Boris Konstantinovich Souvarine
Boris Souvarine
1895–1984
○ Natural causes
The only non-Bolshevik on all three leading Comintern bodies. And author of the first critical Stalin biography.
Ten days after the Bolsheviks seized power, the twenty-two-year-old Souvarine wrote on 17 November 1917: "It is to be feared that, for Lenin and his friends, the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' must be the dictatorship of the Bolsheviks and their leader. This could become a calamity for the Russian working class, and eventually, for the world proletariat. […] What we wish is agreement among socialists to organise a stable power that truly becomes the power of the people and not the power of a man." — 'La Commune maximaliste,' *Ce qu'il faut dire*, No. 78
The only non-Bolshevik to serve on all three leading Comintern bodies. Expelled in 1924 for defending Trotsky, he turned independent anti-Stalinist and published the first critical biography of Stalin (1935), remaining a pioneering Sovietologist throughout his life.
Career timeline
- 1914Mobilised into the French Army; experiences trench warfare on the Western Front
- 1916Joins the SFIO and writes for the anti-war minority paper *Le Populaire*; adopts pseudonym 'Souvarine'
- 1919Joins the Committee for the Third International; distributes Comintern propaganda across Europe
- 1920.05Arrested in government crackdown on 'anarchist plot'; writes *Bulletin Communiste* from La Santé prison
- 1920.12Tours Congress: Souvarine motion adopted, creating the French Communist Party (SFIC); named honorary president
- 1921–1924Member of the ECCI, Presidium, and Secretariat — the only non-Bolshevik on all three leading Comintern bodies
- 1924Defends Trotsky at the 13th Bolshevik Congress; expelled from the Comintern and the French Communist Party
- 1926First publishes Lenin's Testament in France, received from Krupskaya via Christian Rakovsky
- 1927–1935Breaks with Trotsky, analysing the USSR as state-capitalist; organises the Democratic Communist Circle (CCD)
- 1935Publishes *Staline, aperçu historique du bolchévisme* — the first critical biography of Stalin
- 1935Founds the Institute of Social History — French branch of the Amsterdam-based IISH
- 1939.05Predicts the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact 100 days in advance in *Le Figaro*
- 1940–1947Arrested by the Vichy regime, freed through an officer's intervention, exiles to the USA; returns to Paris in 1947
- 1947–1976Edits *Est & Ouest* and *Le Contrat Social* — leading voice of anti-Stalinist left Sovietology during the Cold War