From revolutionary engineer to Soviet diplomatic architect, the only Bolshevik who could do business with Western capital
In 1893, the young Krasin visited Tolstoy to argue that revolution was inevitable. The great apostle of non-violence "began to stamp with rage," as Krasin's wife Liubov, who was present, recorded.
From Siberian exile under the Tsar to general director of Siemens-Schuckert Russia, then to the Soviet state's first People's Commissar of Foreign Trade, Krasin's trajectory was unique among Bolsheviks. During the 1905 revolution he led the Combat Technical Group, handling arms and finance, and built the underground 'Nina' press in Baku to print Iskra. He quit politics in 1909, rose through Siemens to become its Russian head, then returned at Lenin's call in 1918. Architect of the state monopoly on foreign trade and the 1921 Anglo-Soviet Trade Agreement, he was the only senior Bolshevik at home in Western business circles; Lenin rated him the party's ablest practical organizer.
Career Timeline
- 1903–1907Member, RSDLP Central Committee
- 1905Head, Combat Technical Group, CC RSDLP
- 1913–1917General Representative, Siemens-Schuckert in Russia
- 1918–1920People's Commissar of Trade and Industry, RSFSR
- 1919–1920People's Commissar of Railways, RSFSR
- 1920–1925People's Commissar of Foreign Trade, USSR
- 1921–1923Plenipotentiary to Great Britain
- 1924–1926Member, CC VKP(b)
Related historical events
- 1905–1907The Revolution of 1905Head of the RSDLP Central Committee Combat Technical GroupHe led the Central Committee's Combat Technical Group, organizing weapons procurement, bomb manufacture, and druzhina training on an all-Russian scale, using his legal cover as an engineer and businessman to direct the party's military-financial operations.
- 1918–1922The Civil War and Foreign InterventionPeople's Commissar for Transport and Foreign Trade
- 1921–1928The New Economic Policy (NEP)Architect of the foreign trade monopolyHe negotiated the March 1921 Anglo-Soviet Trade Agreement, breaking the capitalist blockade, and established the state monopoly on foreign trade that framed all NEP-era external commerce.
Lenin's Body and the Science of Immortality
When Lenin died in January 1924, Krasin submitted an article titled "On Immortalization" to the Party, arguing for the permanent preservation of the body. He proposed placing the coffin in a metal box with a glass top and keeping it at freezing temperature, and, using his position as People's Commissar of Foreign Trade, secured permission to import specialized refrigeration equipment from Germany. Behind this vision lay the 19th-century Russian philosopher Nikolai Fedorov, whose radical cosmism held that science would one day resurrect the dead. At Lev Karpov's funeral in 1921, Krasin had declared publicly: "I am certain that the time will come when science will become all-powerful, that it will be able to recreate a deceased organism." That was an extraordinary statement for a supposedly materialist Bolshevik leadership.
The cryogenic plan collapsed when the corpse began to deteriorate, and the chemical embalming method of Vladimir Vorobiev and Boris Zbarsky was adopted instead. Krasin, together with Lunacharsky, organized the design competition for the permanent mausoleum while a temporary wooden tomb was erected on Red Square. Though his freezing scheme failed, his vision of Lenin's body as "a center of pilgrimage like Jerusalem or Mecca for the world proletariat" supplied the template for the Soviet Lenin cult that endured for more than half a century. Some historians read in this episode the distinctive intellectual arc of Krasin himself: the police-chief's son who mastered cutting-edge electrical engineering, moved between the Siemens boardroom and Bolshevik bomb-making, and at the end sought to redeem the flesh of the revolution through the cold of the machine.