Christian Rakovsky - Legacy and Rehabilitation

Legacy and Rehabilitation

Rakovsky's second wife, Alexandrina Alexandrescu, was herself arrested, and is known to have been held in Butyrka prison, where she suffered a series of heart attacks. His adoptive daughter, Elena Codreanu-Racovski, was expelled from her job as secretary of the Mossoviet Theater, and deported to Siberia. She returned to Moscow in the 1950s, after Stalin's death, and settled in Communist Romania after 1975, rejoining her brother, the biologist and academic Radu Codreanu. She later authored a memoir which included recollections of her father (it was published in Romanian as De-a lungul şi de-a latul secolului, "The Length and Breadth of the Century"). It was compiled from personal notes and dialogs with physician and former communist militant G. Brătescu, who noted that, probably owing to suspicions she had in respect to the Romanian communist regime, Elena Codreanu refused to talk about Rakovsky's trial and her own persecution. Rakovsky's nephew Boris Stefanov, whom he encouraged to join the Romanian socialist movement before World War I, later became a general secretary of the Romanian Communist Party, before being himself purged in 1940.

By 1932, Rakovsky's name was frequently invoked in the heated debate involving Panait Istrati and his political adversaries. Istrati, having returned to Romania in disillusion over Soviet realities, was initially attacked in the local far right newspapers Curentul and Universul; writing for the former, Pamfil Şeicaru defined Istrati as "the servant of Racovski". Having published To the Other Flame, in which he exposed Stalinism, he consequently became the target of intense criticism and allegations from various pro-Soviet writers, led by the Frenchman Henri Barbusse. During this period, the Romanian communist writer Alexandru Sahia speculated, among other things, that Istrati had been in the pay of Rakovsky and Trotsky for a sizable part of his life.

Based on his independent opinions and, in part, on his friendship with Rakovsky, Marcel Pauker was disavowed by the Romanian and Soviet communist parties, and was himself a victim of the Great Purge in 1938. At various intervals between 1930 and 1952, his wife, the Romanian communist leader Ana Pauker, faced pressures to denounce her husband. She initially refused to criticize him for anything other than his association with Rakovsky, and never admitted that Marcel Pauker had been guilty of all the charges brought against him.

The influential Hungarian-born author Arthur Koestler, himself a former communist, based Rubashov, the main character in his 1940 novel Darkness at Noon, on victims of the Moscow Trials; according to George Orwell, Rakovsky's fate was a possible direct influence: "Rubashov might be called Trotsky, Bukharin, Rakovsky or some other relatively civilised figure among the Old Bolsheviks. If one writes about the Moscow trials one must answer the question, «Why did the accused confess?» and which answer one makes is a political decision. Koestler answers, in effect, «Because these people had been rotted by the Revolution which they served», and in doing so he comes near to claiming that revolutions are of their nature bad".

In 1988, during Glasnost, the Soviet government cleared Rakovsky and his co-defendants of all charges. His rehabilitation came in February, coinciding with that of Bukharin, as well as with those of Ukrainian official and former People's Commissar for Agriculture Mikhail Alexandrovich Chernov, former People's Commissar for Foreign Trade Arkady Rozengolts, and other five officials. Bukharin, Rakovsky, Rozengolts, and Chernov were posthumously reinstated to the Communist Party on June 21, 1988. His works were given imprimatur, while a favorable biography was published by the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences (late 1988).