Elena Stasova

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In this name that follows Eastern Slavic naming customs, the patronymic is Dmitriyevna and the family name is Stasova.
Elena Stasova
Елена Стасова
8th Secretariat
In office
6 August 1917 – 5 April 1920
Personal details
Born15 October [
RSDLP (1898–1903)
RSDLP (Bolsheviks) (1903–1918)
Russian Communist Party
(Bolsheviks) (1918–1946)

Elena Dmitriyevna Stasova (Russian: Елена Дмитриевна Стасова; 15 October [

Old Bolshevik and an early leader of the organisation that would go on to become the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
.

Stasova was born to an

eminent aristocratic family in Saint Petersburg. She worked as a teacher during her youth and came to embrace revolutionary politics. In 1898, she joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDRP) at the time of its establishment. Following the RSDRP ideological split in 1903, Stasova joined Vladimir Lenin's Bolshevik faction. She continued her revolutionary activities in Russia, Switzerland and Finland despite frequent threats of imprisonment and deportation. In 1913, she was exiled to Siberia, but returned to Saint Petersburg shortly before the February Revolution. She was named secretary and alternate member of the Central Committee, but by 1920 she had been fully frozen out of Soviet power. Afterwards, Stasova was a Comintern representative to Germany until 1927, when she returned to Russia and took on a leadership position in the International Red Aid (MOPR). From 1938 to 1946, she found work as an editor of the magazine International Literature
. Stasova died in 1966 at the age of 93.

Biography

Early years

Elena Stasova was born in

Russian Social Democratic Workers Party (RSDRP) at the time of its establishment in 1898, her main contribution being to use her parents' house to store illegal socialist literature.[1]

Family

Her grandfather, Vasili Stasov, had been architect to

St Petersburg Conservatory with Anton Rubinstein.[1] Elena's aunt was the feminist Nadezhda Stasova, and her older sister was the writer Varvara Komarova-Stasova.[5]

Bolshevik revolutionary

When the RSDRP split into

professional revolutionary. Over the next two years Stasova adopted the pseudonyms "Absolute" and "Thick".[6] Other pseudonyms which Stasova used during the underground period included "Delta", "Heron", "Knol", and "Varvara Ivanovna".[7] She served as the conduit for Lenin's newspaper, Iskra, in St. Petersburg, until her arrest in January 1904, which forced her to leave the capital and hide in Minsk. For the rest of that year she traveled to several cities, acting as a specialist in "technical matters", such as creating false passports, organising escape routes, and making contact with sympathisers in the Russian army.[1] She also taught new members how to encode and decode.[8] In spring 1904, Stasova was appointed secretary of the Northern Bureau of the Bolshevik Central Committee. In June, she was assigned to take over the Southern Bureau, based in Odessa, but was arrested and held in Taganka Prison for six months.[1]
She was released on bail in December 1904, and returned to St Petersburg, where she took over as secretary of the city Bolshevik organisation, and later as secretary of the Central Committee.

Stasova emigrated to

Tiflis (now Tbilisi
), the capital of Georgia.

In January 1912, Stasova was elected as an alternate member of the Bolshevik party's Central Committee. She was then secretary to the party's Russian bureau.[9] Arrested on her return to Tiflis, in May 1912, she was tried in May 1913, with Suren Spandaryan and others, and sentenced to deportation to Siberia. She was allowed to return to St Petersburg in autumn 1916, and was arrested there and held in a police station overnight in February 1917, but released in the morning because of the outbreak of the February Revolution.[1]

Political career

After the

October Revolution, finally standing down in March 1920.[8] She was also appointed an alternate member of the Bolshevik Central Committee by the 6th Congress of the Russian Communist Party in 1917, and became the only woman elected to full membership of the Central Committee by the 7th Congress of 1918 and the 8th Congress of 1919. However, the 9th Congress of 1920 dropped her both from the Central Committee and from the party secretariat.[8]

After being removed from the Central Committee, Stasova worked for the

Comintern's apparatus. She was appointed Comintern representative to the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) in May 1921. She used the pseudonym "Hertha"[8] and remained in Germany through 1926, where she played a leading role in the German affiliate of the International Red Aid (MOPR) organization, die Rote Hilfe.[8]

Stasova returned to the USSR in February 1926.[8] The next year she was named deputy director head of the international MOPR as well as head of the Central Committee of the MOPR organization in the USSR, positions which she retained through 1937.[10]

Stasova served as a member of the Central Control Commission of the Russian Communist Party from 1930 to 1934, and in 1935 the 7th World Congress of the Comintern named her a member of the International Control Commission.[8]

Unlike so many other "

secret-police terror which swept the Soviet Union in the late 1930s, although in November 1937, Joseph Stalin told the head of Comintern, Georgi Dimitrov that Stasova was "scum" and "probably" would be arrested. She was dismissed from her post on MOPR five days later, on 16 November 1937.[11] Unusually, she retained her place on the International Control Commission until the Comintern was abolished in 1943,[12] and in 1938 was re-employed as an editor of the magazine International Literature. Stasova continued in this role until 1946, when she retired.[8]

In 1948, she received a "severe reprimand" for saying in a public lecture that "Lenin treated all comrades equally and even called Bukharin 'Bukharchik'" — ten years earlier Bukharin had confessed to being a traitor. She wrote later that the words "slipped out" and that it was "a grave political mistake" on her part.[13]

Death and legacy

After Stalin's death, Elena Stasova was the last surviving Old Bolshevik who had served on the Central Committee during the 1917 revolution. She made very few public appearances after retiring, but in 1961, she was one of four Old Bolsheviks who signed an appeal to the 22nd Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union for the posthumous rehabilitation of Nikolai Bukharin.[14]

A boarding school for foreigners in Ivanovo, Russia called the Ivanovo International Boarding School ("Interdom"), established by MOPR in 1933, was named after Elena Stasova.

Stasova died on 31 December 1966 at Moscow and was placed in an urn in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis.[citation needed]

Writings

  • MOPR's Banners Abroad: Report to the Third MOPR Congress of the Soviet Union. Moscow: Executive Committee of International Red Aid, 1931. (By-line given as "H. Stassova" on cover.)

Honours and awards

References

  1. ^
    ISBN 0-04-947021-3
    . This volume contains an English translation of Stasova's autobiography, first published in 1927.
  2. ISBN 978-0-521-59920-7
    .
  3. ISBN 978-1-4008-8817-7. Archived
    from the original on 16 April 2023. Retrieved 31 August 2022.
  4. ^ Simon Sebag Montefiore, Young Stalin, page 209
  5. ^ Hilde Hoogenboom. "Wladimir Karénine and her Biography of George Sand: One Russian Women Writer Responds to Sand" (PDF). In David A. Powell (ed.). Le siècle de George Sand. pp. 225–. Archived (PDF) from the original on 1 March 2023. Retrieved 1 March 2023.
  6. ^ N.K. Krupskaya, Reminiscences of Lenin. Bernard Isaacs, trans. New York: International Publishers, 1970; pg. 77.
  7. ^ Reference Index to V.I. Lenin Collected Works: Part One: Index of Works, Name Index. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1978; pg. 312.
  8. ^ a b c d e f g h Branko Lazitch and Milorad M. Drachkovitch, Biographical Dictionary of the Comintern: New, Revised, and Expanded Edition. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1986; pg. 444.
  9. ^ Simon Sebag Montefiore, Young Stalin, page 205
  10. ^ G.M. Adibekov et al. (eds.), Politbiuro TsK RKP(b) – VKP(b) i Komintern: 1919–1943 Dokumenty ("Politburo CC RKP(b)-VKP(b) and the Comintern: 1919–1943 Documents"). Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2004; pg. 885.
  11. ISBN 0-300-09794-8
    .
  12. ^ Adibekov et al. (eds.), Politbiuro TsK RKP(b) – VKP(b) i Komintern, pg. 885.
  13. ^ Slezkine, Yuri (2017). The House of Government, A Saga of the Russian Revolution. Princeton: Princeton U.P. pp. 936–37.
    ISBN 978-0-691-19272-7
    .
  14. ^ Medvedev, Roy (1971). Let History Judge, The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. p. 184.

Further reading

  • Barbara Evan Clements, Bolshevik Women, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997

External links

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