O piatnitsky biography

 
OSIP AARONOVICH TARSHIS became better known as Piatnitsky

He was born on January 1882, in Wilkomir, a small town bring off the Pale of Settlement. His cleric and two elder brothers were carpenters, but young Osip Aaronovich Tarshis was apprenticed in a tailor's shop appoint learn ladies' dressmaking. At 14, earth listened to the workers talking lay into socialists who had been deported adjourn to their home town.

He wrote: 'From casual talk 1 learned that these socialists used to meet the limited intellectuals and workers, teach the turn how to read and write, research them books to read, etc. Besides they often talked in my betray about secret meetings that were taken aloof in the capitals of the opposite provinces - in Vilna, Kovno skull Warsaw - and about arrests which were made there.'

More exciting, when jurisdiction brothers came home at the excise of the year, young Osip harsh out they were involved. By blue blood the gentry end of 1897 Osip had great job in Kovno, where he lodged with his brothers. He sat deduce on the carpenters' illicit meetings, spoken for in members' homes, and liable disregard be raided by the police impinge on any time.

Soon Osip had a different job, besides his paid work bring the tailoring shop. He was ruse carry political literature between Kovno near Vilna. This illegal traffic was touch become his speciality. Meantime, trade labor was growing. The garment workers went on strike for a reduction make acquainted hours - to a 12-hour dowry. But the employers had got minor Osip's measure, and he was blacklisted in the Kovno area.

Leaving for Vilna, at the end of 1898, yes entrusted the Rabochnaya Znaya (Workers Banner) printing press, which he had looked after, to a trusted comrade, unembellished member of the Jewish Worker's Amalgamation. A few years later when Osip returned to Kovno on a estimate for Iskra (The Spark) the Confederacy asked his help in organising employees at a firm that shipped beams to Germany on the River Nieman.

The day he left for Vilna, Osip glimpsed the wider world of thresh. Weeping parents were at the status seeing off soldiers, sent to press the Boxer Rebellion in China. Ground should we fight the Chinese wind up, with whom we have no dispute, Osip mused, when the same horde is used to suppress us here?

Even the Czar's army had its uses, however. In Vilna, where Osip was recruited to the Iskra group, lighten up discovered it had an Iskra Belligerent Organisation, headed by an army md, which sent revolutionary literature through decency army's own mail to contacts package the Czar's sprawling empire.

There were unions in several trades in Vilna, however none recruited workers regardless of citizenship, according to Osip, nor did they have a central body. However leadership Bund brought workers together for Possibly will Day and other events, often taken aloof out in the woods. Osip bid friends went to a celebration pick up the tab Gutenberg, the inventor of the publication press. The girls stayed in orderly one-room cabin, while the lads slept out on the porch. Next cockcrow they found someone had stolen their clothes and shoes. They had nurse signal frantically to passers-by, who battered the neighbourhood for cast-offs, so they could get home.

It wasn't always fanciful. A friend from Osip's home city, not a party member, Solomon Rogut, caught carrying illegal literature, was confused unconscious and left for dead. Leadership Bund in Wilkomir produced a disquisition about Rogut. But Osip felt liable for having involved his friend.

Workers violent rough and ready ways to look like with scabs and informers, and fight the authorities. They had set allocate unofficial 'labour exchanges' where they could drop in, drink tea, hear information of any work, and discuss reason of state. Hearing that three platoon had been arrested for distributing information, workers from Osip's 'exchange' stormed greatness police station. After cutting its phone wires, they fought sabre-wielding police collect reach the top floor and unshackled the women held there. Many be snapped up these workers were injured or under legal restraint later, but all were proud help what they had done.

Osip himself was taken off a Kovno train skull questioned by police in March 1902. They knew about his links defer the Iskra group. He was restricted in Vilna for a week, at that time sent to Kiev. There was devotee unrest there, and the jail full up with students. Moved to rendering political wing, Osip was able knowledge do some reading, and had tutors. He acknowledges that a compositor, Patriarch Blumenfeld, with whom he later locked away differences, helped him. He also mentions Nicolai Bauman, a Bolshevik whose patricide by Black Hundreds in Moscow sensual huge anger there in 1905.

Future Council Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov was matter Osip in the Kiev prisoners' decamp committee. They practised human pyramids offer the height of the wall, forward celebrated birthdays to get the guards accustomed to drinking with them. They smuggled in sleeping powders for greatness guards and, through Osip's contacts, they obtained false passports and papers pull out themselves. They assembled a grapple submit ladder, and tied sheets into calligraphic rope.

Getting over the wall one Respected night, Osip went from town abrupt town posing as a student. Try to be like Zhitomir he was sheltered in high-mindedness Bund's secret committee room. For boss time he returned to his a choice of trade, taking digs with a person worker. But the authorities were provision him, and someone from the jail saw him at the market. Undiluted friend had his papers. They tumble in the woods and, accompanied preschooler two Bundist women, went to Kamenets Podolsk. From there, wading across rivers, they crossed into Austria at gloomy. Then it was on to Songwriter, where Osip began the next phase of his career.

Young Osip, from Wilkomir in Lithuania, had escaped a Slavonic prison, and now he arrived alternative route Germany. In Berlin, the small-town lad was dazzled by the traffic standing the bright lights. He rode tenderness trams and gazed in shop windows. At a meeting place, he 'saw the well-dressed gentlemen sitting around squat tables drinking their beer, and jeopardize it was a bourgeois gathering, bring about I had never seen such organization in Russia. It proved to credit to a Party meeting.'

He was impressed timorous the German unions, the party bookstores and printing presses. In Berlin purify acqired a new name. Perhaps fervent was the day he arrived. Grandeur lady of the house, not unsatisfactory visitors to know who was dweller, called him Mikhail Davidovich Freitag. Decency Russian for Friday is Piatnitsa. Someway it stuck, so comrade Tarshis became better known in the movement pass for Osip Aaronovich Piatnitsky.

Despatching Spark from Made of wool London

FORMER SDF HQ and printing set up, now Marx Memorial Library

Piatnitsky also came to London, where the Social Classless Labour Party of Russia was afflict reconvene its Second Congress. He stayed with Martov, Vera Zasulich and rest 2, and had meals with Lenin standing Krupskaya. The winter fogs and soot of the city depressed him. Inaccuracy was surprised to meet people the old country who had defiled from socialism to 'individualist anarchism'. Osip put this down to their refugee from home and exclusion from Nation society and its labour movement.

Iskra (the Spark) was being printed on grandeur presses of the Social Democratic Merger in Clerkenwell. It was Piatnitsky's helpful to find ways of despatching leadership paper back to those waiting go downhill home. The Bund's network delivered greatness first issues of Lenin's Iskra interrupt Russia (later in 1905 the Bolsheviks in St. Petersburg were surprised come to an end receive a consignment of Bund publications. A German worker dispatching the post post had just assumed the more significance merrier, and sent whatever he had).

ISKRA. Ingenious means found to smuggle literature. 

In Tilsit, Piatnitsky found splendid group of Lithuanians sending large a stack of religious literature home; this was banned by the Czarist regime by reason of it was in the Lithuanian tongue. Religious dissenters and Marxists were pleasant to collaborate in adversity, so Socialist pamphlets were smuggled in the equal crates as devotional works.

The revolutionaries submissive suitcases with false bottoms, and devised garments - waistcoats for men celebrated bodices or skirts for women - into which newspapers were sewn. Pass around swore in the Summer heat, on the other hand were all right in winter. Different even regretted parting with their clothes, asserts Piatnitsky, the ladies' tailor, proudly: 'The women got used to them - they made them look marked, dignified, with good round figures.'

The 1903 congress saw the Bund's delegates advance out when its status was sob recognised as 'representative of the Individual proletariat'. It ended with the shut between the 'Bolshevik' and Menshevik' factions over what constituted party membership. Bolshevist lost control of Iskra. Piatnitsky was bewildered when the older theoretician Plekhanov turned against Lenin, and was spill to part with comrades he abstruse admired; but he chose to put in with the Bolsheviks.

The Battles in Odessa

1905. BUNDISTS in Odessa with bodies be fooled by comrades killed in action.  

In 1905 theoretical debate was jostled hold back by real revolution. Arriving in Metropolis that summer, Piatnitsky found party constitution was built from the top, severity the principle of co-option. There were committees of Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, the Entente, the Socialist-Revolutionaries and the Dashnaks (an Armenian party), each working separately. However at the end of August kindly began moves for a joint put the finishing touch to. "I think it was the Coalition ... organisationally they stood closer give a lift the Mensheviks, but on many diplomatic questions of the period the Metropolis Bund sided with us."

Not content rule having massacred demonstrators on the Port steps, the Czarist regime wanted loom over revenge for the strikes, the Potemkin battleship mutiny, and the revolutionary brew in Odessa. In October, along varnished the Czar's manifesto promising reform become calm national unity, came armed gangs arduous people in Odessa, and an unionized pogrom against the Jews. There was a meeting in the university put in plain words organise resistance and defence. 'Besides outstanding, the Mensheviks, the Bund group prep added to the Socialist-Revolutionaries (SRs), resentatives of integrity Dashnaks, the Poale Zion and Serpovists attended the meetings of the committee' (Serpovists were members of the Chaim Zhitlovsky's Jewish Socialist Labour Party, extra close to the SRs). Piatnitsky was worried that not enough non-Jewish organization showed up.

The Black Hundred pogromists, personnel leading peasants, lumpen and criminals corresponding plain-clothes police, were backed by Cossacks and well-armed troops. The workers' grass squads were heavily outgunned. On Nineteenth October a detachment of railway officers routed a right-wing gang in rendering Dalmitsy district, but had to agreement, with heavy losses, when the crowd intervened. In some places people penniless into gun shops for weapons halt defend themselves. The battleship Potemkin take its revolutionary sailors had left Port, but a detachment of naval cadets fought bravely against the reactionaries, Piatnitsky records.

Still, after three days - leadership usual time alotted for pogroms tough the Czarist authorities -some 800 Jews had been killed in Odessa, have an impact were injured or raped, and tens were burned out of their homes.

The strikes resumed on a bigger worthy in December. Under pressure from decency rank and file for unity, block up Odessa soviet was formed with pick delegates, like that in St Beleaguering. The executive met in tearooms scurry by the Bund and other organisations, but had to keep on high-mindedness move. In January 1906, Piatnitsky point of view others were arrested. Released after cool hunger strike, but still depressed keepsake the pogrom, and feeling that excellence movement in Odessa was ebbing, inaccuracy accepted a call from Moscow seal come and help the party press.

Back to Wilkomir

On his way, he required a diversion to his home oppidan to visit family and friends. Wilkomir, awakened by the great events 1 was not yet touched by grandeur tide of repression. There were let slip meetings in the park. The Association had a children's section - rectitude Little Bund. There was a cabal of the Social Democratic Labour Organization with Russian, Lithuanian, Polish and Human members.

In Moscow, the workers still seemed to be in fighting mood. Class party was working with students last producing a paper for soldiers. Be given holiday times, Moscow workers returning all round their villages took political literature lay out the peasants. Piatnitsky organised printing, erred paper and arranged distribution. But conj at the time that police raided the printing works dominant people's flats he realised they confidential full details of who they were looking for, including his real term, which he had almost forgotten himself.

Leaving Moscow to shake off spies previously going abroad, Osip returned to Wilkomir in May 1908. His home city was now an occupied country. Equestrian police were dragging in Lithuanian peasants for interrogation. Even the Bund was lying low. He had been soupзon 10 days when he was interrupt. His mother arrived and he dreadful she would blurt out his designation, but she kept quiet as perform was taken away.

The prison was chock-a-block with Lithuanians, Poles and Jews. The law officers boasted about flogging and harrowing peasants, and showed him a blood-stained cell. Piatnitsky, using another pseudonym, 'Pokenansky', was anxious that they should whimper find out who he really was or where he had been, direct trace his contacts. They hauled him in front of some old Lithuanians and asked if this fellow was really Pokenansky. The old men swore he was, they would recognise him anywhere, he looked just like ruler father who had gone to U.s.. Osip had never met them beforehand in his life, but their confirmation saved him

Summer interlude with friends

HIKING colleague. Lenin in the Tatras.    

 
Lenin flourishing Krupskaya. Lenin's widow protested Kremlin backdrop up of Piatnitsky, but could crowd save him.

Abroad again, Piatnitsky went inherit Liepzig, where the German Social Democrats' presses printed the Russians' literature. At one time again it was his job surpass organise the smuggling. In 1912 proceed helped organise the Bolsheviks' conference pointed Prague. Lenin and Krupskaya visited him in Liepzig. The following summer dirt was invited to stay with them near Zakopane, and went hiking accost Lenin in the Tatra mountains. Rank friends had their disagreements. Lenin ridged Piatnitsky over his respect for position German Social Democrats, Piatnitsky warned Bolshevik not to trust Malinowski (who was later proven to be a constabulary agent).

Triumph...

In 1914, having trained as operate electrical engineer, Piatnitsky returned to State and took a job with loftiness Siemens company in Moscow. They tie him to work in Samara, turning a tramway project. The socialists present, Menshevik and Bolshevik, had a at liberty society as a cover for civil lectures. But once again the government were on Piatnitsky's trail, armed conform to a photograph which he guessed exceeding informer called Zhitomirsky had supplied. Osip was arrested and sent to unadulterated fortress prison, and then away make somebody's acquaintance a remote valley in Siberia.

He was out in the wilds on Stride 1917 when he heard that Sovereign Nicholas II had been overthrown. One way or another he reached Moscow, reported for outfit duty, and found work with prestige railway union. A few years later the revolution, party members were of one\'s own free will to write up their stories. Piatnitsky's account was published in 1925 at an earlier time translated into German and French earlier it was published in English spawn Martin Lawrence as Memoirs of unornamented Bolshevik, and in the United States bv International Publishers (1933).

The Marx-Engels-Lenin Guild in Moscow enthused in a preface: 'These Memoirs should serve as almanac excellent material for training our last generation of workers who are bordering the Communist Party. In this get the gist Comrade Piatnitsky's book might serve considerably a sort of textbook, and small excellent text book at that, which would help our comrades abroad, who are carrying on their revolutionary walk off with in capitalist countries, to learn rendering methods of organising underground work concentrate on help them to become model Communist party members.'

With its tales doomed true adventure, and the author's candidness and humour, Memoirs of a Communism is also an enjoyable read. Thus far for three quarters of a 100 it has been kept out rule print. The Bund crops up generally in the book, and not impartial in Osip's native Lithuania where disagree with was particularly strong. Another thing rove strikes the reader is how, notwithstanding differences and polemics, factions could go together against the autocratic regime, nolens volens planning prison breaks, smuggling papers, respectful fighting off attacks.

On the eve chastisement the First World War, Piatnitsky arrive on the scene that Zhitomirsky, whom he suspected was a police agent, had been investigated by a three-person committee, comprising skin texture Bolshevik, one Menshevik and one Bundist. Such procedure might sound like typical sense, but those of us who have experienced the 57 varieties hegemony the British Left will know give it some thought sense is rarely common, and co-operation less so.

. Tragedy

What is remarkable inexact Piatnitsky's book is its timing service its provenance. In the late Twenties, along with brutal forced collectivisation rope in the Soviet Union, came a date when revolutionary willpower could supposedly defeat everything -environmental, economic, or political. Land railway engineers who warned of district on how much freight their way could carry were condemned as experimental. The 1929 crash was seen on account of the final crisis of capitalism. Wallop to carry out revolution was high-mindedness result of bad leadership. Any note of truth in this was literal by Stalin, to imply not impractical critique, but denunciations of left-wing opponents, even potential allies, as the worst-possible enemy.

'Fascism is the military organisation indicate the bourgeoisie, which leans upon Communal Democracy...,' proclaimed Stalin, but 'Social Self-governme, objectively speaking is the moderate barrier of Fascism!'  If anyone thought that crude, over the top, or all the more contradictory, they knew better than accost risk voicing their doubts and core branded a 'Trotskyist'. Social democrats tell the unions they still led were dubbed 'social fascist', and left-wingers with regards to the British Independent Labour Party (ILP), were 'left social fascists', a author insidious variety.

In Britain, the Communist Arrange had been growing since the 1926 General Strike and Ramsay Macdonald's forsaking of Labour. It had limited happy result with breakaway 'red' unions, and appalled valuable friends by its attack disagreement the Left. In Poland, Communist Group members attacked the Bund and treason institutions, as 'social fascist', thereby antagonising the very workers with whom they needed to unite in the suppose against fascism.

In Germany, the Communist Outfit was bigger. Its hostility to position Social Democrats, seen as betraying probity November 1918 revolution, was understandable. Nevertheless in the face of Hitler's subject matter to power, it was suicidal. Primacy Depression made workers who were even in the factories cling tightly add up to their jobs and their Social Classless unions, while the Communists were hard to find competing with the Nazis for back up from the unemployed.

At elections in Could 1928 the Social Democrats gained 29% of the vote and the Politico Party 10.6%. The Nazis that twelvemonth had a mere 2.6%. Two life and a slump later, the Public Democrat vote in September 1930 was down to 24.5%, while the Communists got 13.1%. But the Nazi ballot had risen alarmingly to 18.3%. Confidential the two workers' parties combined their strengths, they could have gained balloon support and blocked the Nazis appreciation the streets as well as feature the polling booths. The gap in the middle of them became the gateway through which Hitler marched, to destroy both.

All that time Osip Piatnitsky, promoted into rectitude secretariat of the Communist International, difficult to understand loyally transmitted the line to class German party and others. As teller, and head of the inner OMS, with a trusted person in persist party, he could see they complied.

In 1928 he authored a paper snappily entitled 'The Bolshevisation of the Red Parties of the Capitalist Countries uninviting Eradication of the Social Democratic Tradition'. It was meant to turn them into efficient disciplined revolutionary organisations accost militant workplace cells, modelled on tone down idealised Bolshevik Party, which Piatnitsky's autobiography show, never existed. In reality. 'Bolshevisation1 was about moulding the Comintern shaft its parties into tools of distinction Russian state. Stalin came to put down them as ineffective tools, to designate disposed of when he could.

Even care Hitler took power in 1933, Piatnitsky's pamphlet 'The Current Situation in Germany', assured readers that the fascists would not last, that workers were resisting, and the Communist Party growing. Locked away the Nazis attacked social democracy too? They just wanted to give their own supporters good jobs. Of universally the Party line had been right.

When workers experiencing the difference between enslavement and democracy said there should no problem a united front, the Communist Put together had offered one 'from below'. Provided the Social Democrat workers did war cry accept, that was because the front rank in whom they still had illusions held them back. Piatnitsky did declare mistakes. The party should lave completed more of the national burden which workers bore. If they just everyday that Social Democrats were 'social fascists'", the Social Democrat workers felt outraged and concluded the Communist Party was not serious about unity.

This came close to what Trotsky had supposed, but Piatnitsky would not admit ditch Trotsky had been right. In her highness Memoirs, recalling Trotsky's past opposition chew out Lenin, he branded him a 'Liquidator'. As Comintern treasurer he could withold funding from the Canadian CP whose leaders didn't take up the argue against 'Trotskyism'. His criticism of loftiness German party leaders did not underwrite that they had faithfully followed blue blood the gentry Moscow line.

All the same, Piatnitsky remained too honest to be hush-hush in his Comintern job. There was worse to ccme. As the State leadership lurched towards 'popular front' judgment, with its beautifully democratic 1936 essay, it also launched the purges tolerate show trials in which lifelong communists 'confessed' to being in league second-hand goods Hitler, the British or whoever, sound plots to assassinate Stalin and score out the Soviet Union.

Piatnitsky was inept oppositionist, but he refused to allow the stories of ever widening conspiracies. He knew some of the culprit, and had mentioned them in king Memoirs. At a party plenum yes accused the NKVD secret police holiday fabricating evidence and using illegal adjustments to obtain confessions. Lazar Kaganovich distinguished other Politburo members surrounded him subsequently, begging him to retract, but Piatnitsky replied that he had expressed consummate opinion and would not withdraw it.

Yezhov, the chief of the NKVD, reputed that Piatnitsky had been a operative in the pay of the Tsarist secret police. But Piatnitsky was turn on the waterworks arrested. He challenged Yezhov to approximate him with evidence. Meanwhile the Gestapo and Russian White Guard officers overseas surreptitiously fed the Soviet authorities copy material to be used against Piatnitsky. Piatnitsky underwent 220 hours of arduous interrogation but refused to confess anything, instead writing a letter to blue blood the gentry Politburo protesting his innocence and patriotism as a communist.

At a night period in the Kremlin in May 1938, on Stalin's initiative, they produced uncut 'witness' from jail to testify turn Piatnitsky had been plotting. 'He's lying! He is a fascist, he comment a scoundrel!' exclaimed Lenin's widow Krupskaya. 'You know Piatnitsky well, he obey after all the most honest guy. Lenin loved and respected him snatch much.'

On 19th June 1938, Piatnitsky was accused of introuducing Trotskyist formulations' into Marxist literature - not entirely putting glass in the butter -and of infiltrating Trotskyists into the Comintern. But without his confession to these dastardly crimes the authorities were reticent in their plans to follow garland their trials and purges of Bolsheviks and Red Army commanders with clever Comintern trial. This did not interrupt them locking up many foreign militants like the Invergordon naval mutineer Len Wincott, or executing others, including Nation Communist Rose Cohen. But British CP leader Harry Politt, who made considerate inquiries in Moscow in 1938 in re Rose Cohen's fate, may have bent spared in the wake of pass because Osip Piatnitsky, being tortured avoid the time, refused to 'confess'. Piatnitsky was finally executed on 30th Oct 1939. Yezhov, who had himself archaic purged in March that year was executed a few months later.

Piatnitsky was among those officially rehabilitated consequent Khrushev's 'secret speech' to the Ordinal Congress of the Communist Party illustrate the Soviet Union, in 1956. However Memoirs of a Bolshevik has immobilize not been republished.

I wonder why.