Grigori Sokolnikov

Grigori Yakovlovich Sokolnikov (1888-1939) was a Russian old Bolshevik revolutionary, economist, and Soviet politician.

Biography

Grigori Sokolnikov was born Girsh Yankelovich Brilliant to a Jewish railway doctor in present-day Poltava Oblast on 15 August [O.S. 3 August] 1888. He moved to Moscow as a teenager and joined the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1905. He served time in prison and studied economics whilst at the Sorbonne.

He returned to Russia in April 1917 along with Vladimir Lenin in the 'sealed train', and on arriving in Russia became part of the editorial board of the Bolshevik's central party organ.^[1]

After the October Revolution, he held various government positions. He was a member of the delegation for peace negotiations with Germany (he replaced Leon Trotsky as chairman, and signed the Brest-Litovsk treaty in 1918), and alongside Rosalia Zemlyachka became commissar of the Eighth army, using this position to order mass shootings during the Russian Civil War.^[2] He was appointed People's Commissar of Finance following the introduction of the New Economic Policy and became a candidate member of the Politburo of the Communist Party in May 1924. According to Boris Bajanov, as minister of finance Sokolnikov proved himself to be a capable administrator, accomplishing every task he was asked to do such as creating the first stable Soviet currency. Bajanov also notes that despite Sokolnikov's past in the Red Army, he was not ruthless in his personality. Privately, Sokolnikov lost faith in Marxism and later described the Soviet economy as "state capitalist"^[3]. He was removed from his position in the Sovnarkom (Council of People's Commissars) and demoted from the Politburo after calling for Joseph Stalin's removal as General Secretary of the Communist Party at the Fourteenth Congress of the Bolsheviks in December 1925. He was the Soviet ambassador to England from 1929-32.

During the Great Purge (1936-38), in 1937 Sokolnikov was arrested and tried at the Trial of Parallel Anti-Soviet Trotskyist Centre and sentenced to ten years of imprisonment. Reportedly, he was killed in a prison by other convicts on May 21, 1939. A post-Stalin investigation during the Khrushchev Thaw revealed that the murder was orchestrated by the NKVD. In 1988, during perestroika, he was rehabilitated along with many other victims of the Great Purge.

References

• Soviet Policy in Public Finance, 1917–1928, by Gregory Y. Sokolnikov & Associates; translated by Elena Varneck, edited by Lincoln Hutchinson & Carl C. Plehn. Stanford University Press. 1931.

External links

• Grigory Sokolnikov Archive, part of Marxists Internet Archive.
• Grigorii Yakovlevich Sokolnikov and the development of the Soviet state, 1921–1929