Ivan Adolfovich Teodorovich

Immediately after the October Revolution, Teodorovich became People's Commissar for Food Supply in the first Council of People's Commissars. But within ten days, he resigned alongside eight other Bolshevik commissars, in protest against Lenin's refusal to form a broad 'all-Soviet' coalition government including Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries.

On 4 November 1917 (O.S.), Teodorovich joined Nogin, Rykov, Milyutin, Shliapnikov and others in a statement to the All-Russian Central Executive Committee warning that "a purely Bolshevik government can maintain itself only by means of political terror" and would "lead to the ruin of the revolution and the country." Lenin was furious; the Central Committee denounced the resigners as 'deserters,' yet within days the party quietly reversed course and formed a coalition with the Left SRs.

Teodorovich continued his duties through December, but he was already a marginalized figure in the first cabinet. The resignation became a political stigma that was revived whenever he later found himself in the minority, during the NEP-era agrarian debates and, decisively, in 1930 when Stalin, in a letter to Molotov, called him a 'scoundrel' and identified him as a link between Kondratiev and the Right Opposition of Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky. That brief act of defiance in November 1917 cast a shadow over his entire career.

In the 1920s Teodorovich interpreted NEP as a way of accumulating funds in the capitalist agrarian sector through the development of 'strong' (крепкие) peasant farms, which was to become a source of funds for industrialization, including of the countryside itself, and hence for the transition to socialism. At the People's Commissariat of Agriculture he supervised the work of the economist N. D. Kondratiev, head of the department of agricultural economics and statistics, and gave him a degree of protection and patronage. The Russian text specifies that he helped secure Kondratiev's release from arrest in 1920, while the English text reverses the direction of that detail, so it must be checked before use.

From 1926 he was director of the International Agrarian Institute, and in 1928-1930 general secretary of the Peasant International (Krestintern). The Krestintern was an international peasant revolutionary organization active in 1923-1933, founded at an October 1923 congress, which produced the journals Krestyansky internatsional and Mezhdunarodny krestyansky byulleten. Other reference works give the Krestintern post from March 1928 and the institute directorship from the same point, so the 1926 institute date is not uniform across sources. He had been a delegate to the founding congress in 1923, replaced Aleksandr Smirnov in March 1928 after Smirnov was sacked for 'peasant deviation', and was a delegate to the 15th and 16th congresses of the VKP(b).

In February 1928 Smirnov was sacked as People's Commissar for resisting Stalin's decision to send detachments into the countryside to seize grain; a few weeks later Teodorovich lost the post of Deputy People's Commissar of Agriculture, though he was not publicly denounced at that stage. When Kondratiev was arrested in July 1930 and accused of organizing a clandestine 'Peasants' Labour Party', Stalin called Teodorovich a 'scoundrel' and suspected him of being a link between Kondratiev and Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky. In a letter to Molotov, Stalin wrote that the enquiry into the Kondratiev-Groman-Sadyrin case must be pressed 'with all thoroughness' and that he had no doubt it would expose a direct link 'through Sokolnikov and Teodorovich' between those men and the Right. The campaign against 'Kondratievshchina' named him, cost him his posts and sent him to run the publishing house and journal of the Society of Former Political Prisoners and Ex-Settlers. On 22 November 1930 Pravda printed his 'repentance' letter, in which he acknowledged that his understanding of NEP had been mistaken.

In 1929-1935 he edited the society's journal, Katorga i ssylka. Founded in Moscow in 1921, the historical-revolutionary organ had successive general editorships: V. D. Vilensky-Sibiryakov (1923-1927), F. Ya. Kon (1927-1929) and Teodorovich (1929-1935). Its main fields were the history of the revolutionary movement in Russia, prison, katorga, exile and emigration, obituaries, bibliography and chronicles; its contributors included Bolshevik and Comintern activists such as Kollontai, Manuilsky, Mitskevich, Nevsky, Semashko and Yaroslavsky alongside former Narodnaya Volya members such as Figner, Frolenko and Yakimova-Dikovskaya. The journal ran to 116 issues in all.

On 25 June 1935 the Society of Former Political Prisoners and Ex-Settlers was liquidated by decision of the USSR Central Executive Committee Presidium. The end of the Society of Old Bolsheviks is dated differently in the sources: its own article states that on 16 May 1935 it dissolved itself on the instructions of the VKP(b) leadership, while accounts of the liquidation report abolition by a Central Committee decision of 25 May. The formal ground of the closure is likewise given variously as a decision of the Central Executive Committee Presidium and as a Central Committee decision, so it cannot be reduced to one. Among the charges ascribed by the historian Nicolas Werth were that the societies had petitioned to abolish the death penalty for members of the opposition and had over-cultivated the revolutionary spirit of earlier years. Historian Robert Conquest identifies the main cause as the society's collection of signatures among influential circles for a petition to the Politburo against executing oppositionists, and Mark Junge places the liquidation inside a general state policy toward public organizations. After the Society's liquidation most of its members were shot or ended up in Stalin's camps, a fate documented for Teodorovich himself: arrested on 11 June 1937, sentenced to death by the Military Collegium of the USSR Supreme Court on 20 September 1937 on the charge of participation in an anti-Soviet terrorist organization, shot the same day, buried at Donskoye Cemetery in Moscow and rehabilitated on 11 April 1956.