Dmitry Manuilsky
Dmitriy Zakharovich Manuilsky or Dmitro Zakharovych Manuilsky was an important Bolshevik revolutionary, Soviet politician and academic who was Secretary of the Executive Committee of the Communist International from December 1926 to its dissolution in May 1943.
Early life and career
Son of an Orthodox priest, Manuilsky was born to a peasant family in the village of, Kremenets County, Volhynian Governorate. After secondary school, he enrolled at the University of St. Petersburg in 1903, and joined the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social [Democratic Labour Party] in 1904.During the 1905 revolution he was assigned by the Bolsheviks to the naval base in Kronstadt where he took part in the naval revolt in July. Arrested, he was held in Kronstadt prison in 1905–06, then exiled, but escaped, arriving in Kiev and then, in 1907, to Paris, where he continued studies at the Sorbonne University. There he supposedly aligned with the ultra-left group led by Alexander Bogdanov, who challenged Lenin for the leadership of the Bolsheviks, and worked on the newspaper Vpered.
After the outbreak of war in 1914, he worked on the newspaper Nashe Slovo and acted as the main contact between the Bolsheviks and the smaller group associated with Leon Trotsky. Manuilsky's articles also appeared in the Ukrainian social democratic press. After his return to Russia in May 1917, he supposedly joined Trotsky's group, the Mezhraiontsy, who amalgamated with the Bolsheviks in August 1917.
After the October Revolution
During the Russian Civil War, Manuilsky worked in the People's Commissariat for Food, before being sent to Ukraine, where Lenin assigned him the task of organising the peasant population around Kharkov to defeat the White Army of Anton Denikin. He also took part in the Soviet Russian delegation at the peace negotiations with Ukraine.Starting from 1919, Manuilsky became an active member of the Communist Party of Ukraine, and participated in a Moscow-critical conference of the organization in Gomel. However, soon thereafter he abandoned his oppositional views and denounced the "federalist" group of the party before Lenin. In January 1919, Manuilsky and Inessa Armand were sent to Paris, in the hope they could stoke a revolution in France, but he was arrested and deported.
In 1919-1920 Manuilsky was a member of the All-Ukrainian Revolutionary Committee. Between 1920 and 1921, during the famine in Ukraine, he served as the People's Commissar for Food of the Soviet Socialist Republic">Soviet Union">Soviet Socialist Republic. He then switched to journalism, editing the newspaper Kommunist and serving as secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party. From 1922 Manuilsky was working for the Comintern, serving as the organization's secretary in 1928-1943. On that position he was responsible for executing purges in the Comintern's apparatus and in foreign Communist parties on the orders of Stalin.
From 1923 to 1952 he was a member of the Central Committee of the [Communist Party of the Soviet Union], as well as a member of the elite inner circle known as the "malaia comisiia", a five-member group that ruled the eleven-member Political Secretariat. In 1926, he supplanted Nikolai Bukharin as leader of the Soviet Union delegation on Comintern's executive, and the lead representative at congresses of the French, German, and Czechoslovak communist parties.
Later life and career
From 1935 until the dissolution of Comintern in 1943, Manuilsky acted as deputy to its General Secretary, Georgi Dimitrov. During the Great Purge, almost every Old Bolshevik with a past link with Trotsky was killed or imprisoned, except Manuilsky, whom Stalin despised but by whom he did not feel in any way threatened. In 1939, he told Dimitrov: "Manuilsky is a toady! He was a Trotskyite! We criticised him for keeping quiet and not speaking out when the purges of Trotskyite bandits were going on, and now he has started toadying!"The Montenegrin anti-communist Milovan Djilas, who met Manuilsky in 1944, admired his learning and writing talent, but remembered him as "a slight and already hunched veteran, dark-haired, with a clipped moustache spoke with a lisp, almost gently and – what astonished me at the time – without much energy." Seeing him again five years later, Djilas thought him an "almost senile, little old man who was rapidly disappearing as he slid down the steep ladder of the Soviet hierarchy."
Between 1944 and 1952, Manuilsky held a post of Foreign Minister of Ukraine. Having fallen out of Stalin's favour after 1950, from 1952 to 1953 he served the Ukrainian ambassador to the United Nations. On the latter position he was known for his speeches denouncing Ukrainian emigration. After Stalin's death Manuilsky left politics. He died in 1959 in Kiev.