Leonid Krasin
| Leonid Krasin | |
|---|---|
 | |
| People's Commissar for Foreign Trade | |
| In office 6 July 1923 – 18 November 1925 | |
| Succeeded by | Alexander Tsiurupa |
| People's Commissar for Trade and Industry | |
| In office November 1918 – June 1920 | |
| People's Commissar for Transport | |
| In office March 1919 – December 1920 | |
| Personal details | |
| Born | 15 July 1870 Kurgan, Tobolsk Governorate, Russian Empire |
| Died | 24 November 1926 (aged 56) London, United Kingdom |
| Citizenship | Soviet |
| Political party | RSDLP, Communist Party of the Soviet Union |
Leonid Borisovich Krasin (Russian: Леони́д Бори́сович Кра́син; 15 July [O.S. 3 July] 1870, Kurgan — 24 November 1926) was a Russian Jewish engineer, social entrepreneur and Soviet Bolshevik politician and diplomat.
Early years
Krasin was born in Kurgan, Tobolsk Governorate in Siberia. His father, Boris Ivanovich Krasin was the local chief of police. The young Leonid was a star pupil at school and met the American explorer, George Kennan when he visited Siberia.[1] Krasin joined the Social Democratic Labor Party during the 1890s. He graduated from Kharkov Technological Institute in 1901.
In the 1903 split into Mensheviks and Bolsheviks, Krasin supported the latter, and was elected to the Central Committee the same year.
Arrested towards the end of the 1890s, he was sent to internal exile in Siberia where he worked as a draughtsman on the Trans Siberian Railway. Release from exile in 1900, he moved to Baku where the future Stalin was also active at the same time. While there Krasin used his financial contacts to help establish an illegal printing press which was the main vehicle for Lenin’s newspaper. He left Baku in 1904 to work as the chief engineer of Savva Morozov.
His activities during the 1905-06 revolution was primarily in sourcing finance for the revolutionaries, including organizing bank robberies to fund the Bolsheviks' revolutionary activities. Krasin helped organize the 1907 Tiflis bank robbery, a bloody robbery that took place in the middle of Yerevan Square killing forty and injuring 50.
However, he also enjoyed the excitement of terrorism. His home was the main laboratory from which the bombs used to attack Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin were manufactured.[2]
This quest for excitement caused a break with Lenin. Lenin, who was usually acerbic in such circumstance, remained complimentary towards Krasin, and continued to exhort him to rejoin the Party.[3]
In 1908 he left Russia and in 1909 collaborated with Alexander Bogdanov in the launch of Vpered. Later he withdrew from political activities for many years. He had a successful career as an electrical engineer, becoming a millionaire. After the February Revolution of 1917 he returned and rejoined the Bolsheviks.[4] In the Russian Bolshevik government Krasin was People's Commissar of foreign trade between 1920 and 1924.
Diplomatic career
Krasin met with E. F. Wise in Copenhagen in April 1920. Wise was representing the Supreme Economic Council It was in this capacity that he negotiated and signed the Anglo-Soviet Trade Agreement of March 1921.
In 1924 he was elected to the Communist Party's Central Committee, an office he held until his death in London from 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. 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 Wall Necropolis in Moscow.
His London position was filled by Christian Rakovsky. Two famous icebreakers commemorated Krasin's name.
During the Great Purge his name was erased from the Communist Party's history.[5]
His daughter Liubov married French politician and diplomat Gaston Bergery, and divorced in 1928. She married after the war French politician and journalist Emmanuel d'Astier de La Vigerie. His third daughter Tamara Tarasova-Krasina lives in Moscow.
Texts
- 'Our Trade Policy', Labour Monthly, Vol II, No.1, January 1922
Notes
- ↑ Glenny, Michael (Oct., 1970). "Leonid Krasin: The Years before 1917. An Outline". Soviet Studies (Taylor & Francis, Ltd.) 22 (2): 192–221. JSTOR 150054.
- ↑ Felshtinsky, Yuri (2003). Preface to Leonid Krasin: Letters to His Wife and Children (in Russian).
- ↑ Adam Ulam Stalin: The Man and His Times
- ↑ 'The Anglo-Soviet Trade Agreement, March 1921', M. V. Glenny, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 5, No. 2. (1970), pp. 63-82.
- ↑ Roy Medvedev, Let History Judge, 1971
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