1879–1967
○ Natural causes
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.
Activities and affiliations
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
Related historical events
- 1905–1907The Revolution of 1905Moscow Bolshevik organization agitatorIn 1905, he worked as an agitator for the Moscow Bolshevik organization.
- 1917.02–07The February Revolutionpolitical figure behind the Lenin spy allegationHe put his name to the allegation in Zhivoe Slovo on 5 July 1917 that Lenin was a German spy.
Emigration and anti-Soviet activity (1919–1967)
In 1919 Alexinsky crossed into Estonia, and from then until his death he lived in emigration. He sat on the Russian Council in Constantinople, and in 1920 the Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal tried him in absentia in the Tactical Centre case, convicted him of counter-revolutionary conspiracies and barred him from entering Soviet Russia. Settling in Paris, he chaired the Russian Council there and worked as a polemicist for the émigré press, contributing to Obshcheye Delo and Russkaya Gazeta. He continued to publish books, among them Du tsarisme au communisme (1923) and Bilan d'une expérience: un quart de siècle de régime communiste (1941).
Late in life he handed Central Committee materials of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (Bolsheviks) to the Bakhmeteff Archive at Columbia University; some of his papers are held in the Harvard University library. He died in 1967 in the Paris area and was buried in the Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois cemetery. The man who had been arrested by the Cheka in 1918, released on bail and even taken Soviet service thus left the country within a year and remained an émigré politician in open opposition to Soviet power.