Ivar Smilga

Ivar Smilga was born in Aloja, Latvia in 1892. He joined the Bolsheviks and in 1917 he became chairman of the Regional Committee of the Russian Soviets in Helsingfors. His growing power was acknowledged when on 26th July, he became a member of the Bolshevik Central Committee. Other members included Lenin, Gregory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, Yakov Sverdlov, Joseph Stalin, Victor Nogin, Alexei Rykov, Nickolai Bukharin, Alexandra Kollontai, Felix Dzerzhinsky, Leon Trotsky, Moisei Uritsky, Andrey Bubnov and Grigori Sokolnikov.

Smilga was a loyal supporter of Lenin and was one of those who favoured the overthrow of the Provisional Government. He was described by other leaders as a "young firebrand". The opposition was led by Lev Kamenev led the opposition to Lenin's call for the overthrow of the government. In Pravda he disputed Lenin's assumption that "the bourgeois democratic revolution has ended," and warned against utopianism that would transform the "party of the revolutionary masses of the proletariat" into "a group of communist propagandists."

On 19th July, Alexander Kerensky gave orders for the arrest of leading Bolsheviks who were campaigning against the First World War. This included Lenin, Gregory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, Anatoli Lunacharsky, and Alexandra Kollontai. The Bolshevik headquarters at the Kshesinsky Palace, was also occupied by government troops. Lenin managed to escape and commented: "All hopes for a peaceful development of the Russian Revolution have definitely vanished. The objective situation is this: either a victory of the military dictatorship with all it implies, or a victory of the decisive struggle of the workers."

Lenin went into hiding in Helsingfors where he was protected by Smilga. On 12th September 1917, he took a message from Lenin to Petrograd. It included the following orders: "Without losing a single moment, organize the staff of the insurrectionary detachments; designate the forces; move the loyal regiments to the most important points; surround the Alexandrinsky Theater; occupy the Peter-Paul fortress; arrest the general staff and the government; move against the military cadets, the Savage Division, etc., such detachments as will die rather than allow the enemy to move to the center of the city; we must mobilize the armed workers, call them to a last desperate battle, occupy at once the telegraph and telephone stations, place our staff of the uprising at the central telephone station, connect it by wire with all the factories, the regiments, the points of armed fighting, etc. Of course, this is all by way of an example, to illustrate the idea that at the present moment it is impossible to remain loyal to the revolution without treating insurrection as an art."

Joseph Stalin read out the message. Nickolai Bukharin was one of those who attended the meeting: "We gathered and - I remember as though it were just now - began the session. Our tactics at the time were comparatively clear: the development of mass agitation and propaganda, the course toward armed insurrection, which could be expected from one day to the next.... The letter was written very forcefully and threatened us with every punishment. We all gasped. No one had yet put the question so sharply. No one knew what to do. Everyone was at a loss for a while. Then we deliberated and came to a decision. Perhaps this was the only time in the history of our party when the Central Committee unanimously decided to burn a letter of Comrade Lenin's. This instance was not publicized at the time."

Following the successful Russian Revolution Smilga lived with Stalin. According to Vyacheslav Molotov, a group of Bolsheviks lived together: "Stalin and I lived in the same apartment at that time. He was a bachelor, and so was I. It was a large apartment on the Petrograd side. I shared a room with Zalutsky, then there was Smilga with his wife, and Stalin joined us. It was a sort of commune we had there."

Smilga led the Seventh Army during the Russian Civil War. In March, 1919, General Alexander Kolchak captured Ufa and was posing a threat to Kazan and Samara. Smilga and Trotsky disagreed about the way to deal with Kolchak. "Vatzetis's point of view was that after our great successes against Kolchak we abstain from rushing too far into the East, to the other side of the Urals. He wanted the eastern front to stay at the mountains for the winter. This would have enabled us to withdraw a few divisions from the East and switch them to the South, where Denikin was getting more dangerous. I supported this plan. But it met with rigorous opposition from Kamenev, the commander of the eastern front and a colonel of the general staff in the Tsar's army, as well as from two members of the Military Council, both old Bolsheviks - Smilga and Lashevich. They insisted that Kolchak was so far defeated that only a few men were necessary to follow him, and that the most important thing was that he be prevented from getting a breathing-spell, because in that case he would recover during the winter and we would have to start the eastern campaign all over again in the spring." In 1921 Smilga also fought alongside Mikhail Tukhachevsky and the Fifth Army against the Polish Army of General Jozef Pilsudski.

In October 1923, Yuri Piatakov drafted a statement that was published under the name Platform of the 46 which criticized the economic policies of the party leadership and accused it of stifling the inner-party debate. It echoed the call made by Leon Trotsky, a week earlier, calling for a sharp change of direction by the party. The statement was also signed b Smilga, Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko, Andrey Bubnov, Ivan Smirnov, Lazar Kaganovich, Victor Serge, Evgenia Bosh and thirty-eight other leading Bolsheviks.

The statement included the following: "The extreme seriousness of the position compels us (in the interests of our Party, in the interests of the working class) to state openly that a continuation of the policy of the majority of the Politburo threatens grievous disasters for the whole Party. The economic and financial crisis beginning at the end of July of the present year, with all the political, including internal Party, consequences resulting from it, has inexorably revealed the inadequacy of the leadership of the Party, both in the economic domain, and especially in the domain of internal Party, relations."

The document then went on to complain about the lack of debate in the Communist Party: "Similarly in the domain of internal party relations we see the same incorrect leadership paralyzing and breaking up the Party; this appears particularly clearly in the period of crisis through which we are passing. We explain this not by the political incapacity of the present leaders of the Party; on the contrary, however much we differ from them in our estimate of the position and in the choice of means to alter it, we assume that the present leaders could not in any conditions fail to be appointed by the Party to the out-standing posts in the workers’ dictatorship. We explain it by the fact that beneath the external form of official unity we have in practice a one-sided recruitment of individuals, and a direction of affairs which is one-sided and adapted to the views and sympathies of a narrow circle. As the result of a Party leadership distorted by such narrow considerations, the Party is to a considerable extent ceasing to be that living independent collectivity which sensitively seizes living reality because it is bound to this reality with a thousand threads."

Isaac Deutscher, the author of Stalin (1949) has argued: "Among the signatories were: Piatakov, one of the two ablest leaders of the young generation mentioned in Lenin's testament, Preobrazhensky and Serebriakov, former secretaries of the Central Committee, Antonov-Ovseenko, the military leader of the October revolution, Srnirnov, Osinsky, Bubnov, Sapronov, Muralov, Drobnis, and others, distinguished leaders in the civil war, men of brain and character. Some of them had led previous oppositions against Lenin and Trotsky, expressing the malaise that made itself felt in the party as its leadership began to sacrifice first principles to expediency. Fundamentally, they were now voicing that same malaise which was growing in proportion to the party's continued departure from some of its first principles. It is not certain whether Trotsky directly instigated their demonstration." Lenin commented that Piatakov might be "very able but not to be relied upon in a serious political matter".

Smilga was vice-chairman of the Supreme Council of National Economy from 1921 and of the Government Planning Commission from 1924. Victor Serge met him during this period: "Smilga, an economist and former army leader who in 1917 had been Lenin's confidential agent in the Baltic fleet, was a fair-haired intellectual in his forties with spectacles, a chin beard, and thinning front hair, ordinary to look at and distinctly the armchair sort. He spoke for a whole evening in a little room to about fifty workers who could not move at all, so closely were they squeezed together. A Latvian giant with gingerish hair and an impassive face scrutinized all who came in. Smilga, sitting on a stool in the middle of the room, spoke, in an expert's tone and without one agitational phrase, of production, unemployment, grain and budgetary figures, and of the plan that we were hotly advocating. Not since the first days of the Revolution had the Party's leadership been seen in an atmosphere of poverty and simplicity like this, face-to-face with the militants of the rank and file."

In 1927 Smilga joined forces with Gregory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, Grigori Sokolnikov and Yuri Piatakov to challenge the power of Joseph Stalin. According to Edvard Radzinsky, the author of Stalin (1996): "The opposition then organized demonstrations in Moscow and Leningrad on November 7. These were the last two open demonstrations against the Stalinist regime. The GPU, of course, knew about them in advance but allowed them to take place. In Lenin's Party submitting Party differences to the judgment of the crowd was considered the greatest of crimes. The opposition had signed their own sentence. And Stalin, of course, a brilliant organizer of demonstrations himself, was well prepared. On the morning of November 7 a small crowd, most of them students, moved toward Red Square, carrying banners with opposition slogans: Let us direct our fire to the right - at the kulak and the NEP man, Long live the leaders of the World Revolution, Trotsky and Zinoviev.... The procession reached Okhotny Ryad, not far from the Kremlin. Here the criminal appeal to the non-Party masses was to be made, from the balcony of the former Paris hotel. Stalin let them get on with it. Smilga and Preobrazhensky, both members of Lenin's Central Committee, draped a streamer with the slogan Back to Lenin over the balcony." However, as Robert V. Daniels has argued: "After vainly challenging the party organization in a wide-ranging controversy over the future of the proletarian dictatorship, the opposition leaders were ousted from all their party posts."

Smilga and Karl Radek gave support to Stalin's policy of collectivization in 1929. As Roy A. Medvedev, the author of Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism (1971) has pointed out: "Stalin produced a split among the Trotskyites in the spring of 1929, when some of them (Smilga and Radek, for example) decided to support Stalin on the grounds that he was adopting their program of an offensive against the kulaks and a swift rate of industrialization. Trotsky himself strongly opposed Stalin's new policies, declaring that they had nothing in common with the earlier proposals of his own group."

In 1933 Ivar Smilga was arrested and charged with being a terrorist. According to one source, when he was banished to Siberia, a demonstration of about a thousand people gathered at the railroad station to protest. It is believed that Smilga was executed in 1938.

Primary Sources

(1) Lenin, message sent to the Bolshevik Central Committee via Ivar Smilga (12th September, 1917)

Without losing a single moment, organize the staff of the insurrectionary detachments; designate the forces; move the loyal regiments to the most important points; surround the Alexandrinsky Theater; occupy the Peter-Paul fortress; arrest the general staff and the government; move against the military cadets, the Savage Division, etc., such detachments as will die rather than allow the enemy to move to the center of the city; we must mobilize the armed workers, call them to a last desperate battle, occupy at once the telegraph and telephone stations, place our staff of the uprising at the central telephone station, connect it by wire with all the factories, the regiments, the points of armed fighting, etc. Of course, this is all by way of an example, to illustrate the idea that at the present moment it is impossible to remain loyal to the revolution without treating insurrection as an art.

(2) Leon Trotsky, My Life: An Attempt at an Autobiography (1930)

The first acute argument in the Central Committee took place in the summer of 1919, apropos of the situation on the eastern front. The commander-in-chief at the time was Vatzetis, of whom I spoke in the chapter on Sviyazhsk. I directed my efforts towards making Vatzetis sure of himself, of his rights and his authority. Without this command is impossible. Vatzetis's point of view was that after our great successes against Kolchak we abstain from rushing too far into the East, to the other side of the Urals. He wanted the eastern front to stay at the mountains for the winter. This would have enabled us to withdraw a few divisions from the East and switch them to the South, where Denikin was getting more dangerous. I supported this plan. But it met with rigorous opposition from Kamenev, the commander of the eastern front and a colonel of the general staff in the Tsar's army, as well as from two members of the Military Council, both old Bolsheviks - Smilga and Lashevich. They insisted that Kolchak was so far defeated that only a few men were necessary to follow him, and that the most important thing was that he be prevented from getting a breathing-spell, because in that case he would recover during the winter and we would have to start the eastern campaign all over again in the spring. The entire question hinged, therefore, on a true estimate of the condition of Kolchak's army and rear. Even then I considered the southern front far more important and dangerous than the eastern. Later on this was fully confirmed.

(3) Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary (1945)

Preobrazhenskv and Smilga were sent to us by the Moscow Center to unify the leadership of the two Leningrad oppositions. Preobrazhenskv had the broad features and short auburn beard that befitted a man of the people. He had driven himself so hard that during the meetings it seemed that he might at any moment drop off to sleep, but his brain was still fresh, and crammed with statistics on the agrarian problem.

Smilga, an economist and former army leader who in 1917 had been Lenin's confidential agent in the Baltic fleet, was a fair-haired intellectual in his forties with spectacles, a chin beard, and thinning front hair, ordinary to look at and distinctly the armchair sort. He spoke for a whole evening in a little room to about fifty workers who could not move at all, so closely were they squeezed together. A Latvian giant with gingerish hair and an impassive face scrutinized all who came in. Smilga, sitting on a stool in the middle of the room, spoke, in an expert's tone and without one agitational phrase, of production, unemployment, grain and budgetary figures, and of the plan that we were hotly advocating. Not since the first days of the Revolution had the Party's leadership been seen in an atmosphere of poverty and simplicity like this, face-to-face with the militants of the rank and file.

(4) Edvard Radzinsky, Stalin (1996)

In October oppositionists spoke out in Party cells at factories, calling for a debate. But they lost their nerve almost immediately, and acknowledged that their action had been "a breach of discipline." It was too late - Stalin was already hounding all those "October leaders" out of the Politburo. Zinoviev also ceased to manage the Comintern.
From that moment the opposition had nothing to lose. Battle was joined A savage battle in which they were doomed.

And so a year later, on the eve of the Fifteenth Party Congress, on the tenth anniversary of the October coup which he had organized, and in the state which he had founded, Trotsky was obliged to set up an underground press to print his program. He knew he would not be able to read it out at the Congress - the audience, obeying Stalin, would shout him down. The GPU, needless to say, knew what was afoot, and this was just what Stalin had been waiting for. The underground press became the excuse for the immediate expulsion of Trotsky's supporters from the Party, and the arrest of many of them. Trotsky delivered his speech at a routine plenum of the Central Committee. His words were barely audible; he was interrupted by oaths and abuse, and the speech was accompanied throughout by cries of "Down with him!"Get him out of here!" The same shouts drove Zinoviev from the platform. Stalin could be proud of himself The system he had created was functioning with greater precision from one day to the next.

The opposition then organized demonstrations in Moscow and Leningrad on November 7. These were the last two open demonstrations against the Stalinist regime. The GPU, of course, knew about them in advance but allowed them to take place. In Lenin's Party submitting Party differences to the judgment of the crowd was considered the greatest of crimes. The opposition had signed their own sentence. And Stalin, of course, a brilliant organizer of demonstrations himself, was well prepared.

On the morning of November 7 a small crowd, most of them students, moved toward Red Square, carrying banners with opposition slogans: "Let us direct our fire to the right - at the kulak and the NEP man," "Long live the leaders of the World Revolution, Trotsky and Zinoviev." The GPU did its work, and a handpicked "public" soon attached itself to the column. The procession reached Okhotny Ryad, not far from the Kremlin. Here the criminal appeal to the non-Party masses was to be made, from the balcony of the former Paris hotel. Stalin let them get on with it. Smilga and Preobrazhensky, both members of Lenin's Central Committee, draped a streamer with the slogan "Back to Lenin" over the balcony. Those marching in support of the opposition shouted "Hurrah!" The "toilers" immediately "acted in protest," blowing whistles supplied in advance, throwing tomatoes they just happened to be carrying. A group headed by the secretary of the district Party Committee, Ryutin, arrived by car and tried to break in through the locked door.

At the same time a Red army soldier climbed the sheer wall to the balcony and tore down the slogan, to the laughter of the mob. Ryutin and his companions found a way into the building and began assaulting the oppositionists. Ultimately they would all perish: the beaten - Smilga and Preobrazhensky - and the beater - Ryutin - alike.
Meanwhile loud shouts of `Bash the oppositionists' were heard from the crowd, and, more loudly still, `Down with the Yid oppositionists." Those demonstrating in favor of the opposition were first beaten up and then arrested.

(5) Roy A. Medvedev, Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism (1971)

These demonstrations did not help the opposition; on the contrary, they gave Stalin the pretext he wanted for final reprisals against its leaders. In November, 1927, Trotsky and Zinoviev were expelled from the Party. Other members of the opposition were expelled from the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission. Then, in December, 1927, the XVth Congress confirmed the expulsion of Trotsky and Zinoviev and resolved to expel seventy-five additional members of the opposition, including Kamenev, Piatakov, Radek, Smilga, G. I. Safarov, I. N. Smirnov, Khristian Rakovskii, and M. M. Lashevich. The Congress also urged all Party organizations to purge their ranks "of all clearly incorrigible elements of the Trotskyite opposition." Trotsky was exiled first to Alma Ata and then abroad.

In the years following, almost all the leaders of the united opposition except Trotsky and sonic of his closest supporters were readmitted to the Party. But their will to fight had been broken. And although, at the end of the twenties and the beginning of the thirties, Stalin was guilty of many crude mistakes, miscalculations, and crimes, neither Kamenev, Zinoviev, Radek, nor Piatakov spoke out against him.