From Volga flotilla commander to exile critic: the diplomat who wrote Stalin an open letter
December 1918, aboard the destroyer Spartak — disguised as an Estonian sailor and hidden among potato sacks, he was exposed when it turned out he didn't speak a word of Estonian.
Bolshevik naval commander of the Volga and Baltic fleets during the Civil War. As a Soviet diplomat he refused recall in 1938 and defected, publishing his 'Open Letter to Stalin' in 1939, a public denunciation of the Great Purge.
Career Timeline
- 1910Joined Bolshevik faction while at St. Petersburg Polytechnic Institute
- 1912–1914Literary contributor to Zvezda and Pravda
- 1917Deputy chairman of Kronstadt Soviet; arrested after July Days, freed Oct 1917
- 1918Commissar of Naval General Staff, commander of Volga Flotilla — took Kazan, saved 432 prisoners from 'death barge'
- 1919–1920Captured by British, held in Brixton Prison; exchanged, commanded Volga-Caspian Flotilla, led Enzeli landing
- 1920–1921Commander of Baltic Fleet; twice awarded Order of the Red Banner
- 1921–1924Plenipotentiary to Afghanistan
- 1928–1930Chairman of Glavrepertkom (censorship); editor-in-chief, Krasnaya Nov
- 1930–1938Plenipotentiary to Estonia, Denmark, and Bulgaria
- 1938–1939Refused recall, defected in Paris; published 'Open Letter to Stalin' Aug 1939
Related historical events
- 1917.02–07The February RevolutionDeputy chairman of the Kronstadt SovietOn 4 July he led thousands of Kronstadt sailors into Petrograd, rallying at the Bolshevik headquarters; after the events he was arrested and imprisoned at Kresty.
- 1918–1922The Civil War and Foreign InterventionRed Navy commanderAs Volga Flotilla commander he recaptured Kazan and rescued 432 prisoners from a 'death barge'; was captured by the British and held at Brixton Prison before a prisoner exchange. He later commanded the Volga-Caspian Flotilla (leading the Enzeli landing) and the Baltic Fleet. Twice awarded the Order of the Red Banner.
The Open Letter to Stalin
After refusing his recall from Bulgaria and defecting to France in April 1938, Raskolnikov was declared an 'outlaw' by the Soviet Supreme Court in July 1939. His reply, completed on 17 August 1939, was the 'Open Letter to Stalin,' published posthumously in the Paris émigré newspaper Novaya Rossiya on 1 October 1939.
The letter struck at the architecture of the Great Terror. Raskolnikov denounced the Moscow show trials as 'dirty forgeries surpassing medieval witch trials,' arguing that the forced confessions and executions of Lenin's comrades, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Bukharin, Rykov, were a scripted farce in which Stalin himself had appointed every supposed 'enemy of the people' to their posts. The line "Who placed the so-called 'enemies of the people' in responsible positions in the state, the Party, and the army? Joseph Stalin" distilled the letter's logic.
Beyond political repression, the letter detailed how Stalin trampled the democratic promises of the 1936 Constitution into single-candidate sham elections; how the purging of the Red Army high command, Marshals Tukhachevsky, Blyukher, and Yegorov, self-inflicted a decapitation of military leadership on the eve of war; and how the arrest of writers like Pilnyak, Meyerhold, and Koltsov, together with systematic book-burning, had suffocated Soviet culture. Raskolnikov stressed that he had never belonged to any opposition, including Trotsky's, making the defection of so loyal a Bolshevik a uniquely damning indictment.
Opening with Griboyedov's line, "I shall tell that truth about you which is worse than any lie," the letter circulated through samizdat channels in the mid-1960s and was finally published officially in the USSR only in 1988, during perestroika. Raskolnikov was posthumously rehabilitated in 1963, but the letter's existence led to his being re-condemned in 1969 as 'a slanderer of the Party and the Soviet state'; full rehabilitation came only under Gorbachev.