A non-party workers' lawyer elected the first chairman of the Petersburg Soviet in 1905
Khrustalev shone with a double light, of the party and of the masses, but both lights were reflected, someone else's.
A non-party workers' lawyer, he was elected the first chairman of the Petersburg Soviet at the height of the 1905 Revolution. His independence helped him command workers' trust, but effective political direction was seized by Social Democrats led by Trotsky and Parvus. After escaping Siberian exile in 1907 he lived as an émigré, returned to Russia as a war patriot, and in 1918 led the self-declared 'Pereyaslav Republic' against the Bolsheviks before being executed by the local revkom the following year.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1905.10–11First chairman, Petersburg Soviet; elected unanimously on 14 Oct
- 1905.11–1906Arrested; sentenced to Siberian exile
- 1907Escaped Siberia; London Party Congress, then emigration
- 1909–1914Left RSDLP; syndicalism and publishing in Paris
- 1915–1917Arrested on return; 3 years' katorga; freed by February Revolution
- 1918–1919Leader, Pereyaslav Republic; anti-Bolshevik activity
Related historical events
An émigré pushed out of the party, and the dispute over his place in history (1907–1917)
After escaping his Berezov exile in March 1907, Khrustalev-Nosar attended the Fifth Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in London that May, where he proposed convening an all-Russian non-party workers' congress. The party question followed him into emigration: the congress formally debated 'the workers' congress and non-party workers' organizations', and the Bolsheviks, holding the majority, effectively rejected his initiative. He left the party in 1910, and from then on he was no longer a participant in its internal factional struggles.
His identity as a non-party workers' lawyer had helped him be acclaimed as a workers' representative in 1905, but what sustained him was a direct relationship with the mass of workers. After losing that trust he passed through two decisive breaks, and these also mark his drift out of the Social Democratic camp. In 1913 a French court sentenced him to prison for misappropriating another person's property, and former comrades led by Trotsky took part in the public campaign that exposed the case. After his release he was treated as an outcast, and in an open letter he announced a permanent break with the party milieu.
The consequences of his non-party position remained a problem after 1905 as well. He was the leader of a strike-born movement driven by the strength of the workers, yet there was no political organization behind him as the working class consolidated its own bodies. Once the Social Democrats took control of the workers' representative institutions and of the mass movement, his influence shrank sharply, and his 1917-1919 course at Pereyaslav, leaning on class forces other than the working class, grew out of that condition.
Assessments of his role long remained an extension of ideological combat. In his memoirs Trotsky maintained that he himself had been the Soviet's real leader and that Nosar was 'an accidental figure in the revolution', while Soviet historiography of the twentieth century cast him as an unprincipled adventurer, later as a Trotskyite and a Petliura supporter. Some scholars, by contrast, hold that he was both the formal chairman and the real leader, pointing to exaggeration in Trotsky's recollections. Neither assessment overturns the fact that he opposed the Bolsheviks at Pereyaslav and was shot in May 1919 by decision of the local revkom.