Elena Stasova | |
|---|---|
Елена Стасова | |
 Stasova in the 1920s | |
| Chairwoman of theSecretariat of theRussian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) | |
| In office March 1919 – December 1919 | |
| Preceded by | Yakov Sverdlov |
| Succeeded by | Nikolay Krestinsky (as Responsible Secretary) |
| Technical Secretary of theCentral Committee of theRussian Social Democratic Labour Party (Bolsheviks) | |
| In office April 1917 – 1918 | |
| Preceded by | Position established |
| Succeeded by | Yakov Sverdlov (as Chairman) |
| Full member of the7thPolitburo | |
| In office 11 March – 25 March 1919 | |
| Candidate member of the8thPolitburo | |
| In office 13 April – 26 September 1919 | |
| Member of the6th,7th,8thSecretariat | |
| In office 6 August 1917 – 5 April 1920 | |
| Personal details | |
| Born | 15 October [O.S. 3 October] 1873 Saint Petersburg,Russian Empire |
| Died | 31 December 1966(1966-12-31) (aged 93) Moscow,Russian SFSR,Soviet Union |
| Resting place | Kremlin Wall Necropolis, Moscow |
| Nationality |
|
| Political party | RSDLP (1898–1903) RSDLP (Bolsheviks)(1903–1918) Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) (1918–1946) |
Elena Dmitriyevna Stasova[a] (Russian:Елена Дмитриевна Стасова; 15 October [O.S. 3 October] 1873 – 31 December 1966) was a RussianSoviet revolutionary,Old Bolshevik and an early leader of the organisation that would go on to become theCommunist Party of the Soviet Union.
Stasova was born to aneminent aristocratic family inSaint Petersburg. She worked as a teacher during her youth and came to embrace revolutionary politics. In 1898, she joined theRussian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) at the time of its establishment. Following the RSDLP ideological split in 1903, Stasova joinedVladimir Lenin'sBolshevik faction. She continued her revolutionary activities in Russia, Switzerland and Finland despite frequent threats of imprisonment and deportation. In 1913, she was exiled toSiberia, but returned to Saint Petersburg shortly before theFebruary Revolution. She was named secretary and alternate member of theCentral Committee, but by 1920 she had been fully frozen out of Soviet power. Afterwards, Stasova was aComintern representative to Germany until 1927, when she returned to Russia and took on a leadership position in theInternational Red Aid (MOPR). From 1938 to 1946, she found work as an editor of the magazineInternational Literature. Stasova died in 1966 at the age of 93.
Elena Stasova was born inSaint Petersburg in 1873, the youngest of five children, in an eminentnoble family. Her father was the state attorneyDmitry Stasov, while her aunt was the feminist activistNadezhda Stasova.[1][2] She was educated at home until the age of 13, and then at the prestigious Tagantsev private school for girls. Stasova described her political awakening as being tied to a realization that other people "made it possible for us, the intelligentsia, to live the way we did."[3] At the age of about 20 she began teaching in evening classes and Sunday schools inLigovo, which brought her into contact with female political activists such asNadezhda Krupskaya, future wife ofVladimir Lenin. She joined theRussian Social Democratic Workers Party (RSDLP) at the time of its establishment in 1898, her main contribution being to use her parents' house to store illegal socialist literature.[1]
Her grandfather, Vasili Stasov, had been architect toEmperors of all the RussiasAlexander I andNicholas I.[4] Her uncle was art criticVladimir Stasov. Her father, Dmitry (1828–1918), was the most eminent liberal Russian lawyer of his generation. As a young man, he had a promising career working for the Senate, and aHerald at thecoronation ofAlexander II – but was barred for life from government service after he was arrested during a student demonstration. He set up in private practice, and was defence counsel in numerous political trials, including the trial ofDmitry Karakozov, the first of the revolutionaries to attempt to assassinate Alexander II, theTrial of the 50, which was the first political trial to be held in public in Russia, and at Russia's largest political trial, theTrial of the 193. He was arrested in 1880, by order of the Tsar, and banished from St Petersburg for a time. Later, he was President of the Russian Council of Lawyers. A keen pianist, he also co-founded theSt Petersburg Conservatory withAnton Rubinstein.[1] Elena's aunt was the feministNadezhda Stasova, and her older sister was the writerVarvara Komarova-Stasova.[5]
When the RSDLP split intoBolshevik andMenshevik factions in 1903, Stasova cast her lot withLenin and the Bolsheviks as aprofessional revolutionary. Over the next two years Stasova adopted the pseudonyms "Absolute" and "Thick".[6] Other pseudonyms which Stasova used during the underground period included "Delta", "Heron", "Knol", and "Varvara Ivanovna".[7] She served as the conduit for Lenin's newspaper,Iskra, in St. Petersburg, until her arrest in January 1904, which forced her to leave the capital and hide inMinsk. For the rest of that year she traveled to several cities, acting as a specialist in "technical matters", such as creating false passports, organising escape routes, and making contact with sympathisers in the Russian army.[1] She also taught new members how to encode and decode.[8] In spring 1904, Stasova was appointed secretary of the Northern Bureau of the Bolshevik Central Committee. In June, she was assigned to take over the Southern Bureau, based in Odessa, but was arrested and held inTaganka Prison for six months.[1] She was released on bail in December 1904, and returned to St Petersburg, where she took over as secretary of the city Bolshevik organisation, and later as secretary of the Central Committee.
Stasova emigrated toGeneva, Switzerland in August 1905, to run the Bolshevik organisation abroad while Lenin was in Russia for theRussian Revolution of 1905. She returned to St Petersburg in January 1906 and then moved to Finland to organise arms smuggling, and to assist in organising the Congress in Stockholm that was supposed to unify the Bolshevik and Menshevik factions of the RSDLP. Arrested in July 1906, after her return to St Petersburg, she was banned for the second time from living in the capital. In 1907, she settled inTiflis (nowTbilisi), the capital of Georgia.
In January 1912, Stasova was elected as an alternate member of the Bolshevik party's Central Committee. She was then secretary to the party's Russian bureau.[9] Arrested on her return to Tiflis, in May 1912, she was tried in May 1913, withSuren Spandaryan and others, and sentenced to deportation to Siberia. She was allowed to return to St Petersburg in autumn 1916, and was arrested there and held in a police station overnight in February 1917, but released in the morning because of the outbreak of theFebruary Revolution.[1]
After theFebruary Revolution of 1917, Stasova became the Technical Secretary of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik party — a position which she retained through theOctober Revolution, finally standing down in March 1920.[8] She was also appointed an alternate member of theBolshevik Central Committee by the6th Congress of the Russian Communist Party in 1917, and became the only woman elected to full membership of the Central Committee by the7th Congress of 1918 and the8th Congress of 1919. However, the9th Congress of 1920 dropped her both from the Central Committee and from the party secretariat.[8]
After being removed from the Central Committee, Stasova worked for thePetrograd party organization, from where she was brought into theComintern's apparatus. She was appointed Comintern representative to theCommunist Party of Germany (KPD) in May 1921. She used the pseudonym "Hertha"[8] and remained in Germany through 1926, where she played a leading role in the German affiliate of theInternational Red Aid (MOPR) organization,die Rote Hilfe.[8]
Stasova returned to the USSR in February 1926.[8] The next year she was named deputy director head of the international MOPR as well as head of the Central Committee of the MOPR organization in the USSR, positions which she retained through 1937.[10]
Stasova served as a member of the Central Control Commission of the Russian Communist Party from 1930 to 1934, and in 1935 the7th World Congress of the Comintern named her a member of the International Control Commission.[8]
Unlike so many other "Old Bolsheviks", Stasova was not arrested during the spy mania and secret-police terror which swept the Soviet Union in the late 1930s, although in November 1937,Joseph Stalin told the head of Comintern,Georgi Dimitrov that Stasova was "scum" and "probably" would be arrested. She was dismissed from her post on MOPR five days later, on 16 November 1937.[11] Unusually, she retained her place on the International Control Commission until the Comintern was abolished in 1943,[12] and in 1938 was re-employed as an editor of the magazineInternational Literature. Stasova continued in this role until 1946, when she retired.[8]
In 1948, she received a "severe reprimand" for saying in a public lecture that "Lenin treated all comrades equally and even called Bukharin 'Bukharchik'" — ten years earlier Bukharin had confessed to being a traitor. She wrote later that the words "slipped out" and that it was "a grave political mistake" on her part.[13]
After Stalin's death, Elena Stasova was the last surviving Old Bolshevik who had served on the Central Committee during the 1917 revolution. She made very few public appearances after retiring, but in 1961, she was one of four Old Bolsheviks who signed an appeal to the22nd Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union for the posthumous rehabilitation ofNikolai Bukharin.[14]
A boarding school for foreigners inIvanovo, Russia called the Ivanovo International Boarding School ("Interdom"), established by MOPR in 1933, was named after Elena Stasova.
Stasova died on 31 December 1966 at Moscow and was placed in an urn in theKremlin Wall Necropolis.[citation needed]
