Everything Flows (28 page)

Kamenev, Lev Borisovich (né Lev Borisovich Rosenfeld, 1883–1936): An important Old Bolshevik. During the period of Lenin's illness (1923–1924), Kamenev, Zinoviev, and Stalin allied against Trotsky and succeeded in marginalizing him. In December 1925, however, Kamenev publicly demanded that Stalin be removed from his position as general secretary. With only Zinoviev and the Leningrad delegation behind him, Kamenev was defeated. Kamenev then formed a United Opposition with Zinoviev and Trotsky, but this too was crushed; Kamenev, Zinoviev, and Trotsky were all expelled from the Party in December 1927. After publicly “acknowledging their mistakes,” both Zinoviev and Kamenev were readmitted to the Party. They were courted by Bukharin in the summer of 1928, at the beginning of his own ill-fated struggle with Stalin—but this was reported to Stalin and used against Bukharin. After being arrested in December 1934, Zinoviev and Kamenev were both sentenced to prison. In August 1936, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and fourteen others, mostly Old Bolsheviks, were put on trial a second time. The charges including involvement in the assassination of the Old Bolshevik Sergey Kirov in 1934, as well as attempting to kill Stalin. This trial of the Trotskyite-Zinovievite Terrorist Center was the first of the Moscow Trials. Like the other defendants, Kamenev was found guilty and shot.

Kautsky, Karl (1854–1938): The leading Marxist thinker after the death of his close friend Friedrich Engels and an important figure in the German Social Democratic Party. Lenin considered Kautsky a “renegade,” and Kautsky, for his part, accused Lenin of having laid the foundations for a new dictatorship.

Khatayevich, Mendel Markovich (1893–1937): A Soviet politician, one of the men responsible for the implementation of the policies that brought about the Terror Famine in the Ukraine. He was executed in 1937.

Khodzhaev, Faizulla (1896–1938): The prime minister of Uzbekistan from 1925 until 1937. He was executed in 1938.

Kibalchich, Nikolay Ivanovich (1853–1881): The main explosive expert for the People's Will terrorist organization. In April 1881 he was hanged for his part in the assassination of Tsar Alexander II. He was the paternal uncle of the writer Viktor Serge.

Kirov, Sergey Mironovich (1886–1934): An important Old Bolshevik, who enjoyed considerable popularity. He was assassinated in 1934. It is possible that Stalin saw him as a rival and ordered this assassination. Stalin succeeded, in any case, in using the assassination for his own purposes, as a justification for the Great Purge during which he eliminated the overwhelming majority of the Old Bolsheviks.

Kobulov, Bogdan Zakharovich (1904–1953): A henchman of Beria. He was executed after Stalin's death.

Kogan, Mikhail Borisovich (d. 1951): One of the “Killer Doctors,” alleged to have worked for many years as an agent of British Intelligence.

Kolchak, Aleksandr Vasiliyevich (1874–1920): Commander of the White Armies in Siberia and the Urals during the civil war. He was executed in 1920.

Komsomol: The Communist Union of Youth, founded in 1918. It played an important role in instilling Communist values in the young, and as an organ for introducing them to the political domain. At its height, in the 1970s, Komsomol membership numbered in the tens of millions.

Kornilov, Lavr Georgievich (1870–1918): White Army general in southern Russia during the civil war.

Kropotkin, Prince Pyotr Alekseyevich (1842–1921): The most important Russian anarchist-philosopher and an advocate of a communalist society free from central government.

Lavrov, Pyotr Lavrovich (1823–1900): A prominent Russian revolutionary philosopher. He believed that while it would be easy to bring about a coup d'état in Russia, the creation of a socialist society needed to involve the masses and, above all, the peasantry.

Left Deviation (Left Opposition): A Communist Party faction opposed to Stalin and led, from 1923 to 1927, by Trotsky.

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich (né Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, 1870–1924): The main leader of the October Revolution and, from 1922, the first leader of the Soviet Union. His father was a successful Russian official in public education. When Lenin was seventeen years old, his eldest brother, Aleksandr, was hanged for participating in a plot against the life of Tsar Alexander III. After qualifying as a lawyer and practicing for several years, Lenin was arrested in 1895 and sentenced to exile in Siberia, where he associated with Plekhanov and other Socialist exiles. In 1900, after his exile came to an end, he left Russia and spent most of the next seventeen years in Western Europe.

Lenin was an active member of the Russian Social Democrat Party and, in 1903, he led the Bolshevik faction after it split from the Menshevik faction. Until 1917, the Bolshevik Party appeared to be of only marginal importance. Two months after the February Revolution, however, Lenin arrived in Petrograd by train and immediately published his
April Theses
, calling for uncompromising opposition to the Provisional Government. Initially, this isolated the Bolsheviks; later, however, it enabled them to win the support of most of those who were disillusioned with the Provisional Government. After having to flee to Finland in July, Lenin returned to Petrograd in October, inspiring the October Revolution with his slogans of “Peace, Bread, and Land” and “All Power to the Soviets!” In January 1918, Lenin shut down the Russian Constitutional Assembly during its first session and formed a coalition government with the left wing of the Socialist Revolutionaries. This coalition soon collapsed, and Lenin outlawed the Socialist Revolutionaries, along with all other political parties.

An attempt on Lenin's life in January 1918 was used to justify a Red Terror against enemies of the revolution, conducted by the Cheka
(the Special Committee, or secret police)
.
When Kamenev and Bukharin tried to curb the excesses of the Cheka in late 1918, it was Lenin—consistently an advocate of mass terror—who defended it.

In May 1922, a stroke left Lenin partially paralyzed. In December 1922 and in March 1923, he suffered two more strokes and was left bedridden and unable to speak. After his first stroke, Lenin dictated to his wife a controversial document known as “Lenin's Testament”—his thoughts about the Party's future leadership. Lenin's wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, sent this to the Central Committee after Lenin's death, asking for it to be read at the Thirteenth Party Congress in May 1924. Since it included criticisms of all the leading Old Bolsheviks, the Central Committee chose to keep the testament secret.

Lenin died on January 21, 1924, at the age of fifty-three. More than 900,000 people passed through the Hall of Columns during the four days and nights that Lenin lay in state. The city of Petrograd was renamed Leningrad in his honor. Within a week of his death, Lenin's body was embalmed and placed on exhibition in the Lenin Mausoleum in Moscow.

Lunacharsky, Anatoly Vasilyevich (1875–1933): As the first Soviet people's commissar of enlightenment, he was responsible for Soviet cultural policy and oversaw a huge improvement in Russia's literacy rate. One of the few prominent Old Bolsheviks to die a natural death.

Lysenko, Trofim Denisovich (1898–1976): The dominating figure in Soviet biology, and especially agriculture, from the late 1930s until the mid-1950s. Lysenko was an opponent of Mendelian genetics. His influence peaked in 1948, when genetics was officially declared a bourgeois pseudoscience. All geneticists were fired and many were arrested. Most of Lysenko's scientific claims—for example, his “discovery” in the late 1940s of strains of wheat that can be grown north of the Arctic Circle—were entirely fraudulent.

MacDonald, James Ramsay (1866–1937): Founding figure of the British Labour Party and the first Labour prime minister. His decision in 1931 to form a so-called National Government, in coalition with the Conservatives, has long been seen by the Left as an act of betrayal.

Martov, Julius (né Yuly Osipovich Tsederbaum, 1873–1923): The leader of the Menshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Party, a faction that split with the Bolsheviks at the Party Congress held in London in 1903. Once a close friend of Lenin, he was exiled in 1920.

Marx, Karl Heinrich
(1818–1883): A revolutionary philosopher and political economist, the father of Communism. Marx argued that capitalism, like previous socioeconomic systems, will produce internal tensions which will lead to its destruction. Just as capitalism replaced feudalism, so capitalism will be replaced by Communism, though only after a transitional period he referred to as “the dictatorship of the proletariat.”

Mayakovsky, Vladimir Vladimirovich (1893–1930): A poet and playwright, among the most important of the Russian futurists. A great deal of his work was dedicated to the Bolshevik cause. In April 1930, unhappy in love and disillusioned with Soviet Russia, Mayakovsky shot himself.
The words “Lenin lives, lived, and will live”—engraved on monuments all over the Soviet Union—are from his elegy, “Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.”

Mendel, Gregor Johann (1822–1884): An Austrian scientist and Augustinian priest, often called the father of genetics for his study of the inheritance of traits in pea plants. The significance of his work was not recognized until the early twentieth century.

Mendeleyev, Dmitry Ivanovich (1834–1907): A great Russian chemist, the creator of the first version of the periodic table of elements.

Menshevik: In 1903, the Russian Social Democrat Party, a Marxist party founded in 1898, split into two factions: the Bolsheviks, led by Lenin, and the Mensheviks, led by Martov. Along with all other political parties, except for the Bolsheviks, the Mensheviks were banned after the revolution. In 1921, Lenin wrote, “The only place for Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, whether they hide their allegiances or are open about them, is prison.”

Merkulov, Vsevolod Nikolaevich (1895–1953): A henchman of Beria. He was arrested and executed at the same time as Beria.

Mikhailov, Timofey Mikhailovich (1859–1881): A member of the People's Will, executed for his part in the assassination of Tsar Alexander II.

Mikhailovsky, Nikolay Konstantinovich (1842–1904): A journalist, critic, and leading theorist of the populist movement.

Mikhoels, Solomon Mikhailovich (né Vovsi, 1890–1948): The director of the Moscow Yiddish theater and chairman of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee founded in 1942. In this latter capacity he traveled around the world, encouraging Jewish communities to support the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany. After 1945, however, Stalin opposed contact between Soviet Jews and Jewish communities in other countries, and most members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee were arrested. Mikhoels was assassinated on orders from Stalin; his death was masked as a car crash.

Nechaev, Sergey Gennadievich (1847–1882): A member of the revolutionary movement known as the Nihilists; he believed in the single-minded pursuit of revolution by any means, including political violence.

Nekrasov, Nikolay Alekseyevich (1821–1878): A Russian radical poet, writer, critic, and publisher.

OGPU: Over the decades the Soviet state security service underwent many changes of name. The most important of these names, in chronological order, are the Cheka
(an acronym for Special Committee), the OGPU, the NKVD, and the KGB. In post-Soviet Russia the state security service is known as the FSB.

Pasternak, Boris Leonidovich
(1890–1960): A famous poet. In 1958 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his novel
Doctor Zhivago
, which was banned in the Soviet Union but had been published in Italy. Under pressure from the authorities, he declined to accept the prize.

People's Will (Narodnaya Volya): A Russian revolutionary organization, responsible for a number of terrorist attacks, including the 1881 assassination of Tsar Alexander II. Unlike the Marxists, the People's Will believed that Russia could achieve socialism through a peasant revolution, bypassing the stage of capitalism. Between 1879 and 1883, most of the organization's members were imprisoned or exiled. At the turn of the century, however, as these veteran revolutionaries were released, they helped to form the Socialist Revolutionary Party. This political party, eventually supported by most of the peasantry, revived many of the goals and methods of the People's Will.

Perovskaya, Sofya Lvovna (1853–1881): A member of the People's Will and wife of Andrei Zhelyabov. She was hanged for her part in the assassination of Tsar Alexander II—the first woman to be executed in Russia for political reasons.

Pestel, Colonel Pavel Ivanovich
(1793–1826): One of the chief ideologues of the revolutionary movement known as the Decembrists. Though a democrat in some respects, he believed in a strong, centralized government, with a secret police force to maintain order. He was hanged in July 1826, after the Decembrists' failed coup.

Peter the Great
(1672–1725): Ruler of Russia and later the Russian Empire from 1682 until his death. His policies of Westernization and expansion transformed Russia into a major European power.

Petlyura, Simon Vasilyevich (1879–1926): The leader of the Ukrainian Nationalist movement, which was at its most powerful during 1918 and 1919.

Plekhanov, Georgy Valentinovich (1856–1918): A prominent Socialist philosopher, considered the founder of Russian Marxism.

Pushkin, Aleksandr Sergeyevich (1799–1837): Russia's greatest poet.

Pyatakov, Georgy Leonidovich (1890–1937): An Old Bolshevik and, after Lenin's death, a member of the Left Deviation. In 1936 he was accused of conspiring against the Soviet government with both Trotsky and the Nazis. He was executed in January 1937.