Alexander Krasnoshchyokov - Arrest and Trial

Arrest and Trial

In September 1921 Krasnoshchyokov was appointed to the People's Commissariat for Finance (Narkomfin), and made a deputy commissar in December 1921, despite the opposition of many of the existing members. Lenin valued his practical expertise and energy over the Bolshevik bureaucrats who had made a mess of the budget. Typhus forced him to step down in March 1922 to the relief of the other commissars who refused to have him back when he recovered. Instead he was appointed to Presidium of Vesenkha in April 1921 and used this to create a new bank in November 1922 to promote Trade and Industry - Prombank - leaving the state bank with only regulation of money and credit, much to the annoyance of the Narkomfin. In 1922 he was interviewed by the American journalist Anna Louise Strong about the New Economic Policy (NEP) and departure from war communism:

Krasnoschekoff said: "We must say frankly to the people, `Your government cannot feed all and produce goods for all. We shall run the most necessary industries and feed the workers in those industries. The rest of you must feed yourselves in any way you can.' This means we must allow private trade and private workshops; it is well if they succeed enough to feed those people who work in them, since no one else can feed them. Later, as state industries produce a surplus, these will expand and drive out private trade."

The new bank was very successful but when Lenin had his third stroke in March 1923, Krasnoshchyokov lost his only protector and had made many enemies in the ranks of the new stalinist bureaucracy. In October 1923 his arrest was announced by Kuybyshev on charges of corruption. At the time his arrest caused a sensation and his trial was quite widely covered in the west. Alexander Krasnoshchyokov was the first well known communist supported by Lenin to be sacrificed in a public 'showtrial' . The trial was held in Moscow in March 1924 and the main charges were that he had given special privileges to his lover Donna Gruz and his brother Iacov, and had been living a bourgeois lifestyle, something common to most of the party elite. He was found guilty, sacked and expelled from the party and sentenced to six years in prison.