Christian Rakovsky

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Christian Rakovsky bigraphy, stories - Soviet diplomat

Christian Rakovsky : biography

August 13, 1873 – September 11, 1941

Christian Rakovsky (Correct transkription: Rakovskij)(August 1 (August 13) 1873 – September 11, 1941) was a Bulgarian socialist revolutionary, a Bolshevik politician and Soviet diplomat; he was also noted as a journalist, physician, and essayist. Rakovsky’s political career took him throughout the Balkans and into France and Imperial Russia; for part of his life, he was also a Romanian citizen.

A lifelong collaborator of Leon Trotsky, he was a prominent activist of the Second International, involved in politics with the Bulgarian Social Democratic Union, Romanian Social Democratic Party, and the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. Rakovsky was expelled at different times from various countries as a result of his activities, and, during World War I, became a founding member of the Revolutionary Balkan Social Democratic Labor Federation while helping to organize the Zimmerwald Conference. Imprisoned by Romanian authorities, he made his way to Russia, where he joined the Bolshevik Party after the October Revolution, and, as head of the Rumcherod, unsuccessfully attempted to generate a communist revolution in the Kingdom of Romania. Subsequently, he was a founding member of the Comintern, served as head of government in the Ukrainian SSR, and took part in negotiations at the Genoa Conference.

He came to oppose Joseph Stalin and rallied with the Left Opposition, being marginalized inside the government and sent as Soviet ambassador to London and Paris, where he was involved in renegotiating financial settlements. He was ultimately recalled from France in autumn 1927, after signing his name to a controversial Trotskyist platform which endorsed world revolution. Credited with having developed the Trotskyist critique of Stalinism as "bureaucratic centrism", Rakovsky was subject to internal exile. Submitting to Stalin’s leadership in 1934 and being briefly reinstated, he was nonetheless implicated in the Trial of the Twenty One (part of the Moscow Trials), imprisoned, and executed by the NKVD during World War II. He was rehabilitated in 1988, during the Soviet Glasnost period.

Legacy and rehabilitation

Rakovsky’s second wife, Alexandrina Alexandrescu, was herself arrested, and is known to have been held in Butyrka prison, where she suffered a series of heart attacks. His adoptive daughter, Elena Codreanu-Racovski, was expelled from her job as secretary of the Mossoviet Theater, and deported to Siberia.Brătescu, p.425-426 She returned to Moscow in the 1950s, after Stalin’s death, and settled in Communist Romania after 1975, rejoining her brother, the biologist and academic Radu Codreanu.Brătescu, p.426 She later authored a memoir which included recollections of her father (it was published in Romanian as De-a lungul şi de-a latul secolului, "The Length and Breadth of the Century").Brătescu, p.426-427 It was compiled from personal notes and dialogs with physician and former communist militant G. Brătescu, who noted that, probably owing to suspicions she had in respect to the Romanian communist regime, Elena Codreanu refused to talk about Rakovsky’s trial and her own persecution. Rakovsky’s nephew Boris Stefanov, whom he encouraged to join the Romanian socialist movement before World War I, later became a general secretary of the Romanian Communist Party, before being himself purged in 1940.Ilarion Ţiu, "Aliatul lui Stalin" ("Stalin’s Ally"), in Jurnalul Naţional, June 7, 2005

By 1932, Rakovsky’s name was frequently invoked in the heated debate involving Panait Istrati and his political adversaries. Istrati, having returned to Romania in disillusion over Soviet realities, was initially attacked in the local far right newspapers Curentul and Universul; writing for the former, Pamfil Şeicaru defined Istrati as "the servant of Racovski".Şeicaru, in Tănase, "The Renegade Istrati" Having published To the Other Flame, in which he exposed Stalinism, he consequently became the target of intense criticism and allegations from various pro-Soviet writers, led by the Frenchman Henri Barbusse. During this period, the Romanian communist writer Alexandru Sahia speculated, among other things, that Istrati had been in the pay of Rakovsky and Trotsky for a sizable part of his life.