Christian Rakovsky
Christian Georgiyevich Rakovsky, Bulgarian name Krastyo Georgiev Rakovski, born Krastyo Georgiev Stanchov, was a Bulgarian-born socialist revolutionary, a Bolshevik politician and Soviet diplomat and statesman; 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 Workers' Social Democratic Party, 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 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, imprisoned, and executed by the NKVD during World War II. He was rehabilitated in 1988, during the Soviet Glasnost period.
Names
Rakovsky's original Bulgarian name was Krastyo Georgiev Stanchev, which he himself changed to Krastyo Rakovski, being a grandnephew of the Bulgarian national hero Georgi Rakovski. The usual form his first name took in Romanian was Cristian, while his last name was spelled Racovski, Racovschi, or Rakovski. His given name was occasionally rendered as Ristache, an antiquated hypocoristic—he was known as such to his acquaintance, writer Ion Luca Caragiale.In Russian, his full name, including patronymic, was Khristian Georgievich Rakovsky. Christian is an approximate rendition of Krastyo, as used by Rakovsky himself. In Ukrainian, Rakovsky's name is rendered as Християн Георгійович Раковський, and usually transliterated as Khrystyian Heorhiiovych Rakovskyi.
During his lifetime, he was also known under the pseudonyms H. Insarov and Grigoriev, which he used in signing several articles for the Russian-language press.
Biography
Revolutionary beginnings
Christian Rakovsky was born to a wealthy Bulgarian family in Gradets — near Kotel — at the time still part of Ottoman-ruled Rumelia. He was, on his mother's side, the grandnephew of Georgi Sava Rakovski, a revolutionary hero of the Bulgarian National Revival; that side of his family also included Georgi Mamarchev, who had fought against the Ottomans in the Imperial Russian Army. Rakovsky's father was a merchant who belonged to the Democratic Party.He later stated that, as early as his childhood years, he had felt a special admiration towards Russia, and that he had been impressed by witnessing, at age 5, the Russo-Turkish War and Russian presence.
Although his parents moved to the Kingdom of Romania in 1880, settling in Gherengic, he completed his education in newly emancipated Bulgaria. Rakovsky was expelled from the gymnasium in Gabrovo for his political activities. It was around that time that he became a Marxist, and began collaborating with the socialist journalist Evtim Dabev, whom he aided in printing works by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
Since, after having ultimately been banned from attending any public school in the country, he could not complete his education in Bulgaria, in September 1890, Rakovsky went to Geneva to begin his studies and become a physician. While in Switzerland, he joined the Socialist Student Circle at the University of Geneva, which was largely composed of non-Swiss youth.
A polyglot, Rakovsky became close to Georgy Plekhanov, the founder of Russian Marxism, and his circle, eventually writing a number of articles and a book in Russian. He briefly worked with Rosa Luxemburg, Pavel Axelrod, and Vera Zasulich. Unable to attend the First International Congress of Socialist Students in Brussels, he became involved in organizing the Second Congress, held in Geneva during the fall of 1893.
He was a founding editor of the Geneva-based Bulgarian-language magazine Sotsial-Demokrat and later a major contributor to the Bulgarian Marxist publications Den', Rabotnik, and Drugar. At the time, Rakovsky and Balabanov, with Plekhanov's encouragement, stressed the importance for moderation in socialist policies—Sotsial-Demokrat rallied with the Bulgarian Social Democratic Union and rejected the more radical Bulgarian Social Democratic Party. He soon became involved in distributing socialist propaganda inside Bulgaria, at a time when Stefan Stambolov organized a crackdown on political opposition.
Later in 1893, Rakovsky enrolled in a medical school in Berlin, contributing articles for Vorwärts and becoming close to Wilhelm Liebknecht. As a Bulgarian delegate to the Second International Congress in Zürich, he also met with Engels and Jules Guesde.
Six months later, he was arrested and expelled from the German Empire for maintaining close contacts with the Russian revolutionaries there. He finished his education in 1894–1896 in Zürich, Nancy and Montpellier, where he wrote for La Jeunesse Socialiste and La Petite République, maintaining a friendship with Guesde and becoming an opponent of Jean Jaurès' reformist views.
According to his own testimony, he became active in supporting the Anti-Ottoman upsurge in Crete and Macedonia, as well as Dashnak revolutionary activities. In 1896, he was the Bulgarian representative to the Second International's London Congress.
Military service and first stay in Russia
Although actively involved in many European countries' socialist movements, prior to 1917 Rakovsky's focus remained on the Balkans and especially on his native country and Romania; his activities in support of the international socialist movement led to his expulsion, at different times, from Germany, Bulgaria, Romania, France and Russia.In 1897, he published Russiya na Istok, a book sharply critical of the Russian Empire's foreign policy, which, according to Rakovsky, followed one of Georgy Plekhanov's guidelines. On several occasions, he publicly criticized Russia's policies towards Romania and in Bessarabia. According to Rakovsky, "Russophile papers" in Bulgaria had begun to target him as a consequence.
After completing his education as a physician at the University of Montpellier, Rakovsky, who had married the Russian student E. P. Ryabova, was summoned to Romania in order to be drafted in the Romanian Army, and served as a medic in the 9th Cavalry Regiment stationed in Constanţa, Dobruja. He rose to the rank of lieutenant.
Rakovsky subsequently rejoined his wife in Saint Petersburg, where he hoped to settle down and engage in revolutionary activities. An adversary of Peter Berngardovich Struve after the latter moved towards market liberalism, he became acquainted with, among others, Nikolay Mikhaylovsky and Mikhail Tugan-Baranovsky, while authoring articles for Nashe Slovo and helping distribute Iskra. His close relationship with Plekhanov led Rakovsky to a position between the Menshevik and Bolshevik factions of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, one he kept from 1903 to 1917; the Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin was initially hostile to Rakovsky, and at one point wrote to Karl Radek that "we do not have the same road as his kind of people".
Initially, Rakovsky was expelled from Russia and had to move back to Paris. Returning to the Russian capital in 1900, he remained there until 1902, when his wife's death and the crackdown on socialist groups ordered by Emperor Nicholas II forced him to return to France. Working for a while as a physician in the village of Beaulieu, Haute-Loire, he asked French officials to review his case for naturalization, but was refused.
In 1903, following the death of his father, Rakovsky again lived in Paris, where he followed developments of the Russo-Japanese War and spoke out against Russia, attracting, according to Rakovsky himself, the criticism of both Plekhanov and Jules Guesde. He voiced his opposition to the concession made by Karl Kautsky to Jean Jaurès, one which had allowed socialists to join "bourgeois" governments in times of crisis.
''România Muncitoare''
He ultimately settled in Romania having inherited his father's estate near Mangalia. In 1913, his property, valued at some 40,000 United States dollars at the time, was home to Leon Trotsky when the latter visited the Balkans as a press envoy during the Balkan Wars. He was usually present in Bucharest on a weekly basis, and started an intense activity as a journalist, doctor and lawyer. The Balkans correspondent for L'Humanité, he was also personally responsible for reviving România Muncitoare, the defunct journal of the Romanian socialist group, provoking successful strike actions which brought him to the attention of officials.Christian Rakovsky also traveled to Bulgaria, where he eventually sided with the Tesnyatsi in their conflict with other socialist groups. In 1904, he was present at the Second International's Congress in Amsterdam, where he gave a speech celebrating the assassination of Russian police chief Vyacheslav von Plehve by Socialist-Revolutionary Party members.
Rakovsky became noted locally especially after 1905, when he organized rallies in support of the Battleship Potemkin revolt, carried out a relief operation for the Potemkin crew as their ship sought refuge in Constanţa, and attempted to persuade them to set sail for Batumi and aid striking workers there. According to his own account, a parallel scandal occurred when an armed Bolshevik ship was captured in Romanian territorial waters; Rakovsky, who indicated that the weapons on board were to be used in Batumi, faced allegations in the Romanian press that he was preparing a Dobrujan insurrection.
His head was injured during street clashes with police forces over the Potemkin issue; while recovering, Rakovsky befriended the Romanian poets Ștefan Octavian Iosif and Dimitrie Anghel, who were publishing works under a common signature—one of the two authored a sympathetic portrait of the socialist leader, based on his recollections from the early 1900s. Throughout these years, Rakovsky, was, according to Iosif and Anghel, "continuously bustling; disappearing and appearing in workers' centers, be it in Brăila, be it in Galaţi, be it in Iaşi, be it anywhere, always preaching with the same undaunted fervor and fanatical conviction his social credo".
Rakovsky was drawn into a polemic with the Romanian authorities, facing public accusations that, as a Bulgarian, he lacked patriotism. In return, he commented that, if patriotism meant "race prejudice, international and civil war, political tyranny and plutocratic domination", he refused to be identified with it. Upon the outbreak of Romanian Peasants' Revolt of 1907, Rakovsky was especially vocal: he launched accusations at the National Liberal government, arguing that, having profited from the early antisemitic message of the revolt, it had violently repressed it from the moment peasants began to attack landowners. Supportive of the thesis according to which the peasantry had revolutionary importance inside Romanian society and Eastern Europe at large, Rakovsky publicized his perspective in the socialist press.
Rakovsky was also one of the journalists suspected of having greatly exaggerated the overall death toll in their accounts: his estimates speak of over 10,000 peasants killed, whereas the government data counted only 421.
He became close to the influential dramatist Ion Luca Caragiale, who was living in Berlin at the time. Caragiale authored his own virulent critique of the Romanian state and its handling of the revolt, an essay titled 1907, din primăvară până în toamnă, which, in its final version, adopted some of Rakovsky's suggestions.