Leo Deutsch
Leo Deutsch | |
---|---|
Лев Григорьевич Дейч | |
Born | |
Died | August 5, 1941 | (aged 85)
Lev Grigorievich Deutsch, also known as Leo Deutsch (Russian: Лев Григорьевич Дейч) (September 26, 1855 – August 5, 1941) was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and one of four founding members of Russia's Marxist Organisation, the precursor of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party.
Biography
Early life and political activities
Lev Grigorievich Deutsch was born September 25, 1855, in
In June 1876, Deutsch was living illegally in
In summer 1877, he was arrested as an accomplice of
Conversion to Marxism
In 1880 Deutsch and other leaders of the Black Repartition group, including
Arrest and exile
It was extremely rare for Russian revolutionaries to be extradited by any European government, but Deutsch was treated as a common criminal because the attempt to kill Gorinovich, and sent back to St Petersburg in a cattle truck. At this trial, he freely admitted the offence, but was denied the right to explain his reasons for it, and was sentenced to 13 years and four months in prison. In 1890, he was deported to the Kara region of Siberia, where he shared a cell with other political revolutionaries. According to his account, when Deutsch told them that he had become a Marxist — an ideology then little known outside Germany: "Had I announced myself a follower of the prophet Mohammed, they could scarcely have been more surprised."[3]
Return to political activity
In 1900, Deutsch made a dramatic escape from Siberia, through Japan, the US, Liverpool, London, and Paris, to rejoin the Emancipation of Labour League in Switzerland in November 1901. His three former comrades there had since joined Vladimir Lenin, Julius Martov, and Alexander Potresov on the six-member editorial board of the newspaper Iskra, which was riven by rivalry between the generations. Plekhanov hoped that Deutsch would take over the task of smuggling the paper into Russia from Lenin, putting the older revolutionaries back in control of the project, but his long imprisonment had taken too much of a toll for him to assume the task.[4] Deutsch was present as an observer at the second congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1903 when it split into its Bolshevik and Menshevik factions. He sided the Mensheviks - Martov, Axelrod, Zasulich, Leon Trotsky et al. Lenin's widow recalled incident involving Deutsch, and a Bolshevik named Vladimir Noskov, as the conference was ending: "Deutsch was angrily reprimanding 'Glebov' (Noskov) about something. The latter raised his head and with gleaming eyes said bitterly: 'You just keep your mouth shut, you old dodderer!'"[5]
During the
Exile and return
From October 1915 to September 1916, Deutsch edited a monthly newspaper in New York City called Svobodnoe Slovo ("Free Word").[6]
In 1917, Deutsch returned to
He did not support the October Revolution which he considered to be a "Bolshevik adventure". After the death of Plekhanov, Deutsch withdrew from political activity. From 1928 he was a personal pensioner and published books about the history of the revolutionary movement and memoirs.[7]
Deutsch died on August 5, 1941, and was buried at the Novodevichy Cemetery.
Personal life
Deutsch never married, though his memoirs show that he had very friendly and affectionate relations with the wives of other revolutionaries, such as Pavel Axelrod. It is probable that he was gay, though he may not have been actively homosexual. During his imprisonment exile in Kara, he and Yakov Stefanovitch – the only exile ready to listen sympathetically to Deutsch's reasons for converting to Marxism – successfully appealed to the governor to be allowed to share a room away from other political exiles.[8] One of their contemporaries, Sergei Kravchinsky, alias Stepnyak, writing while at a time when both men were in Europe, after their escape from Kiev prison, claimed that were "never separated except when absolutely compelled" adding, "and then they write long letters to each other every day, which they jealously keep, showing them to no one, affording thus a subject of everlasting ridicule among their friends."[9]
In London, in 1903, Deutsch, who was then aged 47, became very attached to 23-year-old Leon Trotsky, whom he never referred to by name, but only as 'youth' or 'our Benjamin'. He successfully lobbied the editors of Iskra to allow Trotsky to stay in Europe, rather than be assigned to illegal work in Russia, with a high risk that he would be arrested. In his memoirs, Trotsky recorded that Deutsch "treated me very kindly" and "stood up for me" and that they were "bound by genuine friendship" but that he "never had and never could have any political influence over me."[10]
Footnotes
- ^ Deutsch, Leo (1903). Sixteen Years in Siberia, Some Experiences of a Russian Revolutionist. New York: E.P.Dutton. pp. 85–86. Retrieved 22 March 2018.
- ^ Deutsch, Leo. Sixteen Years in Siberia. pp. 10–11.
- ^ Deutsch, Leo. Sixteen Years in Siberia. p. 212.
- ISBN 9780804701051.
- ^ Krupskaya, Nadezhda (1970). Memories of Lenin. London: Panther. p. 90.
- ^ Vladimir F. Wertsman, "Russians," in Dirk Hoerder with Christiane Harzig (eds.), The Immigrant Labor Press in North America, 1840s–1970s: Volume 2: Migrants from Eastern and Southeastern Europe. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1987; pg. 132.
- ^ "Дейч Лев Григорьевич". www.hrono.ru. Retrieved 2021-12-29.
- ^ Deutsch, Leo. Sixteen Years in Siberia. p. 240.
- ^ Stepniak, S. (Sergei Kravchinsky) (1883). Underground Russia, Revolutionary Profiles and Sketches from Life. New York: Scribner. pp. [https://archive.org/details/cu31924028106221/page/n79/mode/2up 58.
- ^ Trotsky, Leon (1971). My Life, An Attempt at an Autobiography. London: Pathfinder Press. pp. 150–151, 159.
Other sources consulted
- Leopold H. Haimson. The Making of Three Russian Revolutionaries, Cambridge University Press, 1987; p. 472, note 6.
- Spartacus Educational – History on Russian Revolutionaries