Leonid Krasin
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Leonid Borisovich Krasin (Russian: Леонид Борисович Красин; 1870 – November 24, 1926) was a Russian and Soviet Bolshevik politician and diplomat.
[edit] Biography
Krasin joined the Social Democratic Labor Party during the 1890s. He graduated Kharkov Technological Institute in 1901.
M. Krassin contemplates the Commons.
Cartoon from Punch (August 18, 1920), on the occasion of Krasin visiting Parliament to listen to a Lloyd George speech on the future of Poland
In the 1903 split into Mensheviks and Bolsheviks, Krasin supported the latter, being elected to the Central Committee the same year. In 1908, he left Russia and withdrew from political activities for many years, but after the February Revolution of 1917, he returned and rejoined the Bolsheviks. In the Russian Bolshevik government, Krasin was People's Commissar of foreign trade between 1920 and 1924.
In 1924, he was elected to the Communist Party's Central Committee, an office he held until his death in London, due to a blood disease — at the time, Krasin was negotiating a formal recognition of the Bolshevik government by the United Kingdom and France. The remedies proposed by his old friend, the physician Alexander Bogdanov, could not save him.
He left an English wife and three daughters. Krasin's funeral procession three days later included 6,000 mourners, many of them Bolshevik sympathizers; he was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium before being buried at the Kremlin in Moscow.
His London position was filled by Christian Rakovsky. Two famous icebreakers memorialize Krasin's name.
