The Man Lenin Chose to Spread Revolution Across Europe

[00:00:05]September the 11th, 1941.

[00:00:08]A forest outside the Russian city of Oryol.

[00:00:12]German troops are weeks away.

[00:00:15]157 political prisoners are being led out to be shot.

[00:00:20]Six days earlier, Lavrentiy Beria had signed the order.

[00:00:25]One of those prisoners is 68 years old.

[00:00:29]Three years earlier, he'd already stood trial for his life and been spared.

[00:00:34]Sentenced instead to 20 years of hard labor.

[00:00:39]Today, there's no courtroom. No sentence to hand down.

[00:00:43]Just an order and a forest.

[00:00:47]His name is Christian Rakovsky.

[00:00:50]More than 20 years before this morning, Vladimir Lenin gave this man a job.

[00:00:56]Take the revolution that had just seized one country and start moving it across the borders of the rest of Europe.

[00:01:06]He's born in 1873 in Kotel, a Bulgarian market town still under Ottoman rule.

[00:01:13]He spends his 20s and 30s doing one thing over and over in country after country.

[00:01:20]Organizing, getting expelled, and organizing again somewhere else.

[00:01:26]Geneva, Berlin, Bucharest, Sofia, St. Petersburg.

[00:01:35]By the time he's in his 30s, he's been thrown out of five different countries for it.

[00:01:40]He works as a journalist with contacts in every socialist party in the Balkans.

[00:01:45]In July of 1915, in the middle of the First World War, he turns those contacts into an actual organization, the Revolutionary Balkan Social Democratic Labor Federation.

[00:01:58]Built with the Bulgarian socialist Vasil Kolarov to link the left wings of the Romanian, Bulgarian, Serbian, and Greek socialist parties into one coordinated body.

[00:02:13]Rakovsky becomes its first secretary.

[00:02:16]When Romania joins the war on the Entente side in August of 1916, Rakovsky comes under suspicion.

[00:02:25]The following month, he's imprisoned as a suspected German spy.

[00:02:29]He isn't freed until May the 1st, 1917, when the Russian army lets him go in the name of the revolution, they tell him.

[00:02:40]October 1917, the Bolsheviks take power in Petrograd.

[00:02:46]Rakovsky, now living in Russia, joins them and starts pushing for a Bolshevik government in Romania, the country that had jailed him again and again.

[00:02:56]Lenin backs it.

[00:02:59]By December, Rakovsky is stationed on the Romanian border waiting for a signal to cross.

[00:03:05]The signal doesn't come the way anyone plans.

[00:03:09]Bolshevik organizers inside Romania are arrested before the uprising can start and the plan collapses.

[00:03:17]In Petrograd, the response is to detain Romania's own diplomatic staff, the ambassador and his delegation, as leverage for the release of the prisoners taken in Romania.

[00:03:30]Trotsky, running Soviet foreign policy at the time, tells the Romanian government it can hand the prisoners back or watch Moscow start actively supporting Romanian communists on Russian soil.

[00:03:44]No Bolshevik government comes out of it.

[00:03:47]In January of 1919, as the Red Army pushes into Ukraine, Lenin doesn't send an administrator to run it.

[00:03:55]He sends Rakovsky to head the entire Soviet Ukrainian government.

[00:04:01]Trotsky will later call him the soul and the true chief of Ukraine.

[00:04:08]Rakovsky doesn't treat it like a country to be governed so much as a base to operate from.

[00:04:14]He calls Ukraine, in his own words, a decisive factor in world revolution.

[00:04:21]As a member of the Southwestern Front's Military Council, he's tied directly to the 1920 Red Army push into Poland.

[00:04:29]An offensive that isn't really about Poland.

[00:04:33]Soviet strategists at the time see Poland as a land bridge.

[00:04:37]Beyond Warsaw is Germany, the industrial heart of Europe, and the place every serious Bolshevik believes the revolution actually has to reach for any of this to last.

[00:04:50]In March of 1919, 2 months into the Ukraine job, Rakovsky becomes a founding member of the Communist International, the Comintern.

[00:05:01]It's a standing organization headquartered in Moscow, built specifically to coordinate revolution across borders.

[00:05:09]He represents the same Balkan Federation he'd built 4 years earlier.

[00:05:14]The Polish campaign fails, too.

[00:05:17]The Red Army is stopped short of Warsaw and pushed back.

[00:05:21]Two attempts at exporting the revolution beyond Russia's old imperial borders, two failures.

[00:05:29]The country every serious Bolshevik strategist actually cares about is Germany, industrialized, organized, sitting in the middle of Europe.

[00:05:40]In October of 1923, the German Communist Party plans an uprising coordinated with Moscow and calls it off at the last minute.

[00:05:51]The order to stand down doesn't reach the city of Hamburg in time.

[00:05:56]Hamburg's workers rise alone and are crushed alone.

[00:06:01]Historians call it the German October.

[00:06:05]It's remembered as the last real chance the Bolsheviks had to spread the revolution to a major European power by force.

[00:06:14]That same year, Rakovsky is pulled out of Ukraine. Officially, it's a promotion. He becomes Soviet envoy to Britain, then ambassador to France from October of 1925.

[00:06:27]In practice, his job changes completely.

[00:06:31]He spends the next several years not spreading revolution into Europe, but negotiating with the governments of Europe instead.

[00:06:38]Diplomatic recognition, unpaid tsarist era debts, trade deals.

[00:06:45]At one point, he arranges Soviet orders with British manufacturers worth $75 million on paper that collapse when Moscow won't actually pay cash.

[00:06:57]Trotsky still calls him the ambassador of the revolution.

[00:07:02]Rakovsky's own assessment of the men he now negotiates with instead of overthrowing, "The diplomats," he says, "take three steps backward every time we approach them."

[00:07:15]Lenin dies in January of 1924.

[00:07:19]Within a few years, Stalin's version of Soviet strategy has a name, socialism in one country.

[00:07:26]Consolidate, industrialize, defend the Soviet Union first.

[00:07:32]Treat the idea of imminent European revolution as a dangerous distraction, rather than the actual point of the project.

[00:07:40]Rakovsky joins Trotsky's left opposition and goes after Stalin's bureaucracy directly. The same bureaucracy he'd already condemned in one of his last official acts as head of Ukraine.

[00:07:53]Dead bureaucratic centralization, which is synonymous with tyranny.

[00:07:59]By October of 1927, he's persona non grata in France, recalled for signing a Trotskyist opposition platform that calls for renewed revolutionary agitation abroad.

[00:08:12]Two months later, at the party's own congress, he tries to speak and is heckled and interrupted 57 times.

[00:08:21]By the end of the year, he's expelled from the party and exiled.

[00:08:25]First Astrakhan, then Saratov, then Barnaul, out past the Urals, a place he calls a hole in the barren cold ground.

[00:08:37]By now, Rakovsky is one of the last major Trotskyists still refusing to break with Trotsky.

[00:08:45]In February of 1934, with Hitler already in power next door, Rakovsky breaks.

[00:08:52]He telegraphs his submission to Stalin.

[00:08:55]Trotsky calls it purely formal, a technicality.

[00:08:59]Rakovsky writes a piece for Pravda, literally titled "There Should Be No Mercy", calling his former comrades agents of the Gestapo.

[00:09:09]It buys him his freedom, a post in the health ministry, and in 1935, one more diplomatic posting as ambassador to Japan.

[00:09:20]It buys him three years.

[00:09:24]In the autumn of 1937, at the height of Stalin's Great Purge, they come for him.

[00:09:30]Trotsky later reports that Rakovsky was held 18 hours without food or rest while his own house was searched.

[00:09:40]In March of 1938, he's put in the dock alongside Nikolai Bukharin, former Premier Alexei Rykov, and 18 others.

[00:09:50]21 defendants in total in what history calls the trial of the 21.

[00:09:56]The charges: conspiring since 1918 to assassinate Lenin and Stalin, plotting with Germany and Japan to carve up the Soviet Union, murdering the writer Maxim Gorky by poison.

[00:10:12]Rakovsky confesses to all of it, including to being a spy for Japan.

[00:10:18]3 years earlier, that same government had sent him to Tokyo as its ambassador.

[00:10:24]In his final statement, Rakovsky describes his life splitting into two periods, an honest one, and then, in his own words, a dark period.

[00:10:36]The period of my criminal deeds.

[00:10:39]Of the 21 men on trial, 18 are executed.

[00:10:43]Rakovsky isn't one of them.

[00:10:46]He's sentenced to 20 years of hard labor instead, one of three men in that courtroom who get to keep breathing.

[00:10:54]It will not save him.

[00:10:56]September the 11th, 1941.

[00:11:00]Nazi Germany has invaded the Soviet Union, and Stalin's secret police are pulling back from the front.

[00:11:07]They don't want to leave political prisoners behind for the Germans to find or free.

[00:11:13]157 of them, out of roughly 5,000 held at Oryol prison, are marked for execution.

[00:11:21]Rakovsky is one of them.

[00:11:24]So is Olga Kameneva, Trotsky's own sister and the widow of another purged Bolshevik, Lev Kamenev.

[00:11:33]There's no trial this time, no confession to extract. Stalin doesn't need one. He already has a signature and a list.

[00:11:42]Rakovsky, 68 years old, not even 4 years into a 20-year sentence, is taken into the forest and shot.

[00:11:52]For nearly 50 years, that's where his story stops.

[00:11:56]Not just killed, erased.

[00:11:59]It isn't until 1988, under Gorbachev, that the Soviet government reopens the case and clears Rakovsky's name, along with Bukharin's.

[00:12:11]The confessions, the conspiracy, the spying for Japan, the same government that extracted those confessions ends up, decades later, admitting they were never true.

[00:12:25]Add up the borders this mission actually touched. Romania in 1917, Ukraine in 1919, aimed at Poland and beyond Poland at Germany.

[00:12:38]By 1923, revolution had crossed exactly one of those borders and stayed into Ukraine, which is to say, into what became the Soviet Union itself.

[00:12:51]Everywhere else, it failed.

[00:12:54]Rakovsky spent the rest of his career on the far side of that failure.

[00:12:59]First as the diplomat sent to manage the countries he couldn't convert.

[00:13:04]Then as one of the last men in the Soviet leadership still insisting the mission wasn't over.

[00:13:11]Stalin decided it was, and decided, in 1938, that the safest thing to do with the man Lenin had handed that mission to, was to make him confess to secretly serving the very kind of foreign power he'd spent two decades trying to overthrow.

[00:13:29]That's the story of Christian Rakovsky, the man Lenin chose to spread revolution across a continent, who spent his final years being punished for refusing to admit that it hadn't worked.