Grigory Yakovlevich Sokolnikov

In April 1917 Sokolnikov returned to Russia on the 'sealed train' that carried Lenin and other Bolsheviks across Germany. He was elected to the Moscow party committee, backed Lenin's call for a second revolution, and when Lenin went into hiding in July he moved to Petrograd, where he and Stalin were given joint control of the Bolshevik newspapers.

His position that year rested on a line running back through his emigration. He opposed the First World War on internationalist grounds, helped organize a bureau of party-minded Bolshevik foreign groups in Switzerland, and contributed during the war to Nashe Slovo, the newspaper edited by Trotsky. According to the Russian-language article, he belonged to the group of party-minded or non-factional Bolsheviks whom Lenin called 'conciliators' and often met Lenin, who valued him; the label and the Lenin valuation are attributed to that article.

At the VI Party Congress of August 1917 Sokolnikov was elected to the Bolshevik Central Committee. He served on the executive committee of the Petrograd Soviet and on the VTsIK, and was a member of the party's political bureau created to prepare the armed insurrection. After the Bolsheviks took power he sat on the new VTsIK and edited Pravda.

In October 1917 he was selected as one of seven members of a 'Political Bureau,' forerunner of the later Politburo, alongside Lenin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Trotsky, Stalin and Bubnov. This body never met: Lenin and Zinoviev were in hiding and Zinoviev and Kamenev opposed the planned insurrection, and Trotsky called it 'completely impractical.' This is the earliest office-bearing phase of Sokolnikov's career, and the two existing sections, on Brest-Litovsk in 1918 and the chervonets of 1922-1924, do not cover it.

At 17:50 on 3 March 1918, Grigory Sokolnikov signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk on behalf of Soviet Russia, the most humiliating diplomatic document in early Bolshevik history. Russia surrendered territory containing 34% of the former empire's population, 54% of its industrial land, and 89% of its coal mines.

Sokolnikov had first arrived at Brest-Litovsk as part of the delegation led by Adolph Joffe. Leon Trotsky later took over, pursuing a 'no war, no peace' strategy designed to stall while Europe's proletariat stirred. The strategy collapsed in February 1918 when Germany resumed its offensive against near-empty Soviet trenches. Lenin forced the Central Committee to accept the German ultimatum, telling them 'you must sign this shameful peace in order to save the world revolution.' Trotsky resigned as foreign commissar.

Sokolnikov, named to head the new delegation, entered the conference and declared: 'We are going to sign immediately the treaty presented to us as an ultimatum but at the same time refuse to enter into any discussion of its terms.' The German side was stunned. The Soviet delegates signed without negotiation, without protest: a short, cold ceremony that extracted Russia from the world war and bought the Bolsheviks breathing space. The treaty was annulled by Germany's surrender in November 1918, but Sokolnikov's name remained tied to this act of brutal, calculating necessity.

In 1922, amid a currency system shattered by civil war, Finance Commissar Sokolnikov took a bold step. He introduced a new gold-backed currency, the chervonets, and crushed hyperinflation through fiscal balance and central bank independence. By the end of 1924 the Soviet ruble was stable, providing the monetary foundation for the NEP market economy. Sokolnikov's reform exemplified the Soviet state's capacity to appropriate capitalist instruments (the gold standard, austerity, a balanced budget) and make them serve socialist construction. But after 1926 he collided with Stalin's forced industrialization line and was sidelined, then convicted at a Moscow trial and killed in custody in 1939.