Balkan Questions

Bulgarian by birth, Rakovsky was a scion of a relatively wealthy family that in the 1860s had actively fought for Bulgarian independence against the Ottoman Empire. In these turbulent times, “the national question” and social issues shaped his thinking. His politicization led to his exclusion from Bulgarian education at the age of fifteen for leading a student protest. Henceforth, his education and his political involvement were increasingly multinational.

From 1889 onward, he was active in the social democratic movements of Bulgaria and Romania. In 1891, he departed Bulgaria for Geneva, a hotbed of left-wing political émigrés, where he joined a student socialist circle and published in the Bulgarian journal Social-Demokrat. Enrolled as a medical student, he became acquainted with Marxist luminaries such as Friedrich Engels, Georgi Plekhanov, and Rosa Luxemburg.

He was soon a prolific journalist and energetic political activist. In 1893, he organized the Second International Congress of Socialist Students and represented Bulgaria at the International Socialist Congress in Zurich. Three years later, he was a delegate to the fourth congress of the Second International held in London. This gathering was characterized by fierce disputes, notably between Vladimir Lenin and Luxemburg on the question of national self-determination.

The young Rakovsky distinguished himself as a medical student. He graduated from the University of Montpellier in 1897 with a provocative and highly regarded dissertation which argued for a socioeconomic approach to the “causes of crime and degeneration” rather than an anthropological, atavistic one. But his real calling was not medicine, which he only practiced for six months in the Romanian army, but politics — and a risky one at that.

He was forced to flee tsarist St Petersburg in 1899 to avoid arrest after speaking about the debates between the Russian populists, who saw the traditional peasant commune as a vehicle for revolution, and the Marxists, who looked to the working class, as he did. A year later, after again being deported from the Russian capital for “inflammatory” speechmaking, he journeyed to Paris to participate in the International Socialist Congress.

Once there, he linked up with the Bulgarian and Serbian social democrats and went on to represent them at the 1904 Congress of the Second International in Amsterdam. The following year he departed for Romania where he established Workers’ Romania, the newspaper of the Romanian Socialist Party. At the same time, he led a campaign in defense of sailors who had fled to Romania after famously mutinying on the battleship Potemkin during the 1905 Russian Revolution.

Resisting War

Deportation and incarceration became fixtures of Rakovsky’s curriculum vitae. The Romanian authorities declared him to be a socialist agitator and held him responsible for peasant uprisings that swept through the country, and in 1907, he was deported. It took a five-year mass campaign in his favor before he was allowed to return.

He did not waste those years in exile. He represented the Romanian socialists at congresses in Stuttgart and Copenhagen and the Bureau of the Socialist International at the first conference of Balkan socialist parties in Belgrade in 1911. He soon demonstrated his antiwar convictions, denouncing the first Balkan War (1912–13) as an “infamous and criminal . . .  war of conquest.” For Rakovsky, the only legitimate war was class war.

Rakovsky’s initial response to the outbreak of World War I was ambiguous. He did not condemn the social democrats in the belligerent countries who were voting for war credits. While he saw Serbia, France, and Belgium as under attack by Germany and Austria, he campaigned with the Romanian social democrats in favor of Romanian neutrality against two competing pro-war parties: Russophiles and Germanophiles.

However, the establishment of the Union Sacrée in France, which saw the veteran socialist Jules Guesde join the government, combined with the influence of discussions with his friend Leon Trotsky and fierce criticism from Lenin to quickly radicalize Rakovsky’s stance. He went from advocating neutrality to opposing imperialist war and began to identify with Trotsky’s position of “peace without indemnity or annexation, without victors or vanquished.”

Lenin, however, called for the “transformation of the imperialist war into a civil war.” He condemned the failure to fight for this objective as an opportunist “Kautskyist evil.” The tensions between Rakovsky and Lenin were stark at the Zimmerwald antiwar conference, held between September 5 and 8, 1915, in which Rakovsky was a key player.

Rakovsky supported the final conference manifesto drafted by Trotsky. Lenin and his Zimmerwald Left delegates finally voted for this document, seeing it as a step toward breaking with social democratic opportunism, despite their reservations about the manifesto’s lack of analysis of opportunism or of how to struggle against the war.

Zimmerwald, however, marked a real turning point for Rakovsky, who finally repudiated the Second International in favor of a new revolutionary international. He now rejected the idea of national “defensism.” He abandoned the indeterminate opposition to war that had been adopted at the Second International’s 1907 Stuttgart conference, looking instead for revolution in the belligerent states as the way to end the conflict and seeking to formulate the tactics needed to promote it.

At the February 1916 Berne conference of the Zimmerwald movement executive, Rakovsky boasted that he was “at Lenin’s side.” He categorically condemned wartime national unity, supported the goal of establishing a Third International to replace the Second, and advocated socialist revolution as a means to end the war. As a Berne newspaper put it at the time, he was the “most internationalist figure of the revolutionary European movement.”

The Russian Revolution

After returning to Romania, Rakovsky was arrested in September 1916, a month after the Romanian army joined the conflict on the side of the Entente powers. The February 1917 revolution in Imperial Russia proved to be his salvation. Rakovsky was released on May Day 1917 “in the name of the Russian Revolution” by a Russian garrison stationed in Romania.

Now aged forty-four, he immediately went to revolutionary Russia and joined Lenin’s Bolshevik Party straight after the October Revolution. In the name of the Romanian people, Rakovsky hailed “the triumph of the proletarian and peasant revolution in Russia.” For their part, the Bolsheviks saluted an illustrious new recruit, the “famous Romanian leader” and “renowned internationalist.”

The infant Soviet revolution was threatened by German forces which occupied Ukraine in the spring of 1918. Rakovsky was entrusted with the task of negotiating with Pavlo Skoropadsky, who had become hetman of Ukraine in a German-backed coup, in order to defuse possible hostilities. The German Revolution of November 1918 put an end to that immediate threat.

However, the German military detained Rakovsky in his new role as an emissary of the pan-Russian soviets to the Berlin Congress of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils. After his release, Lenin assigned Rakovsky an even more challenging role as Bolshevik leader in Ukraine, now one of the main battlegrounds of the civil war between the Red and White Armies.

In this cauldron, Rakovsky wore multiple Bolshevik hats: chair of the Ukrainian Soviet of People’s Commissars, president of its defense council, commissar of foreign affairs, and politburo member of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Ukraine (CP(b)U). Rakovsky’s multiethnic curriculum vitae, not to mention his courage, energy, and political experience, made him the right choice for the jobs he had to do.

The fledgling Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic (UkSSR), declared on March 10, 1919 in Kharkiv, was almost stillborn. The Red Army had to confront a succession of ferocious counterrevolutionary opponents, including Symon Petliura’s Ukrainian People’s Army and Anton Denikin’s White forces, as well as French and Polish interventionists. The tide of battle shifted dramatically several times, as did the politico-military alliances, until the Soviet-Polish treaty of March 1921 finally brought the fighting to an end.

Nationalism and Internationalism

Social conditions in 1919–21 were far from propitious for Rakovsky’s Ukrainian Soviet government. The conditions of a ruthless civil war, combined with the draconian Bolshevik policies of “War Communism” and agricultural requisitioning, shattered the economy and angered the populace — particularly the peasantry, who made up 80 percent of the population and were predominantly Ukrainian.

The urban centers were the bulwarks of the CP(b)U, particularly in the industrial Donbas. The population in those areas was largely ethnic Russian and Jewish, which reinforced anti-Russian and antisemitic stereotypes about the nature of Bolshevism.

Rakovsky had no truck with Ukrainian nationalism: in view of what he considered the “weakness and anaemia” of the Ukrainian proletariat, he deemed the idea of an independent Ukraine to be a dangerous concession to counterrevolution and Western imperialism. At this point, he dismissed any ethnographic distinctions between Ukrainians and Russians or concerns about the threat of Russification.

According to Rakovsky, Ukrainian nationalism was an artificial force imposed by the intelligentsia. From his perspective, the imperatives of class struggle and international socialist revolution were decisive, and he described the Ukrainian revolutionary struggle as “the decisive factor in the world revolution.”

Rakovsky’s perspective on Ukrainian nationalism shifted dramatically with the end of the civil war, the introduction of the New Economic Policy (NEP) in March 1921, and the negotiations about the formation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in 1922–23. In the course of these discussions, he confronted Joseph Stalin, who was intent on building a centralized USSR dominated by its largest republic, Russia. This ignored the fears of a dying Lenin about the return of Great Russian domination.

As head of Soviet Ukraine, Rakovsky vehemently argued for federal equality between the founding republics of the USSR (Ukraine, Russia, Belorussia, and Transcaucasia). He denounced Stalin’s “dead-handed centralism” and its “insensitivity” toward non-Russian, peasant nationalities as a threat to “Soviet power.”

The new Soviet leader ultimately defeated Rakovsky on this question: while Stalin formally accepted the principle of a Soviet federation of national equals, in reality, he went on to establish a hypercentralized USSR with Moscow at its helm. He never forgave Rakovsky, who was removed as head of the Ukrainian government in July 1923.

Rakovsky was appointed Soviet ambassador to the UK (1923–25) and subsequently to France (1925–27). As he wrote to Stalin, these postings were merely a pretext “to banish me from my work in Ukraine.” It was not to be Rakovsky’s last period in exile.

Opposing Bureaucracy

Rakovsky was increasingly concerned about the emergence of a governmental bureaucracy in the USSR that would stifle both republican national independence and Soviet democracy. Just before his removal as head of the Ukrainian government, Rakovsky warned against the rise of a “separate estate of officials who joined their fate to centralization itself.”

Rakovsky’s opposition to Stalin’s centralizing project drove him to support the Left Opposition led by Trotsky, which he publicly endorsed in August 1927. Soon afterward, the French authorities declared Rakovsky to be persona non grata on their soil and he returned to the USSR. He immediately threw himself into the Left Opposition’s campaign during the run-up to the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution and the All-Union Communist Party Congress that was due to be held in December 1927.

During this period, Rakovsky addressed factory and party meetings, especially in Ukraine, despite harassment and outright thuggery from Stalin’s regime. He was soon expelled from the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party, the Executive Committee of the Communist International, and finally from the Communist Party itself in December 1927.

In the aftermath of the Left Opposition’s defeat, Rakovsky was arrested and exiled to southern Russia and Siberia. While in exile, he elaborated on his thinking about Stalinist bureaucratization in a seminal analysis titled “The ‘Professional Dangers’ of Power,” which was published in the Left Opposition’s clandestine bulletin in 1929. As his biographer Pierre Broué observed, Rakovsky’s analysis was “the first serious attempt by the opposition to come to terms historically and theoretically with the phenomenon of bureaucratic degeneration.”

The article was a searching analysis of the degeneration and bureaucratization of the Communist Party and the Soviet state. The starting point of Rakovsky’s explanation was the passivity and depoliticization of the Soviet working class. He argued that this class was not the same social force that had taken power in October 1917. The postrevolutionary working class had not experienced the same baptism of fire that had previously unified it and driven the revolution.

War and terrible economic conditions had certainly taken their toll. However, Rakovsky believed that the primary cause was the failure of the Communist Party to educate this reconstituted working class in the spirit of Soviet socialism. He attributed that failure in turn to the bankruptcy of the party and state elites, whose privileged living conditions were far removed from those of the working class:

When a class takes power, one of its parts becomes the agent of that power. Thus arises bureaucracy. In a socialist state, where capitalist accumulation is forbidden by members of the directing party, this differentiation begins as a functional one; it later becomes a social one. . . . Certain functions formerly satisfied by the party as a whole, by the whole class, have now become the attributes of power, that is, only of a certain number of persons in the party and this class.

The result was “the intoxication of power,” Rakovsky wrote, citing the French revolutionary leader Maximilien Robespierre. As remedies for this problem, the Left Opposition should propose not only a thorough purging of the party apparatus but also the reeducation of the party membership and the broader populace.

Rakovsky modestly suggested that this was merely a preliminary analysis of the revolution’s malaise. Yet his ally Trotsky enthusiastically praised the essay and urged that it be disseminated as widely as possible. It later provided the starting point for Trotsky’s own famous anti-Stalinist tract, The Revolution Betrayed, published in 1936.

Between Fascism and Stalinism

Expulsion from the party, exile, and brutal incarceration took their toll on the Bolshevik oppositionists. Some sought to return to the party fold, especially after Stalin appeared to have taken up some of their key polices, such as accelerated industrialization, from 1928 onward. For his part, Rakovsky rejected the idea of “capitulation” based on partial concessions from Stalin to the Opposition platform, demanding the complete restoration of party, soviet, and trade union democracy.

After Trotsky’s expulsion from the Soviet Union in January 1929, Rakovsky was now regarded as the leader of the Left Opposition inside the country. Despite his isolation and deteriorating health, Rakovsky wrote several forthright declarations in 1929–30, addressing the Central Committee directly and setting out the necessary preconditions for the Opposition to reenter political life. Thoroughgoing democratization was the essence of what Rakovsky sought.

In effect, these declarations were overtures for readmission to the party, implicitly calling for an alliance with Stalin’s “centrist” faction against figures of the “Right” such as Nikolai Bukharin. This approach worried some oppositionists, including Trotsky, who covertly expressed his reservations to Rakovsky.

Nevertheless, Rakovsky’s declarations were uncompromising and blistering critiques of “the autocracy of the apparatus” and the “violent” political repression it had engaged in. One communiqué provocatively demanded the “abolition of the post of general secretary” — the position held by Stalin himself.

Rakovsky and his cosignatories denounced Stalin’s vision of “socialism in one country,” the forced march toward agricultural collectivization and industrialization, and the Great Russian bureaucratic centralism that was stifling the national republics of the USSR. They stressed the importance of restoring “party and workers’ democracy” as a way of reinvigorating the lapsed “revolutionary initiative of the masses.”

In the 1930s, these proved to be vain hopes. Stalinism was triumphant in the USSR and fascism was on the march elsewhere in Europe. Deported to Central Asia in 1932, the ailing Rakovsky lost all contact with Trotsky. News of Rakovsky being wounded in a failed escape attempt reached Trotsky at the end of that year.

Rakovsky’s Legacy

Worse was to come. On February 23, 1934, the Russian newspaper Izvestiia published the text of Rakovsky’s capitulation to the party. It alluded to the Nazi takeover in Germany a few weeks earlier as a reason to support Stalin’s leadership:

Confronted with the rise of international reaction, directed in the last analysis against the revolution of October, I consider it the duty of a Bolshevik Communist to submit completely and without hesitation to the general line of the party.

Rakovsky’s surrender came as a devastating blow to the beleaguered Left Opposition and Trotsky personally: “Rakovsky was virtually my last contact with the old revolutionary generation,” he wrote in his diary. “After his capitulation there is nobody left.” However, he did not personally condemn Rakovsky, blaming instead the extraordinary political pressures to which he had succumbed: “We can say that Stalin got Rakovsky with the help of [Adolf] Hitler.”

Four years later, in March 1938, at the height of the Stalinist terror, Rakovsky was named in the third Moscow show trial of old Bolsheviks as a member of a so-called “Trotskyite Center.” He was accused of conspiring with foreign intelligence agencies to overthrow the Soviet government. “The old fighter, broken by life,” Trotsky wrote on hearing of the accusation, “goes inescapably to meet his fate.”

And so it was, although his execution did not come until September 11, 1941. Rakovsky had confessed to concocted crimes because of “deception, blackmail, and psychological and physical violence,” in the words of a Supreme Soviet resolution from April 1988 that posthumously rehabilitated Rakovsky and readmitted him to the Communist Party.

The arc of Rakovsky’s life rose and fell with most heroic period of the international Marxist and labor movements and their defeat in the twentieth century, crushed between the fascist hammer and the Stalinist anvil. The repercussions of that defeat are still with us today, and not just in Ukraine, but worldwide.

Rakovsky’s legacy is both historical and contemporary. Forged as he was in the cauldron of the Balkan Wars and the catastrophe of World War I, his writings give us rich insights into the sensitivities of national oppression and the dangers of national chauvinism when harnessed by belligerent, rapacious imperial powers. Internationalism and participatory democracy defined Rakovsky’s socialism, manifest not only in his embrace of the October Revolution but in his unswerving determination to uphold those principles until the very end.