Christian Georgievich Rakovsky

Born Krastyo Stanchev in Ottoman-ruled Kotel, Rakovsky was a descendant of Georgi Rakovsky, the symbol of Bulgarian national liberation. He adopted the name Christian Rakovsky in 1887 and went into exile in Geneva in 1890, where he studied medicine and connected with Plekhanov and the Russian Marxist movement. Continuing his studies in Berlin and Montpellier, he wrote for Wilhelm Liebknecht's Vorwärts, associated with Rosa Luxemburg, and earned his medical doctorate in 1896. When the RSDLP split in 1903, he positioned himself as a mediator seeking to synthesise the Bolshevik economic programme with the Mensheviks' political methods. His central project was Balkan socialism. In Geneva he founded the Romanian left-wing paper Sotsial-Demokrat and Bulgarian Marxist periodicals; in 1910 he revived the Romanian Social Democratic Party and became its first secretary. He then brought together the socialist parties of Bulgaria, Serbia, Romania, and Greece to form the Balkan Social Democratic Federation and served as its first secretary: an attempt at anti-war solidarity across the enmities left by the Balkan Wars. In 1915 he helped organise the Zimmerwald Conference, gathering the international socialist left's anti-war wing, and was repeatedly expelled or imprisoned for anti-war agitation in Russia, France, Germany, and Romania. When Romania joined the Entente in 1916, he was arrested on charges of defeatism and espionage and jailed in Iași until freed by the Russian garrison in May 1917. This broad European revolutionary experience prepared him for the work of building a Soviet state after 1917.

During the formation of the USSR, Rakovsky was the most consistent defender of equal republic rights against Stalin's 'autonomisation' plan, which would have absorbed the republics into the Russian Federation. His standing was such that in March 1922 the plenum of the Ukrainian Communist Party Central Committee resolved to 'categorically demand not to remove comrade Rakovsky from Ukraine.' At the XII Party Congress in April 1923, Rakovsky openly challenged Stalin's nationalities policy, insisting that 'nine-tenths of the rights of the union commissariats must be taken away and transferred to the national republics.' That June, on Rakovsky's initiative, the Ukrainian CC decreed that foreign companies could open branches in Ukraine only with republican permission, a decision Moscow overturned within a month. At the IV Conference of national republic officials in June 1923, Stalin publicly denounced Rakovsky for 'confederalism, national-deviation, and separatism.' A month later Rakovsky was removed as chairman of the Ukrainian Sovnarkom and appointed ambassador to Britain. On 18 July he sent Stalin a letter of protest: 'My appointment to London is, for me and not only for me alone, merely a pretext for my removal from work in Ukraine.' This debate became one of the theoretical starting points for the Left Opposition's later critique of Stalin's bureaucratic centralization.

Arrested on 27 January 1937 by the NKVD, Rakovsky was held in solitary confinement for roughly eight months and refused to admit any guilt. Eventually broken, he appeared in March 1938 as a defendant in the 'Anti-Soviet Bloc of Rightists and Trotskyites' case, the so-called Trial of the Twenty-One. Alongside Bukharin, Rykov, and Yagoda, Rakovsky confessed to spying for Japan and Britain and participating in a treasonous conspiracy. Despite Prosecutor Vyshinsky's demand for the death penalty, Rakovsky was one of only three defendants (with Bessonov and Pletnyov) spared execution, receiving a 20-year sentence. In his final plea he declared: 'Our misfortune is that we held responsible posts and power turned our heads.' Victor Serge later wrote that Rakovsky seemed deliberately to compromise the trial with testimony whose falsity was obvious to Europe. On 11 September 1941, after the Nazi invasion, he was shot in Medvedev Forest near Oryol alongside other prisoners. He was rehabilitated by the USSR Supreme Court on 4 February 1988.