1931 he was again sentenced to 4 years of exile and exiled to Barnaul. For a long time he had a negative attitude towards “capitulators” who returned to the party to continue the struggle, but in 1935, together with another stubborn oppositionist, L. S. Sosnovsky, he announced his break with the opposition. N.A. Ioffe wrote about this: “He believed that in the party, undoubtedly, there is a certain layer that shares our views in their souls, but does not dare to express them. And we could become some kind of sensible core and do something. And one by one, he said, we will be squashed like chickens.” He was returned to Moscow and in November 1935 reinstated in the CPSU(b).

In 1934, he was sheltered in a managerial position in the People's Commissariat of Health of the RSFSR by G. N. Kaminsky.

Third Moscow trial

In 1936 he was again expelled from the party and arrested on January 27, 1937. Held in an internal NKVD prison; for several months he refused to plead guilty to the crimes charged against him; but ultimately he was broken and in March 1938 appeared as a defendant in the trial of the Anti-Soviet Right-Trotskyist Bloc. Pleaded guilty to participating in various conspiracies, as well as being a Japanese and English spy. At the request of the leadership of the Communist Party of Romania, on March 13, 1938, he was among the three defendants (along with Bessonov and Pletnev) who were sentenced not to death, but to 20 years in prison with confiscation of property. In his last word he stated: “Our misfortune is that we occupied responsible positions, the authorities turned our heads. This passion, this ambition for power has blinded us.”

Regarding Rakovsky’s behavior at the trial, another oppositionist, Victor Serge, wrote: “It was as if he deliberately compromised the trial with testimony, the falsity of which is obvious to Europe...”. Another explanation is offered by the USSR Supreme Court in its Resolution of February 4, 1988: “Self-incrimination was achieved through deception, blackmail, mental and physical violence.”

Death

He served his sentence in the Oryol Central Prison. After the start of the Great Patriotic War, Christian Georgievich Rakovsky, like Bessonov and Pletnev, who were convicted along with him, was shot on September 11, 1941 in the Medvedsky special purpose forest near Orel without trial or investigation on the personal orders of L.P. Beria and I.V. Stalin . On February 4, 1988, he was rehabilitated by the Plenum of the Supreme Court of the USSR and on June 21, 1988, by the decision of the CPC under the CPSU Central Committee, he was reinstated in the party.

To speak of Rakovsky as a diplomat means, let diplomats forgive, to belittle Rakovsky. Diplomatic activity occupied a very small and completely subordinate place in the life of a fighter. Rakovsky was a writer, speaker, organizer, and then an administrator. He was a soldier, one of the main builders of the Red Army. Only in this row is his activity as a diplomat. He was least of all a man of the diplomatic profession. He did not start out as an embassy or consul secretary. He hasn't sniffed in salons for many years to those ruling circles that don't always smell good. He entered diplomacy as an ambassador of the revolution, and I don’t think that any of his diplomatic counterparts had the slightest reason to feel their diplomatic superiority over this revolutionary who invaded their holy of holies.

If we talk about the profession in the bourgeois sense of the word, then Rakovsky was a doctor. He would undoubtedly have become a first-class physician thanks to his powers of observation and insight, his ability for creative combinations, his persistence and honesty of thought, and his indefatigable will. But another, higher in his eyes, profession tore him away from medicine: the profession of a political fighter.

He entered diplomacy as a ready-made man and a ready-made diplomat, not only because in his youth he knew how to wear a tuxedo and top hat on occasion, but above all because he understood very well people for whom a tuxedo and top hat are work clothes.

I don’t know if he has ever read the special textbooks that young diplomats are taught on. But he knew perfectly well the new history of Europe, the biographies and memoirs of its politicians and diplomats, his psychological resourcefulness easily told him what the books were silent about, and Rakovsky, thus, found no reason to be confused or amazed at those people who mend the holes of old Europe .

Rakovsky, however, had a quality that seemed to predispose him to diplomatic activity: courtesy. She was not a product of a salon upbringing and was not a smiling mask of contempt and indifference towards people. Since diplomacy is still recruited mainly from rather closed castes, since the refined politeness that has become a proverb is only a radiation of arrogance. How quickly, however, this high training, even if passed from generation to generation, slips, revealing the features of fear and anger, this is what the years of war and revolution allowed us to see. There is another kind of contemptuous attitude towards people, resulting from too deep psychological penetration into their actual driving motives. Psychological insight without creative will is almost inevitably colored by a touch of cynicism and misanthropy.

These feelings were completely alien to Rakovsky. In his nature lay a source of inexhaustible optimism, keen interest in people and sympathy for them. His benevolence towards people was all the more stable in personal relationships, all the more charming, because it remained free from illusions and did not need them at all.

The moral center of gravity is so happily located in this person that, without ever ceasing to be himself, he feels equally confident (or at least holds himself) in the most diverse conditions and social groups. From the working-class neighborhoods of Bucharest to St. James's Palace in London.

“You introduced yourself, they say, to the British king?” – I asked Rakovsky on one of his visits to Moscow.

Cheerful lights began to sparkle in his eyes.

- Introducing myself.

- In short trousers?

- In short trousers.

- Aren't you wearing a wig?

- No, without a wig.

- Well, so what?

“Interesting,” he replied.

We looked at each other and laughed. But neither I had the desire to ask, nor to tell him, what exactly was “interesting” in this unusual meeting between the revolutionary, who was exiled nine times from different countries of Europe, and the Emperor of India. Rakovsky wore his court costume in the same way as during the war he wore a Red Army overcoat, as well as industrial clothes. But we can say without hesitation that of all the Soviet diplomats, Rakovsky wore the clothes of an ambassador best of all and allowed them to influence his ego the least.

I never had the opportunity to observe Rakovsky in a diplomatic environment, but I can easily imagine him, because he always remained himself and he did not need to put on the uniform of politeness in order to talk with a representative of another power.

Rakovsky was a man of exquisite moral nature, and it shone through all his thoughts and deeds. A sense of humor was characteristic of him to the highest degree, but he was too friendly towards living people to allow himself to turn it too often into caustic irony. But among friends and relatives, he loved the ironic way of thinking just as much as the sentimental one. Striving to remake the world and people, Rakovsky knew how to take them at every moment as they are. It was this combination that constituted one of the most important features in this figure, for the benevolent, soft, organically delicate Rakovsky was one of the most unbending revolutionaries that political history has produced.

Rakovsky captivates with his open and benevolent approach to people, intelligent kindness, and nobility of nature. This tireless fighter, in whom political courage is combined with courage, is completely alien to the realm of intrigue. That is why, when the masses acted and decided, the name of Rakovsky thundered throughout the country, but Stalin was known only in the office. But precisely because the bureaucracy alienated the masses and silenced them, Stalin should have gained an advantage over Rakovsky.

Rakovsky came to Bolshevism only in the era of revolution. If, however, we trace Rakovsky’s political orbit, then there will be no doubt about how organically and inevitably his own activity and his development led him to the path of Bolshevism.

Rakovsky is not a Romanian, but a Bulgarian, from that part of Dobrudzha, which, according to the Berlin Treaty, went to Romania. He studied at a Bulgarian gymnasium, was expelled from it for socialist propaganda, and took a university course in southern France and French Switzerland. In Geneva, Rakovsky ended up in the Russian Social Democratic circle, which was under the leadership of Plekhanov and Zasulich. From that time on, he became closely associated with the Marxist Russian intelligentsia and fell under the influence of the founder of Russian Marxism, Plekhanov, through whom he soon became close to the founder of French Marxism, Jules Guesde, and took an active part in the French labor movement, on its left wing, among the Guesdes.

A few years later, Rakovsky actively works on the basis of Russian political literature under the pseudonym X. Insarova. For his connection with the Russians, Rakovsky was expelled from Berlin in 1894. After graduating from university, he comes to Romania, to his official fatherland, with which nothing has connected him until now, and serves his military service as a military doctor.

Zasulich told me in her old years (1903-1904) about the ardent sympathy that the young man Rakovsky aroused for himself, capable, inquisitive, ardent, irreconcilable, always ready to rush into a new dump and not counting his bruises. From a young age, political courage was combined in him with personal courage. In maneuver warfare, the combat commander gains “movement per shot.” Both external conditions and his personal insatiable interest in countries and peoples threw him from state to state, and in these constant movements, persecution of the European police occupied not the least place.

The emigrant Plekhanov was an uncompromising Marxist, but he remained one for too long in the field of pure theory so as not to lose touch with the proletariat and the revolution. Under the influence of Plekhanov, Rakovsky in the years between the two revolutions (1905-1917), however, stood closer to the Mensheviks than to the Bolsheviks. However, how far he was in his own political activities from the opportunism of the Mensheviks is shown by the fact that the Romanian Socialist Party, led by Rakovsky, already in 1915 emerged from the Second International. When the question of joining the Third International arose, only the organizations of Transylvania and Bukovina, which previously belonged to the opportunist Austrian and Hungarian parties, offered resistance. Nevertheless, the organizations of old Romania and the Bulgarian quadrangle (quaddilater), which was transferred to it in 1913, almost unanimously spoke out in favor of joining the Communist International.

The leader of the opportunist part of the party, the former Austrian deputy Grigorovichi, declared in the Romanian Senate that he remains a social democrat and that he does not agree with Lenin and Trotsky, who became anti-Marxists.

Rakovsky is one of the most international figures in modern political history, both in upbringing, in activities, and, most importantly, in psychological make-up. This is what I wrote about him in the book “The Years of the Great Turnaround,” 1919, p. 61]:

“In the person of Rakovsky, I met an old acquaintance. Christu Rakovsky is one of the most “international” figures in the European movement. Bulgarian by origin, but a Romanian subject, a French doctor by education, but a Russian intellectual by connections, sympathies and literary work (under the signature of X. Insarov, he published a number of journal articles and a book about the third republic in Russian), Rakovsky speaks all Balkan languages ​​and three European, actively participated in the internal life of four socialist parties - Bulgarian, Russian, French and Romanian - and now stands at the head of the latter ... "

Rakovsky was expelled from Tsarist Russia, built the Romanian Socialist Party, was expelled from Romania as a foreigner, although he had previously served in the Romanian army as a military doctor, returned to Romania again, set up a daily newspaper in Bucharest and led the Romanian Socialist Party, fought against intervention Romania into the war and was arrested on the eve of its intervention. The Socialist Party of Romania, which he raised, in 1917 completely joined the Communist International.

On May 1, 1917, Russian troops freed Rakovsky from prison in Iasi, where, in all likelihood, the fate of Karl Liebknecht awaited him. And an hour later Rakovsky was already speaking at a rally of 20,000 people. He was taken to Odessa on a special train. From this moment on, Rakovsky completely immersed himself in the Russian revolution. Ukraine becomes the arena of his activities.

That Rakovsky personally came to Lenin as a grateful student, free from the slightest shadow of vanity and jealousy in relation to his teacher, despite the difference in age of only four years, there cannot be the slightest doubt on this score for anyone who is familiar with the activities and personality of Rakovsky . Now in the Soviet Union, ideas are evaluated solely in the light of birth and smallpox vaccination documents, as if there were an ideological route common to all. Bulgarian, Romanian and French, Rakovsky did not fall under the influence of Lenin in his youth, when Lenin was still only the leader of the extreme left wing of the democratic-proletarian movement in Russia. Rakovsky came to Lenin as a mature man of forty-four, with many scars from international battles, at a time when Lenin had risen to the role of an international figure. We know that Lenin encountered considerable resistance in the ranks of his own party when, at the beginning of 1917, he replaced the national democratic tasks of the revolution with international socialist ones

But even having joined the new platform, many of the old Bolsheviks, in essence, remained with all their roots in the past, as the current epigonism indisputably testifies. On the contrary, if Rakovsky did not assimilate the national logic of the development of Bolshevism for a long time, he accepted Bolshevism in its expanded form all the more deeply, and the very past of Bolshevism was illuminated for him with a different light. Bolsheviks of the provincial type, after the death of the teacher, pulled Bolshevism back towards national narrow-mindedness. Rakovsky remained in the rut that was paved by the October Revolution. A future historian, in any case, will say that the ideas of Bolshevism developed through the disgraced group to which Rakovsky belonged.

In early 1918, the Soviet Republic sent Rakovsky as its representative to negotiate with his former fatherland, Romania, about the evacuation of Bessarabia. On March 9, Rakovsky signed an agreement with General Averescu, his former military commander.

In April 1918, a delegation consisting of Stalin, Rakovsky and Manuilsky was created for peace negotiations with the Rada. At that time, no one could have imagined that Stalin would overthrow Rakovsky with the help of Manuilsky.

From May to October, Rakovsky negotiated with Skoropadsky, the Ukrainian hetman by the grace of Wilhelm II.

Either as a diplomat or as a soldier, he fights for Soviet Ukraine against the Ukrainian Rada, Hetman Skoropadsky, Denikin, the occupying forces of the Entente and against Wrangel. As Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of Ukraine, he directs the entire policy of this country with a population of 30 million souls. As a member of the Party Central Committee, he participates in the leadership work of the entire Union. At the same time, Rakovsky takes a close part in the creation of the Communist International. In the leadership core of the Bolsheviks there was, perhaps, no one who knew so well, from his own observation, the pre-war European labor movement and its leaders, especially in the Roman and Slavic countries.

At the first meeting of the International Congress, Lenin, as chairman, when discussing the list of speakers, announced that Rakovsky had already left Ukraine and should arrive tomorrow: it was taken for granted that Rakovsky would be among the main speakers. Indeed, he spoke on behalf of the Balkan Revolutionary Federation, created in 1915, at the beginning of the war, as part of the Romanian, Serbian, Greek and Bulgarian parties.

Rakovsky accused the Italian socialists of the fact that, although they talked about revolution, they actually poisoned the proletariat, portraying to them the proletarian revolution “as a wedding in which there can be no place for terror, hunger, or war.”

Rakovsky was protected from bureaucracy. Alien to him was that naive overestimation of political specialists, which usually goes hand in hand with a skeptical distrust of the masses. Accusing the Italian socialists at the Third Congress of the Comintern for not daring to break with the right deviation of Turati, Rakovsky gave an apt explanation for this indecisiveness: “Why is Turati so irreplaceable that over the past 20 years you have had to use up the entire supply of lime available in Italy in order to whitewash him? Because the Italian comrades from the Socialist Party place all their hope not in the working class, but in the intellectual aristocracy of specialists.”

Rakovsky is alien to the naive deification of the masses. He knows from the experience of his own activities that there are entire eras when the masses are powerless, as if shackled in a heavy sleep. But he also knows that nothing great in history has been accomplished without the masses and that no specialists from the parliamentary kitchen can replace them. Rakovsky learned, especially at Lenin's school, to understand the role of far-sighted and firm leadership. But he was clearly aware of the official role of all specialists and the need for a merciless break with such “specialists” who are trying to replace the masses and thereby lower their own confidence in themselves. This concept is the source of Rakovsky’s irreconcilable hostility to bureaucracy in the labor movement and, consequently, to Stalinism, which is the quintessence of bureaucracy.

As Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of Ukraine and a member of the Politburo of the Ukrainian Party, Rakovsky was involved in all issues of Ukrainian life, concentrating leadership in his hands. In the diaries of the Lenin Secretariat there are constant entries about telegraphic and telephone communications between Lenin and Rakovsky on a wide variety of issues: about military affairs, about the development of census materials, about the Ukrainian import program, about national politics, about diplomacy, about issues of the Comintern.

I met with Rakovsky during tours of the front.

Rakovsky's position was People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs: the complete unification of Soviet diplomacy was carried out only later. We were in no hurry with centralization, since it was unknown how international relations would develop, and whether it would not be more profitable for Ukraine not yet to formally link its fate with the fate of Great Russia. This caution was also necessary in relation to the still fresh Ukrainian nationalism, which through experience had yet to come to the need for a federation with Great Russia.

As the Ukrainian People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Rakovsky did not skimp on notes of protest, which he sent to the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the peace conference of the governments of France, Great Britain and Italy and to everyone, everyone, everyone. These extensive propaganda documents thoroughly explain how the Entente military forces wage war in Ukraine without declaring war, carry out gendarme functions, persecuting communists, help White Guard gangs and, finally, pirate, seizing Ukrainian ships on the spot (March, July, September, October 1919 of the year).

Rakovsky characterizes the exploits performed by whites under the auspices of the French command in the war zone of the Allied forces as “horrors reminiscent of the darkest era of the conquest of Algeria and the Hunnic methods of the Balkan War.”

In the radio dated September 25, 1919, sent to Paris, London and everyone, everyone, everyone... Rakovsky in great detail, listing places, persons and circumstances, paints a picture of Jewish pogroms committed by Russian and Ukrainian White Guards, allies and agents of the Entente. Rakovsky’s struggle against the pogrom anti-Semitism of the counter-revolution gave reason to classify him as a Jew: the white press did not write about him otherwise than as “the Jew Rakovsky.”

Much more important, however, was the behind-the-scenes diplomatic initiative that Rakovsky showed, often pushing Moscow. When archival documents are published, they will tell a lot of interesting things about this. But Rakovsky’s main attention in the early years was devoted to the military and food issues.

Of course, in this first period of complete state independence of Ukraine, the necessary communication was provided through the party line. As a member of the Central Committee, Rakovsky, of course, carried out the decisions of the Central Committee. It must be borne in mind, however, that in those early years there was no talk of the party's tutelage over the entire work of the Soviets, or, more precisely, of replacing the Soviets with the party. To this we must also add that the lack of experience meant the lack of routine. The Soviets lived a full-blooded life, improvisation played a big role.

Rakovsky was the true inspirer and leader of Soviet Ukraine in those years. It was not an easy task.

Ukraine, which had gone through a dozen regimes in two years that intersected in various ways with the rapidly growing national movement, became a hornet's nest for Soviet politics. “After all, this is a new country, a different country,” Lenin said, “but our russians don’t see this.” But Rakovsky, with his experience of Balkan national movements, with his attention to facts and living people, quickly mastered the Ukrainian situation, differentiated national groupings, and attracted the most decisive and active wing to the side of Bolshevism. “This victory is worth a couple of good battles,” Lenin said at the IX Party Congress in March 1920. To the “Russians” who tried to grumble against Rakovsky’s compliance, Lenin pointed out that “thanks to the correct policy of the Central Committee, superbly carried out by Comrade Rakovsky” in Ukraine, “instead of an uprising, which was inevitable,” an expansion and strengthening of the political base was achieved.

Rakovsky's policy in the countryside was distinguished by the same foresight and flexibility. Given the greater weakness of the proletariat, social contradictions within the peasantry were much deeper in Ukraine than in Great Russia. For the Soviet government this meant double difficulties. Rakovsky managed to politically separate the peasant poor and unite them into “committees of helpless villagers,” turning them into the most important support of Soviet power in the countryside. In 1924-1925, when Moscow set a firm course towards the wealthy upper classes of the village, Rakovsky defended the committees of the rural poor for Ukraine.

For better or worse, Rakovsky explains himself in all European languages, including the Balkans and Turkey as Europe. “A European and a true European,” Lenin said more than once with taste, mentally contrasting Rakovsky with the widespread type of provincial Bolshevik, the most outstanding and complete representative of which is Stalin. While Rakovsky, a true citizen of the civilized world, feels at home in every country, Stalin more than once took special credit for the fact that he had never been in exile. Stalin's closest and most reliable associates are people who have not lived in Europe, do not know foreign languages ​​and, essentially, have very little interest in everything that happens outside the borders of the state. Always, even in the old days of friendly work, Stalin’s attitude towards Rakovsky was colored by the envious hostility of a provincial towards a real European.

Rakovsky's linguistic economy nevertheless had an extensive character. He knew too many languages ​​to know them perfectly. He spoke and wrote Russian fluently, but with large errors in syntax. He spoke French better, at least from the formal side. He edited a Romanian newspaper, was the favorite speaker of the Romanian workers, spoke Romanian with his wife, but still did not speak the language perfectly. He parted with Bulgaria too early and returned too rarely subsequently for his mother’s language to become the language of his thoughts. He spoke German and Italian weakest. He made great strides in English, already working in the diplomatic field.

At Russian meetings, he more than once asked the audience to condescendingly remember that the Bulgarian language has only four cases. At the same time, he referred to Empress Catherine, who was also at odds with cases. There were a lot of jokes in the party related to Rakovsky’s Bulgarianisms. Manuilsky, the current leader of the Comintern, and Boguslavsky imitated Rakovsky’s pronunciation with great success and thereby gave him considerable pleasure.

When Rakovsky came from Kharkov to Moscow, the spoken language at our table in the Kremlin was, because of Rakovsky’s wife, a Romanian, French, which Rakovsky spoke better than all of us. He easily and imperceptibly tossed in the right word to those who lacked it, and cheerfully and gently imitated those who were confused in subjunctive syntax. Dinners with Rakovsky's participation were true holidays, even in completely unfestive conditions.

While my wife and I lived very secluded, Rakovsky, on the contrary, met a lot of people, was interested in everyone, listened to everyone, remembered everything. He spoke about the most notorious and malicious opponents with a smile, with a joke, with a touch of humanity. The inflexibility of a revolutionary was happily combined in him with tireless moral optimism.

Our dinners, usually very simple, became somewhat more complicated with Rakovsky's arrival. After a lucky Sunday I was sporting game or fish. Several times I took Rakovsky hunting with me. He traveled out of friendship and love for nature; The hunt itself did not captivate him. He didn’t kill anything, but he was tired and had animated conversations with peasant hunters and fishermen. Sometimes we caught fish with nets, “botaying,” that is, scaring the water with long poles with tin cones at the ends. We once spent the whole night doing this work, cooked fish soup, fell asleep for a short time by the fire, “worked” again and returned in the morning with a large basket of crucian carp, tired and rested, bitten by mosquitoes and happy.

Sometimes Rakovsky, as a former doctor, would present dietary considerations over dinner, most often in the form of criticism of my supposedly too strict dietary regime. I defended myself, citing the authorities of doctors, primarily Fyodor Alexandrovich Getye, who enjoyed our general recognition. “J"ai mes regies a moi,” Rakovsky answered and immediately improvised them. The next time someone, most often one of our sons, caught him in violating his own rules. “You cannot be a slave to your own rules,” he retorted, “one must be able to apply them.” And Rakovsky solemnly referred to dialectics.

The work of the Bolsheviks was more than once compared with the work of Peter the Great, who drove Russia into the gates of civilization with his cudgel. The presence of similarities is explained by the fact that in both cases the instrument of movement forward was state power, which did not hesitate to resort to extreme measures of coercion. But the distance of two centuries and the unprecedented depth of the Bolshevik revolution pushes the lines of similarity far back before the lines of difference. The personal psychological comparisons between Lenin and Peter are completely superficial and downright false. The first Russian emperor stood in front of European culture with his head raised up and his mouth agape. The frightened barbarian fought against barbarism. Lenin not only intellectually stood on the tower of world culture, but also psychologically absorbed it into himself, subordinating it to the goals towards which all of humanity was still moving. There is no doubt, however, that next to Lenin in the front row of Bolshevism stood a variety of psychological types, including those of the leaders of Peter the Great’s era, that is, barbarians who rebelled against barbarism. For the October Revolution, a link in the chain of world development, at the same time resolved extremely backward problems in the development of the peoples of Russia, without the slightest intention of saying anything derogatory, with the sole purpose of not being political, but objectively historical.

It can be said that Stalin most fully expressed the “Petrine”, most primitive, trend in Bolshevism. When Lenin spoke of Rakovsky as a “true European,” he was putting forward a side of Rakovsky that was too lacking in many other Bolsheviks.

“True European” did not mean, however, a culturalist who generously bends down to the barbarians: there was never a trace of this in Rakovsky. There is nothing more disgusting than the colonialist Quaker-philanthropic arrogance and bigotry that appears not only under the religious or Freemasonry, but also under the socialist personality. Rakovsky organically rose from the primitiveness of the Balkan backwoods to the world horizon. In addition, a Marxist to the core, he took into account the entire current culture in its connections, transitions, entanglements and contradictions. He could not contrast the world of “civilization” with the world of “barbarism.” He explained too well the layers of barbarism at the heights of the current official civilization to contrast culture and barbarism with each other as two closed spheres. Finally, a man who internally implemented the latest achievements of thought, he was and remained psychologically completely alien to the arrogance that is characteristic of civilized barbarians in relation to nameless and deprived builders of culture. And at the same time, he did not completely dissolve either in the environment or in his own work, he remained himself, not an awakened barbarian, but a “real European.” If the masses felt they belonged to him, then the half-educated and half-cultured leaders of the bureaucratic type treated him with envious half-hostility, as an intellectual “aristocrat.” This is the psychological background of the struggle against Rakovsky and Stalin’s special hatred of him.

In the summer of 1923, Kamenev, then Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars, together with Dzerzhinsky and Stalin, in a free evening hour at Stalin's dacha, on the balcony of a village house, over a glass of tea or wine, talked on sentimental and philosophical topics, generally speaking, not very common among the Bolsheviks. Everyone spoke about their tastes and preferences. “The best thing in life,” said Stalin, “is to take revenge on the enemy: prepare a plan well, aim, strike and... go to sleep.” Kamenev and Dzerzhinsky involuntarily looked at each other upon hearing this confession. Death saved Dzerzhinsky from testing it in the experiment. Kamenev is now in exile, if I’m not mistaken, in the very places where he was on the eve of the February Revolution along with Stalin. But the most burning and poisonous character is undoubtedly Stalin’s hatred of Rakovsky. Do doctors think that Rakovsky’s heart needs rest in a warm climate? Let Rakovsky, who allows himself to criticize Stalin so convincingly, practice medicine in the Arctic Circle. This decision bears Stalin's personal stamp. There can be no doubt about this. Now, in any case, we know that Rakovsky did not die. But we also know that exile to the Yakut region means a death sentence for him. And Stalin knows this as well as we do.

On the political horizon, Plutarch preferred paired stars. He connected his heroes by similarity or by contrast. This gave him the opportunity to better note individual traits. The Plutarch of the Soviet revolution would hardly have found two other figures who would have illuminated each other better by the contrast of their features than Stalin and Rakovsky. True, they are both southerners; one is from the multi-tribal Caucasus, the other is from the multi-tribal Balkans. Both are revolutionaries. Both, although at different times, became Bolsheviks. But these similar external frameworks of life only more clearly emphasize the opposition of two human images.

In 1921, while visiting the Soviet Republic, the French socialist Morizet, now a senator, met Rakovsky in Moscow as an old acquaintance. “Raco, as we all called him, his old comrades... knows all the socialists in France.” Rakovsky bombarded his interlocutor with questions about old acquaintances and about all corners of France. Talking about his visit, Morizet, mentioning Rakovsky, added: “His faithful lieutenant (adjutant) Manuilsky.” Manuilsky’s loyalty lasted, in any case, for two whole years, which is a considerable period if we take into account the nature of the person.

Manuilsky always served as someone’s adjutant, but remained faithful only to his need to be with someone. When the conspiracy led by the “troika” (Stalin-Zinoviev-Kamenev) against the old leadership required an open political struggle against Rakovsky, who enjoyed especially great popularity and undivided respect in Ukraine, it was difficult to find anyone who would take the initiative of cautious insinuations, to gradually raise them to condensed slander. The choice of the “troika”, who knew the human inventory, settled on Rakovsky’s “faithful lieutenant”, Manuilsky. He was given a choice: either to fall victim to his loyalty, or through treason to acquire his share in the conspiracy. There could be no doubt about Manuilsky’s answer. A recognized master of political anecdote, he himself later colorfully told his friends about the ultimatum that forced him to become Zinoviev’s lieutenant in 1923, so that by the end of 1925 he would become Stalin’s lieutenant. So Manuilsky rose to a height that during the years of Lenin he could not even dream of: now he is the official leader of the Comintern.

Part of the top of the Ukrainian bureaucracy had already been drawn into Stalin’s conspiracy by this time. But to simplify and facilitate the further struggle, it turned out to be most convenient to tear Rakovsky away from Ukrainian and Soviet soil in general, turning him into an ambassador. A favorable occasion was the Soviet-French conference. Rakovsky was appointed ambassador to France and chairman of the Russian delegation.

In October 1927, at the categorical request of the French government, Rakovsky was removed from the post of ambassador and recalled, one might say, almost expelled from Paris to Moscow. And three months later he was already expelled from Moscow to Astrakhan. Both expulsions, paradoxically, were connected with Rakovsky’s signature on an opposition document. The Paris government found fault with the fact that the opposition statement contained “unfriendly” notes addressed to foreign armies hostile to the Soviet Union. In fact, the right wing of the House did not want any connections with the Bolsheviks at all. And Rakovsky personally worried Tardieu-Briand with his too large figure: they would have preferred a less impressive and less authoritative Soviet ambassador on rue Grenelle. Being quite aware of the relationship between the Stalinists and the opposition, they apparently hoped that Moscow would help them get rid of Rakovsky. But the Stalinist group could not compromise itself with such consideration towards the French reaction; besides, she did not want to have Rakovsky either in Moscow or in Kharkov. She thus found herself forced, at the most inconvenient moment for herself, to take Rakovsky publicly under protection from the French government and the French press.

In an interview on September 16, Litvinov referred, with good reason, to Rakovsky’s sympathy for French culture and to the fact that de Monzy, the head of the French delegation at the Soviet-French conference, publicly testified to Rakovsky’s loyalty. “If the conference managed to resolve,” said Litvinov, “the most difficult issue of the negotiations, namely, compensation for public debts... then it primarily owes this to comrade personally. Rakovsky."

On October 5, Chicherin, then still the People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs, told representatives of the French press in refutation of false rumors: “I have never expressed any displeasure towards Ambassador Rakovsky; on the contrary, I have every reason to value his work extremely highly...”

These words sounded all the more expressive because the Stalinist press, following a signal given from above, had already begun at that time to present the oppositionists as saboteurs and underminers of the Soviet regime.

Finally, on October 12, this time in an official note to the French ambassador Jean Herbett, Chicherin wrote:

“Both Mr. Litvinov and I wrote that the recall of Mr. Rakovsky, to whose efforts and energy the Franco-Soviet conference largely owed the results achieved, could not but cause moral damage to the conference itself.”

However, yielding to the categorical demand of Briand, who cut off his own path of retreat and had to protect his reputation as part of a right-wing government, the Soviets were forced to recall Rakovsky.

Arriving in Moscow, Rakovsky immediately came under attack not from the French, but from the Soviet press, which was preparing public opinion for the upcoming arrests and exiles of oppositionists; and caring little about what was written yesterday, she portrayed Rakovsky as an enemy of Soviet power.

This August Rakovsky turns 60 years old. For over five years, Rakovsky spent in exile in Barnaul, in the Altai Mountains, together with his wife, an inseparable companion. The harsh Altai winter with frosts reaching 45-50 degrees was unbearable for a southerner, a native of the Balkan Peninsula, especially for his tired heart. Rakovsky's friends - and his honest opponents always treated him friendly - were trying to get him transferred to the south, to a milder climate. Despite a number of severe heart attacks of the exile, which became the source of rumors about his death, the Moscow authorities flatly refused the transfer. When we talk about the Moscow authorities, this means Stalin, because if very large economic and political issues can and often do pass by, then where it comes to personal reprisal, revenge on the enemy, the decision always depends personally on Stalin.

Rakovsky remained in Barnaul, fought the winter, waited for the summer and faced the winter again. Rumors about Rakovsky's death have arisen several times already as the fruit of the intense anxiety of thousands and hundreds of thousands for the fate of a loved one.

He tirelessly followed the Soviet economy and world life through the newspapers and books that reached him, wrote a large work on Saint-Simon and conducted extensive correspondence, less and less of which reached its intended destination.

Rakovsky follows the Soviet press day after day about all the processes in the country, reads between the lines, completes what was left unsaid, exposes the economic roots of difficulties, and warns against impending dangers. In a number of remarkable works, where a broad generalization is based on rich factual material, Rakovsky from Astrakhan, then from Barnaul, imperiously interferes with the plans and events of Moscow. He strongly warns against exaggerated rates of industrialization.

In mid-1930, during months of extreme bureaucratic vertigo from poorly conceived successes, Rakovsky warned that forced industrialization would inevitably lead to crisis. The impossibility of further increasing labor productivity, the inevitability of disruption of the capital work plan, the acute shortage of agricultural raw materials, and, finally, the deterioration of the food situation lead the far-sighted researcher to the conclusion: “The crisis of industry is already inevitable; in fact, industry has already entered into it.”

Even earlier, in an official statement dated October 4, 1929, Rakovsky strongly warned against “total collectivization,” which was not prepared either economically or culturally, and, in particular, “against emergency administrative measures in the countryside,” which would inevitably entail difficult political consequences. consequences. A year later, the hated and tireless adviser states: “The policy of complete collectivization and the elimination of the kulaks undermined the productive forces of agriculture and ended the acute conflict with the countryside prepared by all previous policies.” Rakovsky exposes Stalin’s tradition of shifting the blame for economic failures onto the “performers” as an admission of his own insolvency: “Responsibility for the quality of the apparatus falls on the leadership.”

The old politician especially closely monitors the processes in the party and in the working class. Back in August 1928, from Astrakhan, the first place of his exile, he gave a deep and passionate analysis of the processes of degeneration in the ruling party. He focuses on the detachment of the bureaucracy as a special privileged layer.

“The social position of a communist who has at his disposal a car, a good apartment, regular vacations and receives the party maximum, differs from the position of a communist working in coal mines, where he receives from 50 to 60 rubles a month.”

Functional differences turn into social ones, and social ones can develop into class ones.

“A party member of 1917 would hardly have recognized himself in the face of a party member of 1928.”

Rakovsky knows the role of violence in history, but he also knows the limits of this role. More than a year later, Rakovsky denounces the methods of command and coercion. With the help of methods of command and coercion, brought to the point of bureaucratic virtuosity, “the elite managed to turn into an irremovable and inviolable oligarchy, replacing the class and the party.” A heavy accusation, but every word in it is weighed. Rakovsky calls on the party to subjugate the bureaucracy, deprive it of the “divine attribute of infallibility,” and subject it to its strict control.

In an appeal to the Central Committee in April 1930, Rakovsky characterizes the regime created by Stalin as “dominion and internecine struggle of corporate interests of various categories of bureaucracy.” It is possible to build a new economy only on the initiative and culture of the masses. An official, even a communist one, cannot replace the people. “We do not believe in the so-called enlightened bureaucracy any more than our bourgeois predecessors, the revolutionaries of the late 18th century, did - in the so-called enlightened absolutism.”

Rakovsky's works, like all opposition literature in general, did not leave the manuscript stage. They corresponded, were sent from one exiled colony to another, passed from hand to hand in political centers; they almost never reached the masses. The first readers of Rakovsky's handwritten articles and circular letters were members of the ruling Stalinist group. Until recently, in the official press one could often find echoes of Rakovsky’s unpublished works in the form of tendentious, grossly distorted quotes, accompanied by crude personal attacks. There could be no doubt: Rakovsky’s critical blows hit the target.

The proclamation of the first five-year plan and the transition to the path of collectivization represented a radical borrowing from the platform of the left opposition. Many of the exiles sincerely believed in a new era. But the Stalinist faction demanded that the oppositionists publicly renounce the platform, which continued to be a prohibited document. Such double-mindedness was dictated by bureaucratic concerns for prestige. Many of the exiles reluctantly agreed to meet the bureaucracy halfway: at this high price they wanted to pay for the opportunity to work in the party at least on the partial implementation of their own platform.

Rakovsky, no less than others, sought to return to the party. But he could not do this, denying himself. Rakovsky's letters, always soft in tone, sounded metallic notes. “The greatest enemy of the proletarian dictatorship,” he wrote in 1929 at the height of the capitulatory craze, “is a dishonest attitude towards convictions. Like the Catholic Church, which extorts conversions to Catholicism from the beds of dying atheists, the party leadership forces the opposition to admit to imaginary mistakes and renounce their beliefs. If thereby it loses all right to self-respect, then an oppositionist who changes his convictions overnight deserves only complete contempt.”

The transition of many like-minded people to Stalin’s camp did not shake the old fighter for a minute. In a series of circular letters, he argued that the falsity of the regime, the power and lack of control of the bureaucracy, the strangulation of the party, trade unions and Soviets would devalue and even turn into their opposite all those economic borrowings that Stalin made from the platform of the opposition. “Moreover, this screening can bring improvement to the ranks of the opposition. There will remain those who do not see the platform as a kind of restaurant card, from which everyone chooses a dish according to their taste.” It was during this difficult period of repression and capitulation that the sick and isolated Rakovsky showed what indestructible strength of character lay behind his gentle benevolence towards people and delicate compliance. In a letter to one of the exile colonies, he writes in 1930: “The worst thing is not exile or isolation ward, but capitulation.” It is not difficult to understand what influence the voice of the “old man” had on the younger ones and what hatred it aroused among the ruling group.

“Rakovsky writes a lot. Everything that reaches us is rewritten, forwarded, and read by everyone, young friends from exile abroad told me. – In this regard, Christian Grigorievich is doing a great job. His position does not differ in the slightest from yours; just like you, he focuses on the party regime..."

But less and less came through. Correspondence between exiled oppositionists in the first years of exile was relatively free. The authorities wanted to be aware of the exchange of opinions between them and at the same time hoped for a split among the exiles. These calculations turned out to be not so justified.

The capitulators and candidates for capitulation referred to the danger of a split in the party, the need to help the party, etc. Rakovsky replied that the best help is loyalty to principles. Rakovsky was well aware of the invaluable importance of this rule for long-range policy. The course of events brought him a kind of satisfaction. Most of the capitulators lasted no more than three or four years in the party; Despite their utmost compliance, they all came into conflict with politics and the party regime, and all again began to be subjected to second expulsion from the party and exile. It is enough to name such names as Zinoviev, Kamenev, Preobrazhensky, I.N. Smirnov, along with many hundreds of lesser known ones.

The position of the exiles was always difficult, fluctuating in one direction or another depending on the political situation. Rakovsky's position deteriorated continuously.

In the fall of 1932, the Soviet government switched from a system of rationed grain procurements, i.e., in fact, from the requisition of grain at fixed prices, to a system of food taxes, leaving the peasant the right to freely dispose of all supplies, minus the tax.

And this measure, like many others, was the implementation of a measure that Rakovsky had recommended more than a year earlier, decisively demanding “the transition to a system of tax in kind in relation to the middle peasant in order to give him the opportunity to some extent to dispose of his remaining production or, at least the appearance of such a possibility, cutting off the accumulated fat.”

When the news of the death of X. G. Rakovsky in Siberian exile spread throughout the world press, the official Soviet press remained silent. Rakovsky’s friends—they are also my friends, for we are connected with Rakovsky by 30 years of close personal political friendship—first tried to verify the news through Soviet authorities abroad. Prominent French political figures, who had time to appreciate Rakovsky when he was the Soviet ambassador to France, applied for information at the embassy. But they didn’t give an answer from there either. In recent years, the news of Rakovsky’s death has broken out not for the first time. But so far it has turned out to be false every time. But why doesn’t the Soviet telegraph agency refute it? This fact increased the anxiety. If Rakovsky really died, then there would be no point in hiding this fact. The stubborn silence of official Soviet bodies suggested that Stalin had to hide something. Rakovsky's like-minded people in different countries sounded the alarm. Articles, appeals, and posters appeared asking: “Where is Rakovsky?” In the end, the veil on the mystery was lifted. According to a clearly inspired Reuters report from Moscow, Rakovsky “is engaged in medical practice in the Yakutsk region.” If this certificate is correct - we have no evidence - then it testifies not only that Rakovsky is alive, but also that from distant cold Barnaul he was exiled even further to the Arctic Circle.

The mention of medical practice is intended to mislead people who have little knowledge of politics and geography. True, Rakovsky is really a doctor by training. But except for a few months immediately after receiving a medical diploma in France and the military service that he served in Romania as a military doctor over a quarter of a century ago, Rakovsky never practiced medicine. It is unlikely that he felt attracted to her at the age of 60. But the mention of the Yakut region makes the incredible message probable. We are obviously talking about Rakovsky’s new exile: from Central Asia to the far north. We have no confirmation of this yet. But, on the other hand, such a message cannot be invented.

In the official Soviet press, Rakovsky is listed as a counter-revolutionary. Rakovsky is not alone in this title.

Without exception, all of Lenin's closest associates are under persecution. Of the seven members of the Politburo, who under Lenin led the destinies of the revolution and the country, three were expelled from the party and exiled or expelled, three were removed from the Politburo and got rid of exile only by a series of successive capitulations. We heard above the review of Chicherin and Litvinov about Rakovsky as a diplomat. And today Rakovsky is ready to put his forces at the disposal of the Soviet state. He broke up not with the October Revolution, not with the Soviet Republic, but with the Stalinist bureaucracy. But it was no coincidence that the divergence coincided with a period when the bureaucracy, emerging from the mass movement, subjugated the masses and established the old principle on new principles: the state is me.

Mortal hatred of Rakovsky is caused by the fact that he places responsibility for the historical tasks of the revolution above the mutual responsibility of the bureaucracy. Its theoretic journalists talk only about workers and peasants. The grandiose bureaucratic apparatus does not exist at all in the official field of view. Whoever takes the very name of bureaucracy in vain becomes its enemy. Thus, Rakovsky was transferred from Kharkov further away, to Paris, so that upon returning to Moscow he would be deported to Astrakhan, and from there to Barnaul. The ruling group hoped that difficult material conditions and the oppression of isolation would break the old fighter and force him, if not to resign himself, then to silence. But this calculation, like many others, turned out to be wrong. Never, perhaps, did Rakovsky live a more intense, fruitful life as during the years of his exile. The bureaucracy began to tighten the ring around the Barnaul exile. Rakovsky eventually fell silent, that is, his voice stopped reaching the outside world. But under these conditions, his very silence was more powerful than his eloquence. What could be done with a fighter who, by the age of 60, had retained the fiery energy with which he set out on the road of life as a young man? Stalin did not dare to shoot him or even imprison him. But with ingenuity, which never failed him in this area, he found a way out: the Yakut region needs doctors. True, Rakovsky’s heart needs a warm climate. But that is precisely why Stalin chose the Yakut region.

on topic: “Christian Rakovsky”

Introduction

The first monographic studies on the life and work of H. Rakovsky appeared in the West; in the USSR, this historical figure remained unknown to the general public for decades. The state party lifted the taboo on mentioning his name in a positive or even neutral context some three years before the end of its existence. After this, books dedicated to him were published in Kyiv and Kharkov, giving an idea of ​​the role of this man in the history of Ukraine, Russia and Europe.

How could it happen that a foreigner occupied such a prominent place in the modern history of our people? The available facts allow us to objectively assess the positive and negative aspects of his activities.

Childhood and youth

Rakovsky Ukrainian politician

To take an active position on the issue of modernizing society in Eastern European countries, one had to be a revolutionary. Christy Stanchev-Rakovsky became one at the age of 15. Family tradition also obliged us to do this.

He was born on August 13, 1873 in the Bulgarian mountain town of Kotel. His father Georgy Stanchev became rich in the wool trade and bought a large estate in the pro-Black Sea Dobrudzha. And when these lands went to Romania after 1878, the Stanchev family had to accept Romanian citizenship. They settled in the Black Sea city of Mangalia.

Christie went to study in Varna, but in 1887 he was expelled from the gymnasium as the leader of a student revolt against Black Hundred teachers. A year later, the young man got a job at the gymnasium in the town of Gabrovo, where he organized the work of a socialist circle. In the spring of 1890 he was expelled from there as well, from the last class. Moves to Geneva, enters the medical faculty of the university. The medical profession, as Rakovsky hoped, had its advantages in promoting socialism.

In Geneva he created a circle of Bulgarian socialist students. In the spring of 1891, he met Plekhanov, quickly became the favorite of his family and struck up close relationships with members of the “Emancipation of Labor” group P. Axelrod and V. Zasulich. Together with R. Luxemburg, who lived nearby, he led a Marxist self-education circle. Following the denunciation of a political rival, the young man went to prison for the first time, albeit briefly.

Rakovsky - Social Democrat

In 1891-1892 Kristi Rakovsky actively participated in the creation of the Bulgarian Social Democratic Party, and in August 1893 represented it at the Zurich Congress of the 2nd International.

In the fall of 1893, a young Bulgarian socialist entered the University of Berlin. However, he quickly comes to the attention of the Berlin police. Rakovsky is arrested and expelled from the country within a few weeks. He continues his studies at the University of Zurich, and then - Nancy in France, where the daughter of the Moscow actor Liza Ryabova, who is close to the Plekhanov family, studied. Christie published in French socialist newspapers, established relationships with J. Guesde, J. Jaurès, and P. Lafargue.

Rakovsky acquires the degree of Doctor of Medicine. As can be seen from the title of the dissertation (“Etiology of Crime and Degeneration”), it was devoted to social problems of medicine.

In the fall of 1898, Rakovsky joined the Romanian army so as not to lose the inheritance right to the Mangalian estate. During several months of serving as a military doctor in Constance, he wrote two books - about the Dreyfus affair (published in Bulgarian) and - commissioned by the St. Petersburg Knowledge Society - a solid popular science monograph on the history of the Third Republic in France. After demobilization in the spring of 1899, Christian Rakovsky went to St. Petersburg, where his wife intended to make a stage career, however, not receiving permission to reside within the Russian Empire, he went with her to France. In Paris, he took part in the next congress of the 2nd International, held in September 1900, and financially supported the organizers of the publication of the newspaper of Russian Social Democrats. And then, having given a bribe, he came to St. Petersburg in the spring of 1901.

I spent almost a year in Russia. Here his wife died during childbirth. The loner returned to France, worked as a doctor in the town of Beaulieu, but due to his father’s death in April 1903 he moved to Romania. Having become the owner of the estate, he left his medical practice and, at the persuasion of D. Blagoev, in the spring of 1904 he went on a large propaganda tour of Bulgaria. His brilliant speeches were transcribed and published in separate brochures.

In August 1904, the next, sixth congress of the 2nd International opened in Amsterdam. X. Rakovsky had two mandates - from the Bulgarian and Serbian Social Democratic parties. And although he was much younger in age than such outstanding figures as A. Bebel, E. Bernstein, A. Briand, J. Guesde, J. Jaurès, K. Kautsky, Plekhanov, he was already considered a veteran of the socialist movement. The Balkan socialist also took an active part in the development of congress documents.

A peasant uprising, meanwhile, broke out in Romania, drowning the authorities in blood. Repressions unfolded against the Socialist Union formed in 1907, trade union organizations and the socialist press. But after the Stuttgart Congress, Rakovsky was not allowed into Romania, and his ordeal began. Only after five years of grueling struggle did he achieve the right to return.

During the 1st World War, the Balkan Social Democratic Federation was created, the secretary of which was H. Rakovsky. Without sharing the extreme positions of V. Lenin, he nevertheless moved away from the idea of ​​“national peace” and on this basis broke with his spiritual father G. Plekhanov.

Released on May 1, 1917 by Russian soldiers from prison in Iasi, he went to revolutionary Petrograd. Rakovsky's centrist political views are increasingly radicalized. Finding himself under threat of arrest after the July events in Petrograd, he leaves for Sweden with the help of the Bolsheviks.

Rakovsky is a communist

More than once the Menshevik internationalists tried to attract Kh. Rakovsky, at that time one of the most influential figures of the 2nd International, into their ranks, but he did not want to get involved with any of the political parties in Russia. And only after the October revolution in Petrograd he made his final choice: he offered his services to Lenin’s government. Thus, at the age of 44, the moderate Western European social democrat became a communist.

Sent by V. Lenin on a diplomatic mission to Odessa, he signed a Russian-Romanian treaty in March 1918, according to which Bessarabia should be liberated within two months. Nevertheless, due to the deterioration of the military-strategic situation after the conclusion of the Brest Peace, this document turned into a piece of paper.

In April 1918, Rakovsky, at the head of the Russian delegation, came to Kyiv. Under the terms of the Brest Peace Treaty, Soviet Russia had to sign a peace agreement with the UPR. Deftly maneuvering between the German administration and his partner in the negotiations - the government of Hetman P. Skoropadsky, he hesitated in making decisions, without taking on any obligations. Then the revolution broke out in Germany. With its beginning, Russia annulled the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and, with the help of the puppet Soviet government of G. Pyatakov, reconquered Ukraine.

Meanwhile, local Bolsheviks quarreled among themselves. In order to strengthen party control over the formally independent republic and strengthen the authority of the leadership, Lenin proposed X. Rakovsky for the post of head of the government of Soviet Ukraine, whose level of education, intelligence and experience undoubtedly surpassed the leaders of the local Bolsheviks. In addition, he had no roots in Ukraine and was completely dependent on the support of the center. Soviet Moscow was always afraid of any manifestation of independence of power structures in the largest national republic.

Dependence on the center suited Rakovsky, who relied on the political support of Lenin (they had known each other since 1902) and could count on the help of the second most important person in the Bolshevik party leadership - Trotsky. Despite the difference in political views, he had warm personal relations with the latter. They probably played no small role in the fact that the Western European Social Democrat chose Soviet Russia as the arena of his political activities. Therefore, in March 1919, Rakovsky, with the support of Lenin and Trotsky, was elected a member of the Central Committee of the RCP (b). A unique case in the history of the Bolshevik Party: its leadership included a person whose party experience had barely reached a year.

In the spring of 1919, the main focus of the civil war broke out in the Don and Kuban. The anti-communist forces were led by General A. Denikin. Having received a large amount of military equipment and weapons from the Entente countries and the United States, he went on the offensive in the central regions of Donbass. Exhausted by desertion, the Red Army suffered heavy losses. After the rebellion of N. Grigoriev, in the immediate rear of the Soviet troops, the White Guards captured Kharkov and Yekaterinoslav. Inspired by success, Denikin gave the order to march on Moscow.

Under pressure from Denikin and the UPR troops led by S. Petliura, the Red Army soldiers abandoned Kyiv at the end of August 1919, and soon the whole of Ukraine. Kh. Rakovsky left for Moscow, where he headed the political department of the Revolutionary Military Council for almost six months.

In the fall of 1919, the White Guard's offensive against Moscow faltered. The numerous armies of L. Greek crushed Denikin's selected forces, and he began to retreat in a southern direction. In the winter months of 1919-1920, Ukraine was again under Bolshevik control.

V. Lenin (unlike Rakovsky) understood that it was necessary to get along with the peasantry. In February 1920, a land law was issued, which was based on the principle of equal land use. The work of the Council of People's Commissars of the Ukrainian SSR, headed by X. Rakovsky, resumed.

During the formation of power in Ukraine, the problem of the influential Borotbist party, which controlled numerous peasant partisan detachments, was acute. This party switched to a communist platform, but unlike the Bolsheviks, it opposed the complete dependence of Ukraine on Moscow.

Lenin advised Rakovsky to create a joint bloc with the Borotbists in the elections to the councils and, having seduced their leaders with high government positions, offer to join the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) U on an individual basis. The head of the Ukrainian Soviet government successfully implemented this cunning plan, turning away the threat of a multi-party system in the political structure of Ukraine, which would have prevented the establishment of the dictatorship of the RCP (b). Rakovsky dealt with those leaders of the competing party who did not want to join the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) U with the help of security officers. With the beginning of the Polish-Soviet war, Moscow sent the head of the Cheka, F. Dzerzhinsky, to Ukraine to “strengthen the rear.”

The significance of Rakovsky for the Ukrainian people

The failure of the harvest in the southern regions of the republic in 1921 turned out to be a great disaster for people. In order to import more grain from Ukraine, the party center hushed up the famine until December. Bread was even confiscated from peasants in the southern provinces. Food supplies stored on the Right Bank and Left Bank were exported to the “red capital” and the Volga region, and the southern regions were left without bread. ARA employees, who provided large-scale assistance to starving Russia, were not allowed into Ukraine, which was not considered a starving region.

Rakovsky tried to protest, but only achieved a party reprimand. When the center finally decided to recognize Ukraine as a starving region, it quickly arranged food supplies from abroad.

He was unable to resist the center in 1922, when, instead of providing food assistance to the ruined farms of the southern provinces, Ukraine was ordered to export millions of pounds of grain abroad. As a result, famine in the south continued until the summer of 1923.

Rakovsky, as head of government, paid significant attention to the restoration of the destroyed industry and headed the republican headquarters for overcoming the crisis. He kept social problems in sight and did everything to help the unemployment that arose as a result of the transfer of industry to self-financing.

With the support of Lenin and Trotsky, Rakovsky pursued policies directed against Ukrainians, but over time he changed his views. An important area of ​​his work in the Council of People's Commissars was cultural construction. He considered the most fundamental issue to be ensuring the development of culture in its national forms. Rejecting during the polemic the statement of the Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) D. Lebed that a struggle between two cultures is unfolding in Ukraine - Russian and Ukrainian - and in this struggle the future belongs to the one developed by Russian culture, Rakovsky declared: the task of the state is to give the opportunity to develop that a culture that was artificially suppressed and limited.

Repression and death

The conflict between him and Stalin broke out in 1922, when the Secretary General decided to eliminate the independent status of the republic and “draw” them into the borders of Soviet Russia. Rakovsky’s protests (he was supported by Lenin) did their job: the Soviet Union was formed as a federation of formally equal union republics, but in fact, a creeping “autonomization” of Ukraine and other republics began to occur. At the XII Congress of the RCP (b) in April 1923, Rakovsky declared that union building had gone down the wrong path, and insisted that 9/10 of the Moscow People's Commissars be taken away from their rights and transferred to the national republics. However, almost no one supported the head of the Ukrainian government at the party congress.

Then the leading “troika” in the Politburo of the Central Committee of the RCP (b) made the appropriate organizational conclusions. Rakovsky was recalled from Ukraine and transferred to diplomatic work, appointing L. Krasin as Soviet representative in London instead.

H. Rakovsky worked in England and France until the fall of 1927, and upon returning to the USSR, he continued his uncompromising, albeit hopeless, struggle against Stalin. In January 1928, he was sent to Astrakhan, where he worked in a modest position as a consultant in the district planning department. Then there were other cities and equally modest positions.

Kh. Rakovsky was arrested on December 31, 1936. He was involved in a fabricated case of the so-called “anti-Soviet right-wing Trotskyist bloc” together with M. Bukharin, A. Rykov and other leading figures of the state party. 65-year-old patient Rakovsky was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

In September 1941, as the Nazis approached Orel, all political prisoners of the local prison were shot. Among them was Christian Rakovsky, a man of unique destiny.

Conclusion

The Ukrainian diplomatic breakthrough became possible largely thanks to the subjective official, personified by Rakovsky. A capable diplomat, who had personal contacts with hundreds of the best European politicians, had enormous authority with the Soviet government, he confidently led the activities of the diplomatic corps of the Ukrainian SSR.

Literature

1.#"justify">. #"justify">. #"justify">. “History of Ukraine” O.D. Boyko, 2005/ “Academizdat”

As I already mentioned in, September 11 marked 75 years since the death of Christian Georgievich Rakovsky (1873-1941), a Bolshevik, a revolutionary for a good half-century, a participant in the October Revolution, and until 1934, the leader of the left (that is, Trotskyist) opposition within the USSR.
Rakovsky is better known as a diplomat, but, as Trotsky noted, “to speak of Rakovsky as a diplomat means to belittle Rakovsky... Rakovsky was a writer, speaker, organizer... one of the main builders of the Red Army.” But he was also a brilliant diplomat, “not only because even in his youth he knew how to wear a tuxedo and top hat on occasion, but above all because he understood very well people for whom a tuxedo and top hat are work clothes.”

From the memoirs of Nadezhda Ioffe: “Rakovsky was born in Bulgaria, grew up in Romania, received his education in France, and... a Russian revolutionary. He spoke equally well in Romanian, Bulgarian, Russian, and several other European languages. And I don’t know what his native language is. I remember I asked him once - what language does he think in? Rakovsky thought and said: “Probably the one I speak at the moment.”
Trotsky said about him:
- Historical fate would have it that Rakovsky, a Bulgarian by birth, French and Russian by general political education, a Romanian citizen by passport, turned out to be the head of government in Soviet Ukraine... In the full sense of the word, an international revolutionary, Rakovsky, in addition to his native Bulgarian language, speaks Russian, French, Romanian, English, German, reads Italian and other languages. Expelled from nine European countries, Rakovsky linked his fate with the October Revolution, which he served in the most responsible positions.

H. G. Rakovsky and L. D. Trotsky in 1924. They knew each other since 1903

Trotsky also recalled his dialogue with Rakovsky:
- You introduced yourself, they say, to the British king?
“I was introducing myself,” Rakovsky answered with a cheerful twinkle in his eyes.
- In short trousers?
- In short trousers.
- Aren't you wearing a wig?
- No, without a wig.
- Well, so what?
“Interesting,” he replied.
“We looked at each other and laughed. But neither I had the desire to ask, nor to tell him, what exactly was “interesting” in this not entirely ordinary meeting of a revolutionary who had been exiled nine times from different countries of Europe, and Emperor of India. Rakovsky wore his court costume in the same way as during the war he wore a Red Army overcoat, as well as industrial clothes.”
A revolutionary in a tuxedo and top hat, and sometimes even in culottes, those same court culottes that the Parisian sans-culottes rejected (for which they received their nickname). “A European, and a real European,” Lenin said more than once with pleasure about Rakovsky. Vladimir Ilyich very highly appreciated Rakovsky’s activities in Ukraine, including the peaceful unification with the Ukrainian Socialist-Revolutionaries-Borotbists, which he managed to achieve. “Instead of an uprising of the Borotbists, which was inevitable,” said Lenin, “we received, thanks to the correct line of the Central Committee, superbly carried out by Comrade Rakovsky, that all the best that was among the Borotbists entered our party under our control, from our recognition, and the rest has disappeared from the political scene. This victory is worth a couple of good battles."
From the end of 1927, when the Trotskyist opposition was defeated, a period of exile began for Rakovsky. An interesting testimony was left by the American journalist Louis Fisher, who met and talked with him in exile in Saratov in 1929: “Sometimes I accompanied him to the dining room; people bowed deeply and took off their hats, because this political criminal in exile was the most famous and most respected resident of Saratov.”
And in exile, Rakovsky continued to work hard. Here are two small quotes to illustrate. The first reflected the point of view of the majority of the party:
“As for the class nature of our state, I already said above that Lenin gave the most precise formulation on this subject, not allowing for any misinterpretation: a workers’ state with bureaucratic perversion in a country with a predominant peasant population.” (I.V. Stalin, March 15, 1927)
And this quote is from the appeal of the left opposition to the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks and to all party members in April 1930. It was signed by Kh. Rakovsky, V. Kossior, N. Muralov and other opposition leaders:
"From a workers' state with bureaucratic perversions - as Lenin defined our form of government - we are developing to a bureaucratic state with proletarian-communist vestiges."
The first quote is a general statement with which by mid-1927, as we see, both the Stalinists and the Trotskyists still agreed.
The second is a more than bold (both theoretically and practically) theoretical conclusion to which the Trotskyist opposition within the USSR came. By the way, it is also noteworthy that in April 1930, oppositionists who were in exile in the USSR still had, albeit illegally, the opportunity to communicate, formulate their political platforms and publish them abroad, in Trotsky’s “Bulletin of the Opposition.” In 1930, this forecast could simply be dismissed. In 2016, on the ruins of the USSR, from which (as we clearly see in Ukraine) the last “proletarian-communist remnants” are being burned out with hot iron (this is directly called “decommunization”), it is much more difficult to brush aside such an assessment and its forecast. ..

Christian Georgievich Rakovsky, plenipotentiary representative in France and Georgy Vasilyevich Chicherin, People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs at the Embassy of the Soviet Union. 1925

H. G. Rakovsky

Rakovsky and Prime Minister of Bulgaria Stamboliysky in Genoa. 1922 Stamboliysky wrote in his diary: “The strongest person in the Russian delegation is the Bulgarian Rakovsky.”

Rakovsky in a group of Soviet diplomats

H.G. Rakovsky - Chairman of the Provisional Workers' and Peasants' Government of Ukraine

In 1934, Rakovsky decided to “make peace with the party” and resigned his “title” as leader of the opposition. Victor Serge recalled the sentiments of the exiled Trotskyists at that time: “Christian Rakovsky joined the Central Committee, “to resist the military threat together with the party.” [...] Rakovsky gave up, but this did not bother us. We told ourselves: “He’s getting old - he fell for a classic trick: he was introduced to confidential documents about the impending war...”
In Moscow, Rakovsky was visited again by Louis Fischer, who wrote down his impressions: “The exile did not tear him down. But he watched Europe from Barnaul and did not detect a revolution there. But he saw how fascism was spreading from one country to another... Hitler led him back to Stalin.”
Rakovsky's decision caused Trotsky deep disappointment. He wrote in his diary: “Rakovsky was essentially my last connection with the old revolutionary generation... Now there is no one left.” He quipped in 1935: “Rakovsky was graciously admitted to ceremonial meetings and receptions with foreign ambassadors and bourgeois journalists. One less big revolutionary, one more minor official.”
And opposition member Nadezhda Ioffe recalled how her relatives tried to persuade her to reconcile with the party: “As the main argument, everyone cited the example of senior comrades I respected, former active oppositionists, who by this time had left the opposition. In response to this, I always answered: “And Rakovsky?" And it was at this time, like a bolt from the blue, that Rakovsky’s statement appeared in the newspapers. It was written as restrainedly as possible, something like this: “I made mistakes... I ask you to return me to the party..." And then I thought: Maybe I really don’t understand something, because it’s impossible to compare my political experience with that of Rakovsky, a man who was engaged in revolutionary activities for forty years in Bulgaria and Romania, in France and in Russia. I don’t suspect him of unprincipledness. could... I called him, and he immediately said: “Come.” When I came, his daughter Lena was with him and her husband Lena was his wife’s daughter, but he adopted her as a child. , she bore his patronymic and surname. At home she was called by the funny Romanian name Cocuta. And her husband was the famous poet Joseph Utkin. I really liked his poems, and I would love to get to know him. But at that moment he was of no use to me at all. However, they immediately left, and we stayed to talk with Christian Georgievich. He spoke very well to me that we must return to the party by any means. He believed that there is undoubtedly a certain layer in the party that shares our views in their souls, but does not dare to express them. And we could become some kind of sensible core and do something. And one by one, he said, we will be squashed like chickens."
If we believe this testimony (and why shouldn’t we believe it?), then it turns out that Rakovsky, having reconciled with the party, did not lay down his ideological weapons at all, but still expected to fight.
In Moscow, Rakovsky was again visited by Louis Fischer, who wrote down his impressions: “The exile did not tear him up. But he followed Europe from Barnaul and did not detect a revolution there. But he saw how fascism was spreading from one country to another... Hitler brought him back to Stalin."
In November 1935, Rakovsky was reinstated in the CPSU(b), but in 1937, such “hidden oppositionists” as he were again under attack... By that time, he already clearly saw his fate, and told his niece: “You I studied the French Revolution, you know how events developed, first there was Danton, then Robespierre. The revolution has its own laws. The revolution devours its children...
In January 1937, Rakovsky was arrested. In 1938, he became one of the defendants in the public trial of the “right-wing Bolsheviks” Bukharin and Rykov (although he himself was the leader of the “left opposition,” and not the right one). Typical dialogue from the court transcript:

"Prosecutor Vyshinsky. I ask - what was your means of livelihood?
Rakovsky. My livelihood came from my father's property.
Vyshinsky. So you lived on your income as a rentier?
Rakovsky. As a farmer.
Vyshinsky. That is, the landowner?
Rakovsky. Yes.
Vyshinsky. So, not only was your father a landowner, but you were also a landowner, an exploiter?
Rakovsky. Well, of course, I'm an exploiter. I received income. Income, as is known, is obtained from surplus value.
Vyshinsky. Was the surplus value in your hands?
Rakovsky. Yes. The added value was in my hands.
Vyshinsky. This means that I am not mistaken when I say that you were a landowner.
Rakovsky. You're right.
Vyshinsky. It was important for me to find out where your income came from."

At the end of this absurd dialogue - for everyone in the party knew that Rakovsky was a landowner, and spent the income from his estate on the revolution - the defendant still could not stand it:
"Rakovsky. But it is important for me to say what these incomes were used for.
Vyshinsky. That's a different conversation."

The court gave Rakovsky 20 years in prison.
In September 1941, by decision of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court, he, along with other prisoners of the Oryol prison, was shot in the Medvedevsky forest near Oryol.

UPD 2019. Who in the USSR could be called “the most popular person in the world” 95 years ago, that is, in August 1924? In fact, no modern reader will ever guess - not the tenth, or even the hundredth time. And he will be very surprised when he finds out... He, most often, has not even heard of this name. And he won’t understand when he finds out - why him? This shows how little and poorly we know and understand our own past.
Meanwhile, here he is, as the caption on the cover of the magazine says (drawing by Boris Efimov) - “the most popular person in the world.”

Christian Rakovsky (1873-1941). Against the background of his jacket pocket is a tiny James Ramsay MacDonald, Prime Minister of the British Empire, the most powerful world power of that time. Something like the then analogue of Trump... But why Rakovsky (whose birthday, by the way, falls on August 13, that is, today)?
Because Rakovsky was at that moment the Soviet plenipotentiary representative in England and represented both the USSR and the Comintern to the whole world. World revolution, in a word.

Cartoon from the magazine “Red Pepper” in 1924, when Rakovsky was the USSR plenipotentiary envoy to England.
- Strange people in England! Some say: “Hands off Russia!”, and extend their hands to us... Others say: “Hands off Russia,” and don’t even shake hands.”

Drawing by L. M. Magazine “Red Pepper”, 1923. “Bolsheviks writing a response to the English Curzon.” Rakovsky is also present in this humorous picture - between Kamenev and Stalin

Source - Wikipedia

Christian Georgievich Rakovsky (pseudonym Insarov, real surname Stanchev: August 1, 1873, Kotel - September 11, 1941) - Bulgarian, Soviet political, statesman and diplomatic figure. Participated in the revolutionary movement in the Balkans, France, Germany, Russia and Ukraine.

Grandson of the famous revolutionary Georgi Rakovsky. Being an ethnic Bulgarian, he had a Romanian passport. He studied at a Bulgarian gymnasium, from where he was expelled twice (in 1886 and 1890) for revolutionary agitation. In 1887, he changed his own name Kristya Stanchev to the more sonorous Christian Rakovsky. Around 1889 he became a convinced Marxist.
In 1890, Christian Rakovsky emigrated to Geneva in Switzerland where he entered the medical faculty of the University of Geneva. In Geneva, Rakovsky became acquainted with the Russian Social Democratic movement through Russian emigrants. In particular, Rakovsky became closely acquainted with the founder of the Marxist movement in the Russian Empire, Georgy Valentinovich Plekhanov. Participated in the organization of the international congress of socialist students in Geneva. In 1893, as a delegate from Bulgaria, he attended the Socialist International Congress in Zurich. He contributed to the first Bulgarian Marxist magazine "Den" and the social democratic newspapers "Rabotnik" and "Drugar" ("Comrade"). According to Rakovsky’s own autobiography, this was a time of intensifying his hatred of Russian tsarism. While still a student in Geneva, he traveled to Bulgaria, where he read a number of reports directed against the tsarist government.
In the fall of 1893 he entered medical school in Berlin, but due to close ties with revolutionaries from Russia, he was expelled from there after just six months. In Germany, Rakovsky collaborated with Wilhelm Liebknecht in the Vorwärts, the central press organ of the German Social Democrats. In 1896 he graduated from the medical faculty of the University of Montpellier in France, where he received his doctorate in medicine.
From the autumn of 1898 he served in the Romanian army. Demobilized in the spring of 1899.
After the split of the RSDLP into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks at the Second Congress in 1903, he took an intermediate position, trying to reconcile both groups on the basis of a consensus. Between 1903 and 1917, along with Maxim Gorky, Rakovsky was one of the links between the Bolsheviks, with whom he sympathized in terms of their economic program, and the Mensheviks, in whose activities he found positive political aspects. In addition to the Russian revolutionaries, Rakovsky worked for some time together with Rosa Luxemburg in Geneva.
After completing his studies in France, Rakovsky arrived in St. Petersburg to offer his services in coordinating the actions of workers and Marsky circles in Russia and abroad, but was soon expelled from the country and went to Paris. In St. Petersburg, Rakovsky visited Miliukov and Struve. Even then there were rumors about Rakovsky that he was an Austrian agent. In 1900-1902 he again stayed in the Russian capital, and in 1902 he returned to France.
Although Rakovsky's revolutionary activities during this period affected most European countries, his main efforts were aimed at organizing the socialist movement in the Balkans, primarily in Bulgaria and Romania. On this occasion, he founded in Geneva the left-wing Romanian newspaper Sotsial-Demokrat and a number of Bulgarian Marxist publications - Den, Rabotnik and Drugar (Comrade). In 1907-1914, a member of the SME.
Returning to Romania, Rakovsky settled in Dobruja, where he worked as an ordinary doctor (in 1913 he hosted Leon Trotsky). In 1910, he was one of the initiators of the restoration, under the name of the Social Democratic Party of Romania, of the Socialist Party of Romania that existed until 1899, which actually ceased to exist after the “complacent” left its membership, agreeing to a compromise with the royal power. The SDPR actually became the basis for the creation in 1910 of the Balkan Social Democratic Federation, which united the socialist parties of Bulgaria, Serbia, Romania and Greece. The very fact of the existence of a united federation of leftist parties was a protest against the policy of aggression and mistrust established in the Balkans as a result of the Balkan Wars. Christian Rakovsky, who was the first secretary of the BKF, at the same time continued to take an active part in the pan-European socialist movement, for which he was repeatedly expelled from Bulgaria, Germany, France and Russia.
World War I
During the First World War, Rakovsky, like some other socialists who initially took a centrist position in discussions regarding methods of political struggle, supported the left wing of international social democracy, which condemned the imperialist nature of the war. Rakovsky, along with the leaders of the left socialists, was one of the organizers of the international anti-war Zimmerwald Conference in September 1915. According to D. F. Bradley, through Rakovsky, the Austrians financed the Russian-language newspaper "Our Word", published in Paris by Martov and Trotsky, which was closed in 1916 by the French authorities for anti-war propaganda. In 1917, the French General Nissel called Rakovsky in his report “a well-known Austro-Bulgarian agent.”
After Romania entered the war in August 1916, he was arrested on charges of spreading defeatist sentiments and spying for Austria and Germany. He remained in custody until May 1, 1917, when he was released by Russian soldiers stationed in Eastern Romania.
Revolution in Russia
After his release from a Romanian prison, Rakovsky arrived in Russia. During the Kornilov days, Rakovsky was hidden by the Bolshevik organization at the Sestroretsk cartridge factory. From there he moved to Kronstadt. Rakovsky then decided to go to Stockholm, where the Zimmerwald Conference was to be convened. The October Revolution found him in Stockholm. in November 1917 he joined the RSDLP (b), conducted party work in Odessa and Petrograd.
Civil War
Arriving in Russia in December 1917, at the beginning of January 1918 Rakovsky left as a commissar-organizer of the Council of People's Commissars of the RSFSR to the south along with an expedition of sailors led by Zheleznyakov. After spending a certain time in Sevastopol and organizing an expedition there to the Danube against the Romanian authorities, who had already occupied Bessarabia, he went with the expedition to Odessa. The Supreme Autonomous Collegium for the fight against counter-revolution in Romania and Ukraine was organized here, and as chairman of this college and a member of the Rumcherod, Rakovsky remained in Odessa until the city was occupied by the Germans. From Odessa Rakovsky came to Nikolaev, from there to Crimea, then to Ekaterinoslav, where he participated in the Second Congress of Soviets of Ukraine, then to Poltava and Kharkov.
Diplomatic mission to Ukraine
After arriving in Moscow, where he remained generally no more than a month, in April 1918 Rakovsky went to Kursk with a delegation that was supposed to conduct peace negotiations with the Ukrainian Central Rada. In addition to Rakovsky, Stalin and Manuilsky were plenipotentiary delegates.

The main driver of all these negotiations was Rakovsky. Without him, the other two would be completely helpless. He had a plan for the state division of Russia. He preferred to delegate the implementation and development of details to others. Manuilsky was sent for this purpose. Stalin, apparently, was only an observer.

In Kursk, the delegates received a message about Skoropadsky’s coup in Kyiv. A truce was concluded with the Germans, who continued their offensive. Skoropadsky's government invited the Bolshevik delegation to come to Kyiv. During the period of the Ukrainian State, he conducted secret negotiations in Kyiv with the removed from power figures of the Central Rada regarding the legalization of the Communist Party in Ukraine.
Diplomatic mission in Germany
In September 1918, Rakovsky was sent on a diplomatic mission to Germany, but soon, together with the Soviet ambassador in Berlin, Joffe, Bukharin and other comrades, he was expelled from Germany. On the way from Germany, the Soviet delegation was overtaken by the news of the November revolution in Berlin. Trying to return to Berlin, Rakovsky, along with others, was detained by German military authorities in Kovno and sent to Smolensk.
Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars and People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs of Ukraine
Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of Ukraine. Since 1923 - in diplomatic work: USSR Plenipotentiary Representative in England, USSR Plenipotentiary Representative in France.

Since 1919, member of the Central Committee of the RCP(b).
In a telegram to Moscow sent on January 10, 1919, members of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (b)U Quiring, Fyodor Sergeev, Yakovlev (Epstein) asked to “immediately send Christian Georgievich” in order to prevent the crisis of the head of government from escalating into a government crisis. From January 1919 to July 1923 - Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars and People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs of Ukraine. At the same time, from January 1919 to May 1920, the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs, the NKVD paid "minimal attention." In 1919-1920 - member of the Organizing Bureau of the Central Committee. One of the organizers of Soviet power in Ukraine.
When at the beginning of 1922 the question arose about Rakovsky’s possible transfer to another job, the plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine (Bolsheviks) on March 23, 1922 decided to “categorically demand that Comrade Rakovsky not be removed from Ukraine.”
As part of the Soviet delegation, he participated in the work of the Genoa Conference (1922).
In June 1923, at the initiative of Rakovsky, a resolution was adopted by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, according to which foreign companies could open their branches in Ukraine only after receiving permission from its authorities. All commercial contracts concluded in Moscow were cancelled. A month later, this decision of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine was canceled.
XII Congress of the RCP (b)
At the XII Congress of the RCP(b) he resolutely opposed Stalin’s national policy. At this congress, Rakovsky declared that “it is necessary to take away nine-tenths of their rights from the union commissariats and transfer them to the national republics.” In June 1923, at the IV meeting of the Central Committee of the RCP (b) with senior officials of the national republics and regions, Stalin accused Rakovsky and his associates of confederalism, national deviationism and separatism. A month after the end of this meeting, Rakovsky was removed from the post of chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of Ukraine and sent as ambassador to England (1923-1925). On July 18, Rakovsky sent a letter to Stalin and, in copies, to all members of the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission of the RCP(b), members of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, a letter in which he indicated: “My appointment to London is for me, and not only for me alone, only a pretext for my dismissal from work in Ukraine." At this time, a scandal related to “Zinoviev’s letter” broke out. From October 1925 to October 1927 - Plenipotentiary Representative in France. He was the head of the Soviet diplomatic mission in London
Left opposition in the RCP (b) and the CPSU (b)
Since 1923, he belonged to the Left Opposition and was one of its ideologists. In 1927, he was removed from all positions, expelled from the Central Committee, and at the XV Congress of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) was expelled from the party among 75 “active opposition figures.” At a special meeting at the OGPU he was sentenced to 4 years of exile and exiled to Kustanai, and in 1931 he was again sentenced to 4 years of exile and exiled to Barnaul. For a long time he had a negative attitude towards “capitulators” who returned to the party to continue the struggle, but in 1935, together with another stubborn oppositionist, L. S. Sosnovsky, he announced his break with the opposition. N.A. Ioffe wrote about this: “He believed that in the party, undoubtedly, there is a certain layer that shares our views in their souls, but does not dare to express them. And we could become some kind of sensible core and something then take action. But one by one, he said, we will be slaughtered like chickens.” He was returned to Moscow and in November 1935 reinstated in the CPSU(b).
In 1934, he was sheltered in a managerial position in the People's Commissariat of Health of the RSFSR by G. N. Kaminsky.
Third Moscow trial
In 1936 he was again expelled from the party and on January 27, 1937.