A polemicist who turned from revolutionary internationalism to wartime patriotism
In July 1917, he placed the material alleging Lenin was a German agent in Zhivoe Slovo.
Grigory Alexinsky rose as a Bolshevik activist and Second Duma deputy during the 1905 revolutionary period, but the pressures of war and revolution drove him sharply toward social patriotism. In 1917 he joined Plekhanov’s Yedinstvo group, attacked the Bolsheviks, and helped place Ensign Yermolenko’s inadequate testimony into the public claim that Lenin was a German agent. The exposure strengthened anti-Bolshevik politics among soldiers and in the soviets, while revealing the path by which a revolutionary became an émigré opponent of Bolshevism.
Career Timeline
- 1899–1904Student at Moscow University; participated in student movement
- 1905Agitator for the Moscow Bolshevik organization
- 1905–1907Central Committee member of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party; writer for Bolshevik publications
- 1907Deputy in the Second Duma; Bolshevik orator in the Social Democratic faction
- 1909–1914Leader of the left-Bolshevik Vpered group
- 1914–1917Pro-war Social Democrat; co-editor of the Paris journal Prizyv
- 1917Leader in Plekhanov’s Yedinstvo group; elected to the Petrograd Soviet
- 1919–1967Russian émigré politician and polemicist; chairman of the Russian Council in Paris