Varvara Yakovleva | |
|---|---|
Варвара Яковлева | |
 | |
| People's Commissar for Finance of the RSFSR | |
| In office January 1930 – September 1937 | |
| Premier | Sergei Syrtsov(until 1930) Daniil Sulimov(until 1937) Nikolai Bulganin |
| Preceded by | Nikolay Milyutin |
| Succeeded by | Nikolai Sokolov[1] |
| Personal details | |
| Born | (1884-12-19)19 December 1884 (N.S.) |
| Died | 11 September 1941(1941-09-11) (aged 56) |
| Party | RSDLP (Bolsheviks)(1904–1918) All-Union Communist Party (bolsheviks) (1918–1937) |
| Spouse | |
| Relations | Nikolai Yakovlev, brother |
| Children | 2 |
Varvara Nikolaevna Yakovleva (Russian:Варвара Николаевна Яковлева; 19 December [O.S. 7 December] 1884 – 11 September 1941) was a Russian revolutionary, prominentBolshevik party member,Cheka officer, andSoviet government official, who supportedLeon Trotsky's attempt to democratize the party in the mid 1920s. She was sentenced to 20 years in prison in 1938 for membership in a "diversionary terrorist organization." She was later shot in theMedvedev Forest massacre inOryol in 1941.
Yakovleva was born in December 1884 inMoscow to the middle-class family of a tradesman of Jewish descent. Her father was a convert toOrthodox Christianity.[2][3] Yakovleva joined theRussian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) in January 1904, at age 19, when she was a student at a women's college in Moscow, where she was studying mathematics and physics, and was immediately involved in the illegal distribution of party literature.[4] She quickly joined theBolshevik faction of the RSDLP due to agreeing withVladimir Lenin's more strict definition of party membership, and her strong belief that the Russianbourgeoisie should have no role in the bourgeois-democratic revolutionary tasks in Russia.[4]
During theRussian Revolution of 1905, she was violently assaulted on the breasts, which damaged her health for many years, and was a cause of thetuberculosis that she later contracted in exile in Siberia.[5] She was first arrested in 1906, and again in 1907, and barred from living in Moscow. Arrested again in December 1910, she was sentenced to four years exile inNarym, in Siberia, but escaped, and emigrated to Berlin to get medical treatment for her tuberculosis, which at the time largely consisted of much bed rest, fresh air and nutrition.[6][7] After recovering, at a time when only around one quarter of people with tuberculosis did so,[8] she made her way toKraków, where she met up with Lenin and made arrangements to smuggle illegal literature and correspondence across the border into Russia.[9] In October 1912, as an agent of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party in Moscow, she was arrested for the fourth time by theOkhrana. In 1913, she was sent back to Narym, but escaped again, to St. Petersburg, where she was soon arrested again and deported toAstrakhan.[4]
Yakovleva was able to return to Moscow late in 1916, and she was appointed secretary of the Moscow regional committee of the Bolshevik Party. In August 1917, she was elected as a candidate for membership in the Bolshevik Central Committee, making her the third most prominent female Bolshevik, afterAlexandra Kollontai andElena Stasova.
On 23 October 1917 (N.S.), Yakovleva took theminutes at the meeting that set the date for theOctober Revolution for 15 days later, for 7 November (N.S.).[10] In the lead up to, and during, the October Revolution, Yakovleva had a role in organizing the takeover of power in Moscow alongsideNikolai Bukharin. While the Soviet taking of power inPetrograd underVladimir Lenin,Leon Trotsky and theMilitary Revolutionary Committee was done relatively quickly, the Soviet taking of power in Moscow took over a week, with Yakovleva playing a major role in the eventual Soviet taking of power in Moscow on 15 November (N.S.). Alexandra Kollontai later stated that "Enormous work was done by Varvara Nikolaevna Yakovleva during the difficult and decisive days of the October Revolution in Moscow", and that Yakovleva "on the battleground of the barricades, showed a resolution worthy of a leader of party headquarters."[11]
In November 1917, Yakovleva was one of four Bolsheviks elected in theTula electoral district, and one of 183 Bolsheviks elected in theConstituent Assembly election overall. In January 1918, the Constituent Assembly convened for only 13 hours before it was shut down by theBolshevik Soviet leaders.
On 20 December 1917 (N.S.), Yakovleva was one of eleven people at the meeting at theSmolny Institute in Petrograd that founded theCheka.[12][13] Yakovleva was then appointed as a member of the collegium of the Cheka byFelix Dzerzhinsky, the Cheka leader. In March 1918, Yakovleva briefly became the head ofVesenkha, the biggest state institution in theRSFSR for the management of the economy, before being replaced by the moderateAlexei Rykov in April 1918.[13]
In late 1917 and early 1918, Yakovleva was one of the most prominentLeft Communists, led by Bukharin, who opposed theTreaty of Brest-Litovsk, a treaty which endedthe war betweenRussia andGermany at the cost of leaving most of Ukraine and the Baltic states under German occupation. In September 1918, Yakovleva was appointed as the deputy head of the Petrograd Cheka.[14] Yakovleva's tenure as the deputy head of the Petrograd Cheka took place during theRed Terror. The Red Terror was unleashed following an unsuccessful attempt on Lenin's life byFanny Kaplan on 30 August 1918, a day which also saw the successful assassination of the head of the Petrograd Cheka,Moisei Uritsky, byLeonid Kannegisser.[14] From January 1919, as a board member of the People's Commissariat of Food, Yakovleva led food inspections and parties that requisitioned food, her job being to make sure thatgrain was not destroyed byKulaks and was used to feedRed Army soldiers during theRussian Civil War. She was known for her severity in this matter.[15]
From December 1920 to March 1921, including at the10th Congress, Yakovleva again backed Bukharin against Lenin during a dispute over the role of the trade unions.[4][15] Lenin, throughout thetrade union debate and also in his speech at the 10th Congress, criticized Bukharin's group for making "theoretical mistakes" and for trying to act as a "buffer".[16]
From December 1920 to April 1921, Yakovleva was secretary of the Moscow party organisation. From April to August 1921, she was secretary of the Siberian party organisation. In February 1922, after the Cheka was dissolved and replaced by theGPU, Yakovleva was appointed as Vice Commissar in the RSFSR People's Commissariat for Education.[1][4]
As Bukharin slowly moved rightwards inside the Bolshevik Party from 1921 onwards, Yakovleva stayed firmly on the left. In October 1923, Yakovleva signedThe Declaration of 46, becoming the most prominent female member of theLeon Trotsky ledLeft Opposition. In early 1926, the Left Opposition formed an alliance with the New Opposition group led byGrigory Zinoviev andLev Kamenev, to form theUnited Opposition. In October 1927, Yakovleva ended her support for the United Opposition under growing pressure from theJoseph Stalin led government. In December 1927, the United Opposition was suppressed and banned from theCommunist Party after the15th Congress. In December 1929, Yakovleva was appointedRSFSR People's Commissar for Finance, a job in the government that she maintained right up until her September 1937 arrest during theGreat Purge.[1][4]
Yakovleva's younger brother, Nikolai Yakovlev (1886–1918), also joined the Bolsheviks in 1904–05, and is reputed to have been arrested 12 times over a decade. In 1914–16, he was in exile in Narym.[17] According toLenin's widow, he was a "staunch and reliable Bolshevik".[18] In 1916, he was conscripted into the Imperial Army, and stationed inTomsk, where he was elected Chairman of the Tomsk Soviet after theFebruary Revolution. In mid 1917, he was appointed as the main Bolshevik leader in the wider Siberian Soviet, and later in the year, following the October Revolution, he became the chairman of the Central Executive of the Siberian Soviet. Yakovlev was forced into hiding whenWhite forces advanced in Siberia during the autumn of 1918, during theRussian Civil War. In November 1918, White forces in Siberia, led byAlexander Kolchak, seized control of Siberia through aBritish sponsoredcoup d'état. That same month, Nikolai Yakovlev was one of a group of Bolsheviks who was captured by White guards and executed on the spot. He was 32 years old.
Yakovleva's first husband wasPavel Shternberg, whom she converted to Bolshevism. Shternberg died in 1920. They had a daughter, Irina Pavlovna Yakovleva (1915–1987).
In 1921, Varvara Yakovleva marriedIvan Smirnov, but this marriage disintegrated after she broke with the Left Opposition in October 1927. After the United Opposition was banned from the Communist Party following the15th Congress, Smirnov was sentenced to three years of internal exile on 31 December 1927.[19] While Smirnov initially stuck by the Left Opposition despite the wrecking of his marriage and the risingStalinist pressure, Smirnov later formally capitulated in October 1929 by "renouncingTrotskyism" and "admitting his mistakes", two things which Yakovleva never did, despite her leaving the Left Opposition two years earlier. At the time of Smirnov's capitulation in October 1929, the policies of the Stalin government now appeared closer to what the Left Opposition had been advocating before their suppression in December 1927, especially with Stalin's implementation of thefirst five-year plan. The first five-year plan, and the Soviet government'sultra-left turn at the time, also played a big role in left communist Yakovleva being appointed to a government job in December 1929 as the RSFSR People's Commissar for Finance.[1]
In May 1930, Smirnov was reinstated in the Communist Party. Smirnov was later arrested by theOGPU in January 1933,[20] and was accused of forming an "anti-party group" that was plotting to remove Stalin from power, resulting in Smirnov being sentenced to five years in a prison labour camp in April 1933. Smirnov refused to do any more capitulations to Stalin, and he was later caught up in theGreat Purge, being executed in August 1936 following his conviction in theFirst Moscow Trial. Yakovleva's daughter with Smirnov, Vladlena Ivanovna Smirnova (1922–1989), fled Moscow after her mother's arrest in September 1937, in order to avoid being placed in an orphanage, and she later worked as a teacher in Siberia. Vladlena later married Dmitri Zolnikov, a lecturer atNovosibirsk State University. Their daughter, Natalya Zolnikova (1949–2018), was one of the foremost historians of the Russian Orthodox Church.[21]
Yakovleva was arrested by theNKVD on 12 September 1937 and taken into custody, where she was charged with sabotage and terrorism against theSoviet Union, and of membership in a "Trotskyite-fascist diversionary terrorist organization", with interrogators bringing up thebisexual Yakovleva's pastsame-sex relationships as "evidence" of her "Trotskyite-fascist tendencies".[4][22] She was also expelled from theCommunist Party.[4] During theThird Moscow Trial in March 1938, she appeared as a witness, to testify that in 1918, Bukharin and her other fellow Left Communist comrades of the time had plotted to arrest and possibly assassinate Lenin,Stalin andYakov Sverdlov. Bukharin, who was on trial, accused her of talking "patent nonsense".[23] According to the historian Roy Medvedev, Yakovleva's 'evidence' was "a fraudulent deposition written for her by the investigators." Afterwards, Yakovleva asked her cellmates to spread the word - if they survived - that her deposition was lies that she had been forced to sign after torture.[24]
At a secret trial on 14 May 1938, Yakovleva was convicted of sabotage, terrorism and membership in a "Trotskyite-fascist diversionary terrorist organization", and was sentenced to 20 years in prison. She was held in solitary confinement atOryol Prison, where she was executed on 11 September 1941 in theMedvedev Forest massacre, together with 156 other inmates. The Medvedev Forest massacre came less than three months after theGerman invasion of the Soviet Union, and 26 days beforeNazi troops invadedOryol.[4] The order to kill her was signed by Stalin.[25] (Several Soviet sources falsely gave the date of her death as 21 December 1944).[15]
She was posthumously rehabilitated in 1958.[15]
| People's Commissars for Finance (1917–1946) |  | |
|---|---|---|
| Ministers of Finance (1946–1991) | ||
| International | |
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| National | |
| People | |
