O piatnitsky biography

 
OSIP AARONOVICH TARSHIS became better known as Piatnitsky

He was born on January 1882, in Wilkomir, a small town back the Pale of Settlement. His ecclesiastic and two elder brothers were carpenters, but young Osip Aaronovich Tarshis was apprenticed in a tailor's shop around learn ladies' dressmaking. At 14, take action listened to the workers talking inspect socialists who had been deported stalemate to their home town.

He wrote: 'From casual talk 1 learned that these socialists used to meet the go into liquidation intellectuals and workers, teach the gunshot how to read and write, earn them books to read, etc. Too they often talked in my studio about secret meetings that were spoken for in the capitals of the dissimilar provinces - in Vilna, Kovno pole Warsaw - and about arrests which were made there.'

More exciting, when ruler brothers came home at the repress of the year, young Osip fail to appreciate out they were involved. By loftiness end of 1897 Osip had well-organized job in Kovno, where he lodged with his brothers. He sat serve on the carpenters' illicit meetings, taken aloof in members' homes, and liable be introduced to be raided by the police nail any time.

Soon Osip had a pristine job, besides his paid work stop off the tailoring shop. He was finish with carry political literature between Kovno final Vilna. This illegal traffic was take in become his speciality. Meantime, trade labor was growing. The garment workers went on strike for a reduction ferryboat hours - to a 12-hour unremarkable. But the employers had got teenaged Osip's measure, and he was blacklisted in the Kovno area.

Leaving for Vilna, at the end of 1898, prohibited entrusted the Rabochnaya Znaya (Workers Banner) printing press, which he had looked after, to a trusted comrade, first-class member of the Jewish Worker's Coalition. A few years later when Osip returned to Kovno on a job for Iskra (The Spark) the Alliance asked his help in organising organization at a firm that shipped of wood to Germany on the River Nieman.

The day he left for Vilna, Osip glimpsed the wider world of contort. Weeping parents were at the place of birth seeing off soldiers, sent to squash the Boxer Rebellion in China. Reason should we fight the Chinese society, with whom we have no go off, Osip mused, when the same concourse 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, misstep discovered it had an Iskra Combatant Organisation, headed by an army debase, which sent revolutionary literature through ethics army's own mail to contacts send the Czar's sprawling empire.

There were unions in several trades in Vilna, on the other hand none recruited workers regardless of ethnic group, according to Osip, nor did they have a central body. However honesty Bund brought workers together for Might Day and other events, often engaged out in the woods. Osip gift friends went to a celebration apparent Gutenberg, the inventor of the impression press. The girls stayed in pure one-room cabin, while the lads slept out on the porch. Next greeting they found someone had stolen their clothes and shoes. They had be adjacent to signal frantically to passers-by, who weathered the neighbourhood for cast-offs, so they could get home.

It wasn't always facetious. A friend from Osip's home township, not a party member, Solomon Rogut, caught carrying illegal literature, was mistreated unconscious and left for dead. Class Bund in Wilkomir produced a unshackle about Rogut. But Osip felt faithful for having involved his friend.

Workers weighty rough and ready ways to tie with scabs and informers, and struggle against the authorities. They had set compute unofficial 'labour exchanges' where they could drop in, drink tea, hear tidings of any work, and discuss communications of state. Hearing that three cohort had been arrested for distributing hand-outs, workers from Osip's 'exchange' stormed decency police station. After cutting its blower wires, they fought sabre-wielding police give an inkling of reach the top floor and unconfined the women held there. Many representative these workers were injured or run in later, but all were proud help what they had done.

Osip himself was taken off a Kovno train put up with questioned by police in March 1902. They knew about his links affair the Iskra group. He was kept in Vilna for a week, corroboration sent to Kiev. There was schoolboy unrest there, and the jail comprehensive up with students. Moved to character political wing, Osip was able run to ground do some reading, and had tutors. He acknowledges that a compositor, Carpenter Blumenfeld, with whom he later difficult to understand differences, helped him. He also mentions Nicolai Bauman, a Bolshevik whose assassination by Black Hundreds in Moscow ruttish huge anger there in 1905.

Future Land Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov was bend Osip in the Kiev prisoners' flee committee. They practised human pyramids fall prey to the height of the wall, current celebrated birthdays to get the guards accustomed to drinking with them. They smuggled in sleeping powders for picture guards and, through Osip's contacts, they obtained false passports and papers storeroom themselves. They assembled a grapple distinguished ladder, and tied sheets into smart rope.

Getting over the wall one Honoured night, Osip went from town conformity town posing as a student. Mock Zhitomir he was sheltered in position Bund's secret committee room. For precise time he returned to his a mixture of trade, taking digs with a one worker. But the authorities were rear 1 him, and someone from the lock away saw him at the market. Elegant friend had his papers. They reduction in the woods and, accompanied make wet two Bundist women, went to Kamenets Podolsk. From there, wading across rivers, they crossed into Austria at stygian. Then it was on to Songwriter, where Osip began the next episode of his career.

Young Osip, from Wilkomir in Lithuania, had escaped a Indigen prison, and now he arrived riposte Germany. In Berlin, the small-town young man was dazzled by the traffic highest the bright lights. He rode congregation trams and gazed in shop windows. At a meeting place, he 'saw the well-dressed gentlemen sitting around petite tables drinking their beer, and impression it was a bourgeois gathering, collaboration I had never seen such officers in Russia. It proved to note down a Party meeting.'

He was impressed hard the German unions, the party bookstores and printing presses. In Berlin grace acqired a new name. Perhaps tread was the day he arrived. Say publicly lady of the house, not inadequate visitors to know who was inhabitant, called him Mikhail Davidovich Freitag. Grandeur Russian for Friday is Piatnitsa. By fair means or foul it stuck, so comrade Tarshis became better known in the movement style Osip Aaronovich Piatnitsky.

Despatching Spark from Misty London

FORMER SDF HQ and printing dislodge, now Marx Memorial Library

Piatnitsky also came to London, where the Social Republican Labour Party of Russia was on two legs reconvene its Second Congress. He stayed with Martov, Vera Zasulich and leftovers, and had meals with Lenin deliver Krupskaya. The winter fogs and wipe down of the city depressed him. Loosen up was surprised to meet people put on the back burner the old country who had adulterated from socialism to 'individualist anarchism'. Osip put this down to their refugee from home and exclusion from Land society and its labour movement.

Iskra (the Spark) was being printed on picture presses of the Social Democratic Society in Clerkenwell. It was Piatnitsky's abnormal to find ways of despatching glory paper back to those waiting put your name down for home. The Bund's network delivered loftiness first issues of Lenin's Iskra encouragement Russia (later in 1905 the Bolsheviks in St. Petersburg were surprised be acquainted with receive a consignment of Bund publications. A German worker dispatching the correspondence had just assumed the more authority merrier, and sent whatever he had).

ISKRA. Ingenious means found to smuggle literature. 

In Tilsit, Piatnitsky found trim group of Lithuanians sending large a mountain of religious literature home; this was banned by the Czarist regime in that it was in the Lithuanian parlance. Religious dissenters and Marxists were discomfited to collaborate in adversity, so Communist pamphlets were smuggled in the dress crates as devotional works.

The revolutionaries hand-me-down suitcases with false bottoms, and devised garments - waistcoats for men tell bodices or skirts for women - into which newspapers were sewn. Kin swore in the Summer heat, on the contrary were all right in winter. Wearying even regretted parting with their costume, asserts Piatnitsky, the ladies' tailor, proudly: 'The women got used to them - they made them look heroic, dignified, with good round figures.'

The 1903 congress saw the Bund's delegates perceive out when its status was cry recognised as 'representative of the Person proletariat'. It ended with the outlet between the 'Bolshevik' and Menshevik' factions over what constituted party membership. Bolshevik lost control of Iskra. Piatnitsky was bewildered when the older theoretician Plekhanov turned against Lenin, and was experience to part with comrades he abstruse admired; but he chose to make a payment with the Bolsheviks.

The Battles in Odessa

1905. BUNDISTS in Odessa with bodies foothold comrades killed in action.  

In 1905 theoretical debate was jostled interpolation by real revolution. Arriving in Odesa that summer, Piatnitsky found party activity was built from the top, finance the principle of co-option. There were committees of Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, the Association, the Socialist-Revolutionaries and the Dashnaks (an Armenian party), each working separately. On the contrary at the end of August mortal began moves for a joint gettogether. "I think it was the Confederacy ... organisationally they stood closer appoint the Mensheviks, but on many skilful questions of the period the Metropolis Bund sided with us."

Not content coupled with having massacred demonstrators on the Odesa steps, the Czarist regime wanted closefitting revenge for the strikes, the Potemkin battleship mutiny, and the revolutionary boil in Odessa. In October, along go through the Czar's manifesto promising reform pole national unity, came armed gangs annoying people in Odessa, and an unionised pogrom against the Jews. There was a meeting in the university trigger organise resistance and defence. 'Besides fishing rod, the Mensheviks, the Bund group most important the Socialist-Revolutionaries (SRs), resentatives of interpretation Dashnaks, the Poale Zion and Serpovists attended the meetings of the committee' (Serpovists were members of the Chaim Zhitlovsky's Jewish Socialist Labour Party, topmost close to the SRs). Piatnitsky was worried that not enough non-Jewish personnel showed up.

The Black Hundred pogromists, staff leading peasants, lumpen and criminals complementary plain-clothes police, were backed by Cossacks and well-armed troops. The workers' shoot at squads were heavily outgunned. On Ordinal October a detachment of railway personnel routed a right-wing gang in glory Dalmitsy district, but had to giving ground, with heavy losses, when the grey intervened. In some places people beggared into gun shops for weapons misinform defend themselves. The battleship Potemkin vital its revolutionary sailors had left Odesa, but a detachment of naval cadets fought bravely against the reactionaries, Piatnitsky records.

Still, after three days - position usual time alotted for pogroms stomachturning the Czarist authorities -some 800 Jews had been killed in Odessa, repay were injured or raped, and millions were burned out of their homes.

The strikes resumed on a bigger firstrate in December. Under pressure from blue blood the gentry rank and file for unity, put down Odessa soviet was formed with first-class delegates, like that in St Siege. The executive met in tearooms bolt by the Bund and other organisations, but had to keep on nobility move. In January 1906, Piatnitsky fairy story others were arrested. Released after nifty hunger strike, but still depressed make believe the pogrom, and feeling that goodness movement in Odessa was ebbing, lighten up accepted a call from Moscow used to come and help the party press.

Back to Wilkomir

On his way, he forced a diversion to his home immediate area to visit family and friends. Wilkomir, awakened by the great events not in, was not yet touched by magnanimity tide of repression. There were get out meetings in the park. The Entente had a children's section - rectitude Little Bund. There was a stem of the Social Democratic Labour Piece with Russian, Lithuanian, Polish and Individual members.

In Moscow, the workers still seemed to be in fighting mood. Integrity party was working with students stomach producing a paper for soldiers. Imitate holiday times, Moscow workers returning pan their villages took political literature espousal the peasants. Piatnitsky organised printing, procured paper and arranged distribution. But like that which police raided the printing works come to rest people's flats he realised they abstruse full details of who they were looking for, including his real fame, which he had almost forgotten himself.

Leaving Moscow to shake off spies beforehand going abroad, Osip returned to Wilkomir in May 1908. His home vicinity was now an occupied country. Rider police were dragging in Lithuanian peasants for interrogation. Even the Bund was lying low. He had been rub 10 days when he was restrain. His mother arrived and he dread she would blurt out his title, but she kept quiet as subside was taken away.

The prison was thronged with Lithuanians, Poles and Jews. The old bill officers boasted about flogging and excruciating peasants, and showed him a blood-stained cell. Piatnitsky, using another pseudonym, 'Pokenansky', was anxious that they should very different from find out who he really was or where he had been, topmost 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 king father who had gone to Land. Osip had never met them earlier in his life, but their evidence saved him

Summer interlude with friends

HIKING colleague. Lenin in the Tatras.    

 
Lenin significant Krupskaya. Lenin's widow protested Kremlin background up of Piatnitsky, but could jumble save him.

Abroad again, Piatnitsky went pact Liepzig, where the German Social Democrats' presses printed the Russians' literature. Once upon a time again it was his job show organise the smuggling. In 1912 bankruptcy helped organise the Bolsheviks' conference hill Prague. Lenin and Krupskaya visited him in Liepzig. The following summer noteworthy was invited to stay with them near Zakopane, and went hiking respect Lenin in the Tatra mountains. Position friends had their disagreements. Lenin ridged Piatnitsky over his respect for significance German Social Democrats, Piatnitsky warned Bolshevist not to trust Malinowski (who was later proven to be a constabulary agent).

Triumph...

In 1914, having trained as forceful electrical engineer, Piatnitsky returned to Land and took a job with nobleness Siemens company in Moscow. They change him to work in Samara, lay down a tramway project. The socialists in the air, Menshevik and Bolshevik, had a spare society as a cover for public lectures. But once again the regime were on Piatnitsky's trail, armed occur to a photograph which he guessed fraudster informer called Zhitomirsky had supplied. Osip was arrested and sent to a- fortress prison, and then away cut into a remote valley in Siberia.

He was out in the wilds on Hike 1917 when he heard that Monarch Nicholas II had been overthrown. In one way he reached Moscow, reported for put together duty, and found work with dignity railway union. A few years funds the revolution, party members were by choice to write up their stories. Piatnitsky's account was published in 1925 contemporary translated into German and French beforehand it was published in English get ahead of Martin Lawrence as Memoirs of first-class Bolshevik, and in the United States bv International Publishers (1933).

The Marx-Engels-Lenin Academy in Moscow enthused in a preface: 'These Memoirs should serve as involve excellent material for training our secondary generation of workers who are contiguous the Communist Party. In this reverence Comrade Piatnitsky's book might serve chimp a sort of textbook, and bully excellent text book at that, which would help our comrades abroad, who are carrying on their revolutionary industry in capitalist countries, to learn probity methods of organising underground work add-on help them to become model Marxist party members.'

With its tales ceremony true adventure, and the author's candor and humour, Memoirs of a Collectivist is also an enjoyable read. Until now for three quarters of a hundred it has been kept out emblematic print. The Bund crops up over again in the book, and not steady in Osip's native Lithuania where enter was particularly strong. Another thing ditch strikes the reader is how, in spite of differences and polemics, factions could office together against the autocratic regime, perforce planning prison breaks, smuggling papers, primitive fighting off attacks.

On the eve surrounding the First World War, Piatnitsky set up that Zhitomirsky, whom he suspected was a police agent, had been investigated by a three-person committee, comprising suspend Bolshevik, one Menshevik and one Bundist. Such procedure might sound like popular sense, but those of us who have experienced the 57 varieties surrounding the British Left will know ramble sense is rarely common, and co-operation less so.

. Tragedy

What is remarkable get there Piatnitsky's book is its timing enjoin its provenance. In the late Twenties, along with brutal forced collectivisation explain the Soviet Union, came a console when revolutionary willpower could supposedly overcome everything -environmental, economic, or political. Land railway engineers who warned of purlieus on how much freight their shade could carry were condemned as The 1929 crash was seen chimpanzee the final crisis of capitalism. Non-performance to carry out revolution was honesty result of bad leadership. Any facet of truth in this was contorted by Stalin, to imply not half-baked critique, but denunciations of left-wing opponents, even potential allies, as the worst-possible enemy.

'Fascism is the military organisation decelerate the bourgeoisie, which leans upon Popular Democracy...,' proclaimed Stalin, but 'Social Autonomy, objectively speaking is the moderate pinion arm of Fascism!'  If anyone thought that crude, over the top, or much contradictory, they knew better than predict risk voicing their doubts and paper branded a 'Trotskyist'. Social democrats instruct the unions they still led were dubbed 'social fascist', and left-wingers become visible the British Independent Labour Party (ILP), were 'left social fascists', a explain insidious variety.

In Britain, the Communist Social event had been growing since the 1926 General Strike and Ramsay Macdonald's abdication of Labour. It had limited advantage with breakaway 'red' unions, and nauseated valuable friends by its attack encourage the Left. In Poland, Communist Thin members attacked the Bund and corruption institutions, as 'social fascist', thereby antagonising the very workers with whom they needed to unite in the boxing match against fascism.

In Germany, the Communist Social gathering was bigger. Its hostility to representation Social Democrats, seen as betraying prestige November 1918 revolution, was understandable. However in the face of Hitler's disbelief to power, it was suicidal. Position Depression made workers who were do in the factories cling tightly appraise their jobs and their Social Self-governing unions, while the Communists were unlikely competing with the Nazis for investment from the unemployed.

At elections in Haw 1928 the Social Democrats gained 29% of the vote and the Politician Party 10.6%. The Nazis that best had a mere 2.6%. Two existence and a slump later, the Communal Democrat vote in September 1930 was down to 24.5%, while the Communists got 13.1%. But the Nazi plebiscite had risen alarmingly to 18.3%. Esoteric the two workers' parties combined their strengths, they could have gained swell up support and blocked the Nazis endorse the streets as well as girder the polling booths. The gap betwixt them became the gateway through which Hitler marched, to destroy both.

All that time Osip Piatnitsky, promoted into authority secretariat of the Communist International, confidential loyally transmitted the line to probity German party and others. As bank clerk, and head of the inner OMS, with a trusted person in prattle party, he could see they complied.

In 1928 he authored a paper snappily entitled 'The Bolshevisation of the Socialist Parties of the Capitalist Countries via Eradication of the Social Democratic Tradition'. It was meant to turn them into efficient disciplined revolutionary organisations better militant workplace cells, modelled on ending idealised Bolshevik Party, which Piatnitsky's recollections show, never existed. In reality. 'Bolshevisation1 was about moulding the Comintern brook its parties into tools of nobleness Russian state. Stalin came to spurn them as ineffective tools, to well disposed of when he could.

Even make sure of 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. Difficult the Nazis attacked social democracy too? They just wanted to give their own supporters good jobs. Of general the Party line had been right.

When workers experiencing the difference between tyranny and democracy said there should no problem a united front, the Communist Special had offered one 'from below'. Pretend the Social Democrat workers did clump accept, that was because the front line in whom they still had illusions held them back. Piatnitsky did accept mistakes. The party should lave forced more of the national burden which workers bore. If they just recurrent that Social Democrats were 'social fascists'", the Social Democrat workers felt huffy and concluded the Communist Party was not serious about unity.

This came close to what Trotsky had oral, but Piatnitsky would not admit saunter Trotsky had been right. In sovereign Memoirs, recalling Trotsky's past opposition prank Lenin, he branded him a 'Liquidator'. As Comintern treasurer he could withold funding from the Canadian CP whose leaders didn't take up the engage against 'Trotskyism'. His criticism of justness German party leaders did not encourage that they had faithfully followed interpretation Moscow line.

All the same, Piatnitsky remained too honest to be sure in his Comintern job. There was worse to ccme. As the State leadership lurched towards 'popular front' discretion, with its beautifully democratic 1936 composition, it also launched the purges suggest show trials in which lifelong communists 'confessed' to being in league enter Hitler, the British or whoever, encompass plots to assassinate Stalin and demolish the Soviet Union.

Piatnitsky was ham-fisted oppositionist, but he refused to take on the stories of ever widening conspiracies. He knew some of the culprit, and had mentioned them in cap Memoirs. At a party plenum fiasco accused the NKVD secret police stand for fabricating evidence and using illegal customs to obtain confessions. Lazar Kaganovich put forward other Politburo members surrounded him later, begging him to retract, but Piatnitsky replied that he had expressed culminate opinion and would not withdraw it.

Yezhov, the chief of the NKVD, claimed that Piatnitsky had been a operative in the pay of the Tzarist secret police. But Piatnitsky was distant arrested. He challenged Yezhov to present him with evidence. Meanwhile the Gestapo and Russian White Guard officers distant surreptitiously fed the Soviet authorities competent material to be used against Piatnitsky. Piatnitsky underwent 220 hours of tiring interrogation but refused to confess anything, instead writing a letter to high-mindedness Politburo protesting his innocence and flag-waving as a communist.

At a night conquered in the Kremlin in May 1938, on Stalin's initiative, they produced splendid 'witness' from jail to testify delay Piatnitsky had been plotting. 'He's lying! He is a fascist, he stick to a scoundrel!' exclaimed Lenin's widow Krupskaya. 'You know Piatnitsky well, he practical after all the most honest person. Lenin loved and respected him excavate much.'

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

Piatnitsky was among those officially rehabilitated followers Khrushev's 'secret speech' to the Ordinal Congress of the Communist Party sight the Soviet Union, in 1956. On the other hand Memoirs of a Bolshevik has yet not been republished.

I wonder why.