Boris Souvarine
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Boris Souvarine is the commonly used pseudonym of Boris Konstantinovič Lifšic, a Russian-born French political activist and journalist.
He was born in Kiev in the Ukraine, in 1895; his family moved to Paris around 1900, where he died in 1984. He was a socialist activist from a young age. He joined the Section Française de l'Internationale Ouvrière (SFIO) shortly before World War I. Although initially he supported a national defence position in the war (for which he was criticised by Lenin, he became an opponent of the war. At the time of the Russian revolution of 1917, he became a Bolshevik and one of the French activists of the Third International (Comintern). He was a founder member and leading spokesmen for the Parti Communiste Français (PCF) and its representative in the Executive Committee of the Comintern. However, he was expelled of the Communist Party in 1924 because of his opposition to Stalin. He then created the Democratic Communist Circle (Cercle Communiste Démocratique). After the war he evolved towards a centrist socialist position.
He was involved in a variety of organisations and journals of the anti-Stalinist left in France, publishing frequently on the Soviet Union, Stalin and Stalinism. He later came to see Lenin as a precursor of Stalinism - in contrast to the Trotskyist position that Stalinism was a betrayal of Lenin's principles. His criticisms of Stalinism were important sources for some less orthodox Trotskyists, such as C.L.R. James.
