Mikhail Mikhailovich Lashevich

On 6 June 1926, Lashevich organized and delivered the keynote report at a clandestine gathering of United Opposition supporters in a forest near the Dolgoprudnaya station outside Moscow. Since the 10th Party Congress had banned factions in 1921, an opposition group holding its own meeting outside party apparatus control was an exceptional challenge. Lashevich criticized the Central Committee leadership's line, and participants discussed the bureaucratization of the party and the social polarization unfolding under NEP.

The Stalin faction seized on the gathering as definitive proof of 'anti-party factional activity.' At the July 1926 Joint Plenum of the Central Committee and Central Control Commission, Point 7 of the resolution 'On Party Unity', the provision allowing expulsion of Central Committee members for factionalism, was invoked for the first time. Lashevich was stripped of his candidate CC membership, removed as Deputy Chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council, and barred from responsible party work for two years. Zinoviev was expelled from the Politburo. The episode became the signal for an all-out campaign against the United Opposition, opening a year and a half of public denunciation and administrative purge.

After the July 1926 plenum, Lashevich was sent to Harbin that November as one of the opposition's "honourable exiles" and appointed tovarishch (deputy) chairman of the Chinese Eastern Railway Board, the Soviet-side post. Under the 1924 Soviet-Chinese parity agreements the chairman was to be a Chinese citizen and the tovarishch a Soviet citizen, so the position was formally a senior one; it was raised at the Politburo on 11 November and confirmed on 20 November 1926. The émigré press in Harbin read the appointment as the exile of an oppositionist.

Lashevich arrived in Harbin with his wife Ida Vladimirovna on 10 December 1926, tasked with settling CER questions while taking account of both sides' interests. He was the highest Soviet representative on the railway, housed in one of the board's mansions in the centre of the New Town and paid 21,000 rubles a year. In a letter to Ordzhonikidze of 4 January 1927 he complained of a ten-room flat, three Chinese servants and the obligatory round of banquets and receptions in formal dress, writing that he had to "associate with all sorts of scum". The Russian émigré community remembered him as a hangman and murderer, and part of it believed him implicated in the killing of the Perm archbishop Andronik in the summer of 1918. In June 1927 Soviet intelligence reported that attempts on his life were being prepared.

As tovpred he showed "no little tact and his characteristic persistence", acting as a kind of "bourgeois negotiator"; he was cautious, dragged out questions that demanded immediate decision and avoided direct conflict with the Chinese administration. He managed temporarily to restore a semblance of order in the CER's top management and a relative equilibrium in Soviet-Mukden relations, settling the question of keeping the railway's cash, the school question and other problems. According to an American consulate report from Harbin of 19 November 1927, after studying the CER situation he proposed to the Soviet leadership a change of policy toward émigrés: close contacts with the local Russian colony in order to paralyse its anti-Soviet activity and to promote its transition to Soviet citizenship and cooperation with Soviet institutions against the Chinese side. He was also remembered as a patron of the arts. The CER Board spent large sums on the theatre, including the opera of which Harbin was proud, and since it was believed that under Lashevich many artists, painters and musicians had come from the USSR for the opera's needs, his return to his post from Moscow in January 1928 animated artistic circles.

He did not consider his political career in the USSR finished. In late October 1927 he travelled from Harbin to Leningrad and took part in the opposition's alternative demonstration of 7 November; that December the 15th Party Congress expelled him from the party as an active figure of the "Trotskyist opposition". Yet on 19 January 1928 the Politburo decided to keep him as tovarishch chairman of the CER Board, and in June 1928 his party membership was restored. He returned to Harbin in February, attended Board meetings and re-engaged with the railway's problems. On 23-28 May he and A. V. Boriskin, and by some accounts the Dalbank official A. I. Pogrebetsky, made a trip to the Halun Arshan resort in Inner Mongolia; a Japanese newspaper claimed its purpose was to reconnoitre roads for military needs, and a report in the foreign press claimed that Lashevich and Boriskin had taken 2 million gold rubles to the Mongols to organise an uprising. On the same trip the car they were travelling in crashed and overturned; Boriskin was hurt most and Lashevich was lightly wounded. The researcher Krotova stresses that these rumours and versions are not confirmed by other sources and that Lashevich's role in the events remains unclear.

His sudden death in late August 1928 gave rise to rumours about the circumstances and even the dating. Most reference works give 30 August, while TASS reported that he died at 4:40 on 31 August 1928 with members of the CER Board present. Officially Gekker announced on 1 September that Lashevich had died of heart disease, and a TASS correspondent described a gangrenous process of the left leg with death from insufficient cardiac activity on the ground of general intoxication. Practically nobody believed the official cause: versions of poisoning, the consequences of the car crash and excessive drinking immediately arose, and some modern authors state that he committed suicide. Another account, transmitted by the American consul in Harbin, Hanson, to the US State Department on 30 August 1928, describes a conference under Lashevich's chairmanship at the Soviet consulate-general on 14-16 August; the documents he took home in a briefcase disappeared, he felt unwell at the news, a doctor diagnosed an exacerbation of heart failure, treatment failed and he died two weeks later. His body was taken to Leningrad, where the funeral was held on the Field of Mars with an artillery salute fired from the Peter and Paul Fortress; in the middle of the 1930s the tombstone there was removed but was later restored.