Russian
Russian(s) refers to anything related to Russia, including:
*Russians (, ''russkiye''), an ethnic group of the East Slavic peoples, primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries
*Rossiyane (), Russian language term for all citizens and peo ...
: Лев Семёнович Сосновский) (1 January 18863 July 1937) was a Russian revolutionary, publicist and journalist. He was a prominent
Trotskyist
Trotskyism is the political ideology and branch of Marxism developed by Ukrainian-Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky and some other members of the Left Opposition and Fourth International. Trotsky self-identified as an orthodox Marxist, a ...
and member of the
left opposition
The Left Opposition was a faction within the Russian Communist Party (b) from 1923 to 1927 headed ''de facto'' by Leon Trotsky. The Left Opposition formed as part of the power struggle within the party leadership that began with the Soviet fou ...
who was executed for his opposition to
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili; – 5 March 1953) was a Georgian revolutionary and Soviet political leader who led the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953. He held power as General Secretar ...
during the
Great Purge
The Great Purge or the Great Terror (russian: Большой террор), also known as the Year of '37 (russian: 37-й год, translit=Tridtsat sedmoi god, label=none) and the Yezhovshchina ('period of Yezhov'), was Soviet General Secret ...
.
Early life
Lev Sosnovsky was born in Orenburg, the son of a retired soldier who had served in the army for 25 years during the reign of
Tsar Nicholas I
, house = Romanov-Holstein-Gottorp
, father = Paul I of Russia
, mother = Maria Feodorovna (Sophie Dorothea of Württemberg)
, birth_date =
, birth_place = Gatchina Palace, Gatchina, Russian Empire
, death_date = ...
. During military service, his Jewish father, Semyon Sosnovsky, was beaten, and threatened with drowning unless he agreed to convert to the
Russian Orthodox Church
, native_name_lang = ru
, image = Moscow July 2011-7a.jpg
, imagewidth =
, alt =
, caption = Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow, Russia
, abbreviation = ROC
, type ...
, which he refused to do. After leaving the army, he worked as a lawyer, despite being barely literate.
Lev Sosnovsky left school early to work in a chemist's shop in Samara, where he joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party as a teenager, in 1903. He joined the
Bolshevik
The Bolsheviks (russian: Большевики́, from большинство́ ''bol'shinstvó'', 'majority'),; derived from ''bol'shinstvó'' (большинство́), "majority", literally meaning "one of the majority". also known in English ...
faction of the RSDLP after moving to Ekaterinburg in 1904. During the
1905 Revolution
The Russian Revolution of 1905,. also known as the First Russian Revolution,. occurred on 22 January 1905, and was a wave of mass political and social unrest that spread through vast areas of the Russian Empire. The mass unrest was directed again ...
, he was sent to
Zlatoust
Zlatoust ( rus, Златоуст, p=zlətɐˈust) is a city in Chelyabinsk Oblast, Russia, located on the Ay River (in the Kama basin), west of Chelyabinsk. Population: 181,000 (1971); 161,000 (1959); 99,000 (1939); 48,000 (1926); 21,000 ...
to recruit factory workers to the Bolsheviks. After the revolution was suppressed, he escaped to Odessa, and stowed away on a ship, disembarked in Algiers, and worked in a tobacco factory until he had the money to move to Paris. In 1906, he settled in
Tashkent
Tashkent (, uz, Toshkent, Тошкент/, ) (from russian: Ташкент), or Toshkent (; ), also historically known as Chach is the capital and largest city of Uzbekistan. It is the most populous city in Central Asia, with a population of 2 ...
, where he worked as a typesetter, until he was dismissed for his political activities, and arrested. After his release, he moved to Baku, where he joined the local Bolshevik organisation and worked as a labourer in the oil fields, but was sacked. He moved to Moscow, where he started working as a journalist, writing for Bolshevik newspapers, but was arrested in winter 1909, and conscripted into the Imperial Army. After two years, he bribed an army doctor to certify that he was unfit for service, and moved to St Petersburg to work for ''
Pravda
''Pravda'' ( rus, Правда, p=ˈpravdə, a=Ru-правда.ogg, "Truth") is a Russian broadsheet newspaper, and was the official newspaper of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, when it was one of the most influential papers in the ...
'' and as an organiser of the Metal Workers Union. He was arrested twice during 1913, and banished to
Chelyabinsk
Chelyabinsk ( rus, Челя́бинск, p=tɕɪˈlʲæbʲɪnsk, a=Ru-Chelyabinsk.ogg; ba, Силәбе, ''Siläbe'') is the administrative center and largest city of Chelyabinsk Oblast, Russia. It is the seventh-largest city in Russia, with a ...
. He was arrested there at the outbreak of war, in 1914, and again in 1915. After his release, he returned to Ekaterinburg.
Revolution and civil war
After the February Revolution of 1917, Sosnovsky was Assistant Chairman, and later Chairman of the Urals Regional Soviet, based in Ekaterinburg. In December, after the
Bolshevik Revolution
The October Revolution,. officially known as the Great October Socialist Revolution. in the Soviet Union, also known as the Bolshevik Revolution, was a revolution in Russia led by the Bolshevik Party of Vladimir Lenin that was a key moment ...
he moved to Petrograd/St Petersburg, and in 1918 followed the Soviet government when it transferred the capital to Moscow. He was sent back to Ekaterinburg after the Red Army had regain control of the city from the White Russian army of
Admiral Kolchak
Alexander Vasilyevich Kolchak (russian: link=no, Александр Васильевич Колчак; – 7 February 1920) was an Imperial Russian admiral, military leader and polar explorer who served in the Imperial Russian Navy and fought ...
, and was dispatched to
Kharkiv
Kharkiv ( uk, wikt:Харків, Ха́рків, ), also known as Kharkov (russian: Харькoв, ), is the second-largest List of cities in Ukraine, city and List of hromadas of Ukraine, municipality in Ukraine.General Denikin, but otherwise he worked full time as a journalist. In spring 1918, he founded the newspaper ''
Bednota
''Bednota'' (russian: Беднота, "Poverty" or "The poor") was a daily newspaper designed and focused toward a peasant readership that was issued by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in Moscow, Russia, from Mar ...
(The Poor)'', which he edited until 1924.
The Dymovka affair
During 1924, Sosnovsky was involved in recruiting village correspondents (), who were mostly communist party members based in the countryside, who invited to submit reports on village life. In March 1924, a named Grigori Malinovsky, from a village called Dymovka, in the Nikolaev (Mykolaiv) region of Ukraine, was murdered, after sending a report exposing two local officials whom he accused of bribery and intimidation. In October, Sosnovsky travelled to Nikolaev to deliver a long speech on behalf of the prosecution at the trial of six men accused of the murder, three of whom were executed. Sosnovsky interpreted the murder as part of the class struggle in the countryside between rich peasants (known as
kulak
Kulak (; russian: кула́к, r=kulák, p=kʊˈlak, a=Ru-кулак.ogg; plural: кулаки́, ''kulakí'', 'fist' or 'tight-fisted'), also kurkul () or golchomag (, plural: ), was the term which was used to describe peasants who owned ove ...
s) and the poor. In an article published in ''Pravda'' in November 1924, he warned that "Dymovka is not an exceptional phenomenon". The publicity caused the number of to swell by more than 100,000, to 115,000, in the 17 months to August 1925, but also exposed Sosnovsky to criticism from party officials who accused him of insulting party officials working in the countryside, until Stalin intervened personally in Sosnovsky's defence. In a speech to the
Orgburo
The Orgburo (russian: Оргбюро́), also known as the Organisational Bureau (russian: организационное бюро), of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union existed from 1919 to 1952, when it was a ...
, in January 1926, he pronounced that "it is to the credit of ''Pravda'', to the credit of Sosnovsky, that they had the courage to drag into the light of day a piece of real life..." An editorial in ''Pravda'' in February 1925 entitled "The Lessons of Dymovka" warned that Malinovsky's murder was a symptom of the dangers of the growth of capitalism in the countryside.
On Mayakovsky
In September 1921, Sosnovsky published a diatribe against the poet
Vladimir Mayakovsky
Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky (, ; rus, Влади́мир Влади́мирович Маяко́вский, , vlɐˈdʲimʲɪr vlɐˈdʲimʲɪrəvʲɪtɕ məjɪˈkofskʲɪj, Ru-Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky.ogg, links=y; – 14 Apr ...
, who had successfully taken up a case in the relevant trade union against Ivan Skvortsov-Stepanov, head of the state publishing house, who had refused to pay for him for a script that had been published in a magazine. The case angered Sosnovsky because Skvortsov was an old comrade “who had joined the revolutionary movement before Mayakovsky was born.” Sosnovsky claimed that there was a movement that he called ''Mayakovshchina'', full of “overgrown oafs” trying to be like the poet, warning that
A few months later, the Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin came out in defence of Mayakovsky, but in January 1925, after Lenin's death, Sosnovsky returned to the attack. At a writers’ conference, in January 1925, he accused Mayakovsky to his face of insulting Lenin, by comparing him to a general. Actually, there had been a misprint. Mayakovsky had written (), meaning a pass, or trail, but in his absence this had been mistakenly transcribed as (general).
On Yesenin
In Summer 1926, Sosnovsky launched an even fiercer attack on the poet Sergei Yesenin, who had committed suicide the previous December. Writing in ''Pravda'', he blamed the sexual references in Yesenin's work for a recent series of gang rapes by members of the communist youth league ( Komsomol), and implied that his entire output should be banned. However, during a debate on literature at the Communist Academy in February 1927, he attributed Yesenin's popularity to the dreariness of political propaganda. When the young encountered human feelings in Yesenin's poetry, it was like “escaping from a cellar that reeks of rotten cabbage into the fresh air.”
Left Opposition
Sosnovsky was one of the signatories of
The Declaration of 46
The Declaration of 46 was a secret letter sent by a group of 46 leading Soviet communists to the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party on 15 October 1923. The declaration followed Leon Trotsky's letter sent to the Polit ...
, and supported
Leon Trotsky
Lev Davidovich Bronstein. ( – 21 August 1940), better known as Leon Trotsky; uk, link= no, Лев Давидович Троцький; also transliterated ''Lyev'', ''Trotski'', ''Trotskij'', ''Trockij'' and ''Trotzky''. (), was a Russian ...
in the power struggle that followed the death of
Lenin
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov. ( 1870 – 21 January 1924), better known as Vladimir Lenin,. was a Russian revolutionary, politician, and political theorist. He served as the first and founding head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 to 1 ...
, despite their differences on cultural issues. (Trotsky defended Mayakovsky and Yesenin). Sosnovsky's opposition to the party leadership was based on economic: he believed that the communist party needed to act against the growing influence of kulaks, whom he accused of exploiting and intimidating poorer peasants. He was dismissed form the editorship of ''Bednota'' in 1924, but was allowed to continue working as a journalist on ''Pravda''. He was one of "75 active leaders of the Trotskyist Opposition" expelled from the communist party during its 15th Congress, in December 1927.
After his expulsion, Sosnovsky was made to leave Moscow and take up a post in
Barnaul
Barnaul ( rus, Барнау́л, p=bərnɐˈul) is the largest city and administrative centre of Altai Krai, Russia, located at the confluence of the Barnaulka and Ob Rivers in the West Siberian Plain. As of the 2021 Census, its population was ...
. In exile, he was one of the last Trotskyists to capitulate and ask to be reinstated in the party. When the group led by Grigory Zinoviev surrendered, he wrote a scathing letter to Illarion Vardin, one of Zinoviev's supporters, citing what he said was a Jewish funeral custom:
In the latter part of 1928, when Stalin turned party policy sharply to the left, initiating a campaign against the kulaks, with Trotsky sent into enforced exile in Turkey, Sosnovsky was the leading voice among the remaining left oppositionists arguing that this was a "temporary manoeuvre" by Stalin, not a genuine turn to the left. He studied local conditions in Barnaul, where he calculated that just eight per cent of peasants were wealthy enough to own a threshing machine, which made the majority utterly dependent on them because
In May 1929, four letters that he had written in exile were published abroad in Trotsky's ''Bulletin of the Opposition''. The OGPU appear to have known about these letters being smuggled abroad, because Sosnovsky was arrested in Barnaul on 29 April 1929, and in May he was sentenced to three years in prison, and transferred to an "isolator" in
Chelyabinsk
Chelyabinsk ( rus, Челя́бинск, p=tɕɪˈlʲæbʲɪnsk, a=Ru-Chelyabinsk.ogg; ba, Силәбе, ''Siläbe'') is the administrative center and largest city of Chelyabinsk Oblast, Russia. It is the seventh-largest city in Russia, with a ...
. By the end of 1929, after most of the leading Trotskyists, including
Yevgeni Preobrazhensky
Yevgeni Alekseyevich Preobrazhensky ( rus, Евге́ний Алексе́евич Преображе́нский, p=jɪvˈɡʲenʲɪj ɐlʲɪˈksʲejɪvʲɪt͡ɕ prʲɪəbrɐˈʐɛnskʲɪj; 1886–1937) was a Russian revolutionary, Soviet economi ...
and Karl Radek, had capitulated to Stain, Sosnovsky was, after Christian Rakovsky, the best known oppositionist still holding out in exile. In January 1930, the ''Bulletin of the Opposition'' reported that Sosnovsky was editing a magazine ''Pravda Behind Bars'' produced by imprisoned Trotskyists. Sosnovsky was then transferred to an "isolator" in
Tomsk
Tomsk ( rus, Томск, p=tomsk, sty, Түң-тора) is a city and the administrative center of Tomsk Oblast in Russia, located on the Tom River. Population:
Founded in 1604, Tomsk is one of the oldest cities in Siberia. The city is a n ...
In April 1932, he was sentenced to a further two years in prison.
Final years
In 1934, following Rakovsky's capitulation, Sosnovsky decided that the completion of the First Five-year plan and the worsening international situation no longer justified his opposition to Stalin. He was permitted to work as a journalist, and in 1935, his membership of the communist party was restored. But he was arrested again on 23 October 1936, sentenced to death in a secret trial on 3 July 1937, and shot the same day.
Family
Sosnovsky married a fellow Bolshevik, Olga Danilova Gerzhevan. She was arrested in August 1937, sent to a labour camp in Mordvinia, then brought back to Moscow in 1938, accused of being a member of a terrorist group of wives of "enemies of the people", tortured and forced to confess. She retracted her confession, but was nevertheless sentenced to death on 6 July 1941, and executed on 28 July.
Their older son, Vladimir Lvovich (1920-1994) was expelled from school and evicted from the family apartment when his mother was arrested. He worked as a labourer in several towns before being called up for military service in 1941, then soon afterwards sentenced to ten years in labour camps. In 1944, he received another ten year sentence. He was released in December 1953, and reunited with his younger brother, Andrei, who had also survived a long prison term. In 1990, Vladimir Sosnovsky was one of the founders of the Memorial Society, set up to create a record of the repression.