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.

Rakovsky became head of the Ukrainian government on 16 January 1919, replacing Georgy Pyatakov, and the government was reorganised as the Soviet of People's Commissars on 29 March 1919. Russian and Ukrainian Wikipedia give the Ukrainian premiership dates differently within the same office: first chairman of the Sovnarkom of the Ukrainian SSR from 29 January to 17 December 1919, and third chairman from 19 February 1920 to 15 July 1923; he headed the Provisional Workers' and Peasants' Government of Ukraine from 24 January 1919. In office he simultaneously served as People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs and, from January 1919 to May 1920, as People's Commissar of Internal Affairs. Arthur Ransome recorded that Pyatakov's government was found too far left and that Pyatakov gave way to Rakovsky, who was better able to conduct a more moderate policy. In 1918 he headed the 'Supreme Autonomous Collegium for the Struggle against Counter-Revolution in Romania and Ukraine', a local Cheka body, in Odessa and was a member of Rumcherod; in April 1918 he went to Kursk with a delegation to negotiate peace with the Ukrainian Central Rada, and in September 1918 he was sent to Germany, expelled together with Joffe and Bukharin and detained by German military authorities at Kaunas. During the Russian Civil War he contributed as a member of the South West Front's Revolutionary Military Council to the defeat of the White Army and Ukrainian nationalists, and in March 1919 he was a founding member of the Comintern, representing the Balkan Communist Federation. His government lost control of Ukraine in summer 1919 and faced contestation from partisans of Ukrainian autonomy inside the party. At the Fourth Congress of the Ukrainian Party in March 1920 his leadership was not reelected; after Lenin sided with him and a delegation of Trotsky, Kamenev and Joffe went to Kyiv, a major purge removed the pro-autonomy opposition and reinstated the former leaders. Rakovsky theorised that 'Ukraine was a laboratory of internationalism' and 'a decisive factor in world revolution', arguing for extending the revolution to the Balkans. Initially he treated the Ukrainian national question as secondary, viewing nationalist movements as counter-revolutionary and claiming the 'danger of Russification under the existing Ukrainian Soviet authority is entirely without foundation'; on 13 February 1919 he told the Kyiv City Council that 'decreeing the Ukrainian language as a state language is reactionary and unnecessary'. He later changed his stance in the early 1920s. After dealing with the Polish-Ukrainian offensive of 1920 his government took measures on collectivization, and per his biographer Gus Fagan he became a proponent of greater Ukrainian autonomy, advocating Ukrainization through full integration of the Borotbists into party structures and a slower pace of communization; in the early 1920s the republic sealed its own trade agreements with other European countries. He also came into conflict with the Russian Party when his second executive had its independent Commissariat of Foreign Trade replaced with an office under central control. At the XII Party Congress he challenged Stalin's nationalities policy, and in June 1923 the Ukrainian CC decreed on his initiative that foreign companies could open branches in Ukraine only with republican permission, a decision Moscow overturned within a month. In early July 1923, isolated inside the Ukrainian leadership, he was removed and replaced by Vlas Chubar and sent to London; Chubar, an ethnic Ukrainian, came to represent Stalin's view on nationality issues in the region, officially defined as 'nativization'.

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.