Georgy Leonidovich Pyatakov (; ; 6 August 1890 – 30 January 1937) was a Ukrainian revolutionary and Soviet politician. He was a leading Bolshevik in Ukraine during and after the Russian Revolution of 1917.
Born in Kiev Governorate, Pyatakov was expelled from St Petersburg University in 1910 and later that year joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. He was arrested in 1912 and exiled to Siberia, but in 1914 escaped to Switzerland, where he worked with Vladimir Lenin. Pyatakov returned to Ukraine after the February Revolution of 1917 and was elected the chairman of the party's Kiev committee, and following the October Revolution was elected the first secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine. In 1918, he was part of the Left Communist party faction, and during the civil war served as the first chairman of the Provisional Workers' and Peasants' Government of Ukraine and in several military roles.
From 1923 to 1926, Pyatakov was deputy chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the National Economy. In 1927, he was expelled from the party, led by Joseph Stalin, for his membership in Leon Trotsky's Left Opposition, but recanted and rejoined in 1928. Pyatakov was later arrested in 1936, found guilty at the Stalinist show trials, and executed in 1937.
Biography
Early life and pre-revolution Pyatakov (party pseudonyms: Pyotr, P. Kievsky, Lyalin, Kii, Yaponets (Japanese), Ryjii) was born 6 August 1890 in the Cherkasy district in the Kiev Governorate of the Russian Empire, now modern-day Ukraine, where his father, Leonid Timofeyevich Pyatakov (1847–1915), was an engineer and director of the large Mariinsky or . Leonid Pyatakov was also the co-owner of Musatov, Pyatakov, Sirotin, and Co.
Pyatakov first became politically active at the age of 14 in secondary school in Kiev. During the 1905 revolution, he was expelled for leading a 'school revolution', and joined an anarchist group, which carried out armed robberies. In 1907 he was involved in a plot to assassinate the Governor General of Kiev, Vladimir Sukhomlinov, but broke with anarchism that same year and began to study Marxism, particularly the writings of Georgi Plekhanov and Vladimir Lenin.
From 1907, he was a student at the Faculty of Economics of St Petersburg University, until he was expelled in 1910, and deported back to Kiev, for taking part in student disturbances. There, he joined the Bolshevik wing of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. Arrested in June 1912, he spent a year and a half exiled to Siberia with his partner, Yevgenia Bosch, in the village of Usolye, Irkutsk.
In October 1914, he and Bosch escaped from exile through Japan and the United States to Switzerland, where they joined the émigré revolutionary community, and joined the editorial board of the journal Kommunist. However, during 1915, the Bolshevik group in Switzerland was split over the issue of small nations' rights to national self-determination, which Lenin supported, but Nikolai Bukharin, Pyatakov, and Bosch opposed. In response to Pyatakov's views, Lenin wrote an article, "Reply to P. Kievsky", and a major work, "A Caricature of Marxism and Imperialist Economism", both were not published until the 1929 but were circulated amongst the Bolshevik ranks. On 30 November 1916, Lenin wrote to his confidant Inessa Armand, complaining that "neither Yuri (Pyatakov), quite a little pig, nor E. B. has a particle of brain, and if they had allowed themselves to descend to group stupidity with Bukharin, then we had to break with them, more precisely with Kommunist. And that was done."
After this breach, Pyatakov, Bukharin, and Bosch moved to Stockholm, but were expelled from Sweden in April 1916 for being present at a conference organised by Swedish socialists to oppose attempts to involve Sweden in World War I. They moved to Oslo, Norway (then called Kristiania), where they lived in "extreme poverty".
Pyatakov and Bosch remained together until she committed suicide by self-inflicted gunshot in January 1925, after hearing that Trotsky had been forced to resign as leader of the Red Army, as well as in pain from her heart condition and tuberculosis.
Revolution and Civil War
After the February Revolution, Pyatakov returned to Russia from Norway but was arrested at the border due to having a false passport. He was subsequently escorted to Petrograd, and then finally to Kiev. He lived in Ukraine from March 1917, becoming a member, then in April, chairman, of the Kiev Committee of the RSDLP. He was elected a of the on 5 August 1917.
For the next ten years, Pyatakov was a leader of the left-wing communists. His opinions on some points of the theory and tactics of the revolutionary struggle were in opposition to that of the party's Central Committee. He was one of Vladimir Lenin's fiercest opponents on the national problem regarding both the course to be followed towards the socialist revolution as well as the Bolsheviks' peace settlement with Germany. After Lenin died in 1924, Pyatakov campaigned to prevent the rise of Joseph Stalin.
During the party conference in Petrograd, in May 1917–at a time of growing support in Finland for independence from Russia–Stalin put forward a motion in favour of self-determination of small nations, which Pyatakov opposed. He declared that the party had to end the idea of self-identification of every nation, and stood for anti-chauvinistic international principles; he proposed that the party adopt the slogan "down with frontiers", which Lenin dismissed as "hopelessly muddled" and a "mess".
After the October Revolution, in November 1917, Lenin called Pyatakov to Petrograd to take over the state bank, whose staff were refusing to release funds for the new government.
In January 1918, Pyatakov was one of the leaders of the Left Communists, who opposed Lenin's decision to end the war with Germany through the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (signed 3 March 1918). In protest, he resigned his post at the state bank and returned to Ukraine, intending to organise partisan warfare against the advancing Imperial German Army.
At the founding congress of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Ukraine, in Taganrog in July 1918, Pyatakov was elected as Central Committee Secretary. He maintained that Ukraine was not a signatory to the Brest-Litovsk treaty, and could therefore justifiably go to war against Germany. He and his supporters on the left, who included Bosch and Andrei Bubnov, remained in control of the Ukrainian party during most of 1918, but the insurrection which they launched against the pro-German Hetman, Pavlo Skoropadskyi, failed.
From November 1918, after the German army withdrew from Ukraine, to mid-January 1919, Pyatakov was a head of the Provisional Worker's and Peasant's Government of Ukraine (). In January 1919 Lenin replaced Pyatakov as head of the Ukrainian government with Christian Rakovsky
In March 1919, while attending the 8th Congress of the Russian Communist Party, Pyatakov again unsuccessfully opposed Lenin's position on national self-determination, which he denounced as a 'bourgeois' slogan that "unites all counter-revolutionary forces."
Pyatakov collaborated with Nikolai Bukharin to co-author the chapter on "The Economic Categories of Capitalism in the Transition Period" in The Economics of the Transformation Period, published in 1920.
Pyatakov served as a political commissar with the Red Army in Ukraine during the Russian Civil War, and again during the 1920 Polish–Soviet War. From 1 January to 16 February 1920, he led the Registration Directorate, the Red Army's military intelligence arm that went on to become the GRU.
Post-Civil War
From the end of the civil war, in 1920, until 1936, Pyatakov worked as an economic administrator, with short interruptions. From 1920–1921, he was placed in charge of the management of the coal mining industry in the Donbas. In February 1921, he was appointed deputy chairman of the Gosplan (State Planning Committee) of the RSFSR. From 1923–1926, he was deputy chairman of the Supreme Council of the National Economy of the Soviet Union.
From June–August 1922, Pyatakov was chairman of the panel of judges during the Trial of the Socialist Revolutionaries. At the conclusion of which, he sentenced all 12 defendants to death- though the death sentences were later commuted.
In October 1923, travelling under the name 'Arwid', Pyatakov was part of the Comintern sent to Germany during the abortive attempt to bring about a communist revolution.
Pyatakov was one of only six leading Bolsheviks mentioned in Lenin's Testament, dictated in December 1922, during Lenin's terminal illness. The other five-Stalin, Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, and Bukharin- were all members of the Politburo, while Pyatakov was not even one of the 27 full members of the Central Committee, to which he had been elected a candidate member, for the first time, in April 1922. He became a full member only in May 1924. Lenin described Pyatakov as "a man undoubtedly distinguished in will and ability, but too much given over to administration and the administrative side of things to be relied on in a serious political situation."
Pyatakov supported Leon Trotsky in the power struggle that began during Lenin's terminal illness. He was a signatory of The Declaration of 46 in October 1923, and in the debate that followed he was "their most aggressive and effective spokesman" who "wherever he went easily obtained large majorities for bluntly worded resolutions." But his personal relationship with Trotsky was distant. Simon Liberman, who worked for the Soviet government during part on the 1920s was with Pyatakov in the Crimea, in 1920, and witnessed how he reacted when Trotsky rang:
Despite his support for Trotsky, Pyatakov was anxious that the communist party did not split irreconcilably. After an angry meeting in October 1926, at which Trotsky called Stalin the 'gravedigger of the revolution' to his face, Pyatakov was visibly distressed and demanded of Trotsky "Why, why have you said this?", but Trotsky simply brushed him aside.
In 1927, Pyatakov was sent to Paris as trade representative at the USSR embassy. In December 1927, he was expelled from the Communist Party for belonging to the "Trotskyite–Zinovievite" bloc. He was the first prominent "Trotskyist" to renounce Trotskyism after the Left Opposition's December 1927 suppression. His capitulation was reported in Pravda on 29 February 1928. For the next eight years he stuck to the party line. This prompted a scathing comment from Trotsky:
When the former Menshevik, Nikolai Valentinov met Pyatakov in Paris early in 1928 and suggested to him that he has capitulated out of cowardice, Pyatakov riposted with a eulogy about the historic role of the Soviet communist party saying that, for the party, nothing was inadmissible, and nothing impossible, and that a true Bolshevik submerged his personality in the party to the extent that he could break with his own beliefs and honestly agree with the party.
Pyatakov was recalled to Moscow and restored to party membership in 1928. He was deputy governor of Gosbank in 1928–29, and governor, 1929–30. After Stalin had ordered the start of the campaign to force peasant farmers to move on to collective farms, Pyatakov gave a speech in October 1929 calling for "extreme rates of collectivisation" and declaring that "the heroic period of our socialist construction has begun."
But in August 1930, Stalin complained in a letter to the head of the soviet government, Vyacheslav Molotov that Pyatakov was a "poor commissar" and a "hostage to his bureaucracy". In September, he called him a "genuine rightist Trotskyist" and a "harmful element". Pyatakov was removed from office on 15 October, and appointed head of the All-Union Chemical Industry Association.