Dmitry Zakharovich Manuilsky

Manuilsky worked in the Comintern from 1922 and was a member of its Executive Committee and Presidium from 15 July 1924 to 15 May 1943. The Ukrainian reference splits the secretaryship into December 1926 to July 1928 and 15 April 1931 to 15 May 1943, with a candidate membership of the ECCI Secretariat in September 1928 to April 1931 in between; the Russian reference gives secretary 1928–1943; the English reference gives secretary from December 1926 until the dissolution in May 1943. The datings differ and should not be harmonised. The English reference reports that in 1926 he supplanted Bukharin as leader of the Soviet delegation on the Comintern executive, and that from 1935 until the dissolution he acted as deputy to General Secretary Georgi Dimitrov.

He was responsible for executing purges in the Comintern's apparatus and in foreign communist parties on Stalin's orders; the Ukrainian reference counts him among those who carried out Stalinist terror policy in the Comintern apparatus and in foreign communist parties. Rogovin's study documents a concrete chain of responsibility: without the sanction of Manuilsky and 'Belov' (Georgii Damianov, head of the Comintern cadre department) the NKVD did not have the right to arrest foreign communists, and Damianov prepared hundreds of reports and recommendations for the NKVD.

The purge machinery of 1937 is documented as well. According to the archival study, a Commission of the ECCI Secretariat (Moskvin, Florin, Anvelt; 1 January to 17 September 1937) was active, and a special Control Commission consisting of Dimitrov, Moskvin and Manuilsky, established in May 1937, decided to exclude 256 members; in the first half of 1937 one-sixth of the Comintern staff was affected. Manuilsky sat on the body that actually processed those exclusions.

The Communist Party of Poland is the characteristic case of the phase. Almost its entire leading cadre was drawn into the purges and murdered (Bronkowski, Stein-Krajewski, Unszlicht, Warski, Koszutska, Horwitz, Leszczynski, Bobinski, Heryng, Ciszewski, Dabal, Amsterdam, Jasieński, Wandurski), and the leaderless party was accused of Trotskyism among other 'deviations' and dissolved by the Comintern on 16 August 1938. The socialist historiography broadly agrees: during the Great Purge all KPP leaders and hundreds of lower-ranking members staying in the Soviet Union were killed, and on Stalin's command the Comintern dissolved the party in 1938 on suspicion of infiltration, with repression against Polish communists beginning at the end of the 1920s and extending to the killing of General Secretary Leński and of Warski. The list of signatories to the dissolution document, which appears in search snippets, could not be verified in the fetched page text and is therefore not reproduced here. Unlike the purge victims, he survived: during the Great Purge almost every Old Bolshevik with a past link with Trotsky was killed or imprisoned, except him, whom Stalin despised but did not feel threatened by. The ECCI leadership largely survived at the height of the purge because it presented itself as the obedient executor of Stalin's will and as a participant in the struggle against all oppositions and 'deviations' in the international communist movement.

This leadership of foreign communist parties in the 1920s and 1930s is the prehistory of the following phase, the UN founding and Ukrainian diplomacy of 1944–1952: the man who spent two decades directing foreign communist parties from the Comintern apparatus later drafted the charter of an international peace organization.

In July 1944 Manuilsky was appointed Deputy Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars and People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs of the Ukrainian SSR. After the Yalta Conference granted Ukraine and Belarus separate UN founding membership alongside the USSR, Manuilsky led the Ukrainian delegation to the United Nations Conference on International Organization in San Francisco in April 1945. He chaired Committee I/1, which drafted the Preamble and Chapter I, 'Purposes and Principles,' of the UN Charter, directly shaping the foundational language of the organization. During committee debates he candidly observed that discussions revealed 'great differences of opinion' on the purposes of the new body. Throughout the conference the Ukrainian delegation pursued a dual strategy: backing the Soviet delegation unreservedly on core issues while taking independent positions on secondary matters. Manuilsky's support for the American proposal to name the organization 'United Nations' earned public thanks from the US delegation. In his report to Khrushchev, he noted with satisfaction that these independent moves aroused interest and puzzlement among other participants. He represented Ukraine at the first four sessions of the UN General Assembly until 1952, becoming one of the Soviet bloc's most visible diplomats in the early Cold War. That a man who had spent two decades directing foreign communist parties from the Comintern apparatus ended up drafting the charter of an international peace organization was one of the most striking reversals of his career.