Christian Rakovsky - Biography - Persecution and Internal Exile

Persecution and Internal Exile

In December, Rakovsky and Lev Kamenev held brief speeches in front of the Soviet Communist Party's Fifteenth Congress. The former was interrupted fifty-seven times by his opponents—Nikolai Bukharin, Martemyan Ryutin, and Lazar Kaganovich. Although, unlike Rakovsky, he used the occasion to appeal for reconciliation, Kamenev was himself interrupted twenty-four times by the same group.

After that moment, although branded "enemy of the people", Rakovsky was still occasionally allowed to speak in public (notably, together with Kamenev and Karl Radek, to the Moscow Komsomol), and continued to criticize Stalin's leadership as "bureaucratic socialism" (see Bureaucratic collectivism) and "social fascism". With Nikolai Krestinsky (who split with the group soon afterwards) and Kamenev, he attempted to organize a substantial opposition, visiting Ukraine for this purpose, hosting public meetings and printing manifestos addressed to the workers in Kiev, Kharkiv, Mykolaiv, Odessa, Dnipropetrovsk, Kherson, and Zaporizhia (he was assisted by, among others, Yuri Kotsubinsky). He was persistently heckled during public appearances, and his supporters were beaten up by the Militsiya.

In November 1927, after receiving news that Adolph Joffe had committed suicide, he assigned Ukrainian campaigning to Voja Vujović, and returned to Moscow. Following the defeat of the Left Opposition in November–December 1927, Rakovsky was ousted from the Comintern, the Central Committee, and eventually from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. He was exiled, first to Astrakhan, Saratov, and then to Barnaul. Shortly before the decision, he commented to his visitor, French writer Pierre Naville: "The French expelled me from Paris for having signed a declaration of the opposition. Stalin expelled me from the for having signed the same declaration. But in both cases they let me keep the jacket".

While in Astrakhan, Rakovsky was employed by the Regional Planning Committee (Gubplan). He was also active as a writer, starting work on a volume detailing the sources of Utopian socialism and the thought of Saint-Simon. Rakovsky remained involved in Trotskyist politics, was contacted by Panait Istrati and the Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis, and corresponded with Trotsky (who had himself been exiled to Almaty). Most of his writings were confiscated by the State Political Directorate, but the letter on Soviet "bureaucratism" he addressed to Nikolai Valentinov survived, and became notorious as a critique of Stalinism (under the title "Professional Dangers" of Power). Mistrusting Stalin's new leftist policies, he foresaw the renewed moves against the Left Opposition (inaugurated by Trotsky's 1929 expulsion).

As his health deteriorated, he was allowed to move to Saratov upon requests addressed by Krestinsky to Kaganovich, the Secretary of the Central Committee. He was visited by Louis Fischer, who recorded Rakovsky's determination not to submit to Stalin (contrasting his option with those of Radek, Yevgeni Preobrazhensky, Alexander Beloborodov and Ivar Smilga). Instead, Rakovsky incited further resistance to Stalinism, and issued a declaration of the united opposition; following this, he was sent to Barnaul, which he called a "hole in the barren cold ground". In another critical letter to the Party leadership (April 1930), he called for, among other things, the restoration of civil liberties, a reduction in the party apparatus, the return of Trotsky, and an end to forced collectivization.

Little is known of Rakovsky's life between that moment and July 1932, the moment when he was allowed a medical leave. Towards the end of the same year, Trotsky was informed that he had attempted to flee the Soviet Union, and, in March 1933, it was announced that he had been deported to Yakutia. Answering Trotsky's request, the French mathematician and Trotskyist Jean Van Heijenoort, together with his fellow activist Pierre Frank, unsuccessfully called on the influential Soviet author Maxim Gorky to intervene in favor of Christian Rakovsky, and boarded the ship he was traveling on near Istanbul. According to Heijenoort, they only managed to meet Gorky's son, Maxim Peshkov, who reportedly told them that his father was indisposed, but promised to pass on their request. Researcher Tova Yedlin proposed that the problem was caused by Gorky's distress over having recently separated from his mistress Moura Budberg, as well as to the writer's close surveillance by OGPU agents.