Georgy Pyatakov

Pyatakov (party pseudonyms: Kievsky, Lyalin, Petro, Yaponets) was born 6 August 1890 in the Cherkasy district in the Kiev Governorate of the Russian Empire, now modern-day Ukraine, where his father Leonid Timofeyevich Pyatakov was an engineer and director of the large Mariinsky or Horodyshche Sugar Refinery.[1] Leonid Pyatakov (1847–1915), was also co-owner of Musatov, Pyatakov, Sirotin, and Co.

Pyatakov first became politically active as 14 year old in secondary school in Kyiv. During the 1905 revolution, he was expelled for leading his 'school revolution' and joined an anarchist group, which carried out armed robberies, and in 1907 was involved in a plot to assassinate the Governor General of Kiev, Vladimir Sukhomlinov[1], but broke with anarchism that same year and began to study Marxism, particularly the writings of Georgi Plekhanov and Vladimir Lenin. From 1907, he studied at the Faculty of Economics of St Petersburg University, until he was expelled in 1910 for taking part in student disturbances, and deported back to Kyiv. There, he joined the Bolshevik wing of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. Arrested in June 1912, he was arrested several times, and spent a year and a half exiled to Siberia with his partner, Yevgenia Bosch, in the village of Usolye, Irkutsk.

In October 1914, he escaped from exile through Japan and the USA to Switzerland, where they joined the émigré revolutionary community. From 1915, together with Vladimir Lenin, he edited the journal Kommunist. Disagreements arose between Lenin and Pyatakov over the right of national self-determination, where Pyatakov advocated for the abolition of nations. This led to Pyatakov resigning from the editorial office of the Kommunist magazine and leaving for Stockholm. Lenin wrote to Inessa Armand about Pyatakov and Bosch.

In 1916, Pyatokov was expelled from Sweden and moved to Oslo, Norway (then called Kristiania) with Bosch.

Pyatakov and Bosch remained together until she committed suicide by self-inflicted gunshot in January 1925, after hearing that Trotsky had been forced to resign as leader of the Red Army, as well as in pain from her heart condition and tuberculosis.

After the February Revolution, Pyatakov returned to Russia from Norway where he was arrested at the border for his false passport, escorted to Petrograd, then to Kyiv[1]. He lived in Ukraine from March 1917, becoming a member, then in April, chairman, of the Kyiv Committee of the RSDLP. He was elected a vowel of the Kyiv City Duma on 5 August 1917.

During the party conference in Petrograd, in May 1917 - at a time when there movement gaining support in Finland for independence from Russia - Joseph Stalin put forward a motion in favour of self-determination of small nations, which Pyatakov opposed. He declared that the party had to end the idea of self-identification of every nation, and stood for anti-chauvinistic international principles.[2][3], and proposed that the party adopt the slogan "down with frontiers", which Lenin dismissed as "hopelessly muddled" and a "mess".[4]

but opposed the Ukrainian nationalists and stood for transfer of power to the All-Ukrainian Congress of Soviets of Workers', Soldiers' and Peasants' Deputies. Pyatakov also headed the Kyiv Military Revolutionary Committee,

After the October Revolution, in November 1917, Pyatakov was called to Petrograd, by Lenin, to take over the state bank, whose staff were release funds for the new government.

In January 1918, Pyatakov was one of the leaders of the Left Communists, who opposed Lenin's decision to end the war with Germany through the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. In protest, he resigned his post at the state bank and returned to Ukraine, intending to organise partisan war against the advancing German army[1]. At the founding congress of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Ukraine, in Taganrog, he maintained that Ukraine was not a signatory to the Brest-Litovsk treaty, and could therefore justifiably go to war against Germany. He and his supporters on the left, who included Bosch and Andrei Bubnov, were in control of the Ukrainian party during most of 1918, but the insurrection which they launched against the pro-German Hetman was a failure.[5]

At the First Congress of CP(b)U, Pyatakov was elected as Central Committee Secretary From November 1918, after the German army withdrew from Ukraine, to mid-January 1919, he was a head of the Provisional Worker’s and Peasant’s Government. In January 1919, he was replaced as head of the Ukrainian government by Christian Rakovsky

In March 1919, while attending the 8th Congress of the Russian Communist Party, he again unsuccessfully opposed Lenin's position on national self-determination, which he denounced as a 'bourgeois' slogan that "unites all counter-revolutionary forces."[6] His opinion on some points of the theory and tactics of the revolutionary struggle contradicted that of the party's Central Committee. He was one of Vladimir Lenin's fiercest opponents on the national problem regarding both the course to be followed towards the socialist revolution and the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the Bolsheviks' peace settlement with Germany.

He collaborated with Nikolai Bukharin to co-author the chapter on "The Economic Categories of Capitalism in the Transition Period" in The Economics of the Transformation Period, published in 1920.[7]

Pyatakov was a political commissar with the Red Army in Ukraine, during the Russian Civil War, and again during the 1920 Polish–Soviet War. From 1 January to 16 February 1920, he led the Registration Directorate, the military intelligence arm of the Red Army that went on to become GRU.

Pyatakov was placed in charge of the management of Donbas coal mining industry in 1921 and became a deputy head of the Gosplan (State Planning Committee) of the RSFSR in 1922 and deputy Chairman of the Supreme Council of the National Economy of the Soviet Union.

In October 1923, travelling under the name 'Arwid', Pyatakov was part of the Comintern sent to Germany to during the abortive attempt to bring about a communist revolution.[8]

Pyatakov supported Leon Trotsky in the power struggle that began during Lenin's terminal illness. He was a signatory of The Declaration of 46 in October 1923, and in the debate that followed he was "their most aggressive and effective spokesman" who "wherever he went easily obtained large majorities for bluntly worded resolutions."[9] He was expelled from the party in 1927 for belonging to the "Trotskyite-Zinovievite" bloc but was one of the first well-known "Trotskyists" to renounce Trotskyism and seek readmission to the party, which was granted in 1928. This prompted a scathing comment from Trotsky:

When Pyatakov belonged to the same group as I did, I prophesied in jest that in the event of a Bonapartist coup d'état, Pyatakov would go to the office the next day with his brief case. Now I can add more earnestly that if this fails to come about, it will be only through lack of a Bonapartist coup d'état, and not through any fault of Pyatakov's.[10]

He became Deputy Head of Heavy Industries. He was appointed Chairman of the Board of the Soviet State Bank in 1929 and held the position for a year.[11]

In the summer of 1936, Pyatakov was appointed as a witness by Joseph Stalin at the First Moscow Trial of Kamenev and Zinoviev.[12] However, two weeks before the trial, he was again accused of anti-party and anti-Soviet activity and in early September 1936, he was withdrawn from the Central Committee and expelled from the party. On 12 September 1936, he was arrested in his service car at the San-Donato station in Nizhny Tagil. At his trial he was accused of conspiring with Trotsky in connection with the case of a so-called Parallel anti-Soviet Party Centre to overthrow the Soviet government in collaboration with Nazi Germany, the latter being promised a reward of large tracts of Soviet territory, including Ukraine. His confessions included the claim that he had secretly met with Trotsky in Norway for those purposes. On 30 January 1937, he was sentenced to death, and executed on 1 February.

Pyatakov was posthumously rehabilitated and reinstated in the party on 13 June 1988 by the decision of the Council of People's Commissars of the Central Committee of the CPSU under Mikhail Gorbachev.[13]