Varvara Yakovleva (politician)

Varvara Nikolaevna Yakovleva (

Early life

Yakovleva was born to the middle-class family of a tradesman of Jewish descent 1885 in Moscow. Her father was a convert to

In February 1918, Yakovleva supported the Left Communists, led by Nikolai Bukharin, who opposed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which ended the war between Russia and Germany at the cost of leaving most of Ukraine and the Baltic states under German occupation. She returned to work in June, and in September 1918 was appointed deputy head of the Petrograd (St Petersburg) Cheka. This was during the Red Terror that followed an attempt on Lenin's life, and the assassination of the former head of the Petrograd Cheka, Moisei Uritsky. From January 1919, as a board member of the People's Commissariat of Food, she led food inspections and parties that requisitioned food as a punitive measure. She was known for her severity in this matter.^[6] In March 1920, Yakovleva again backed Bukharin against Lenin during a dispute over the role of the trade unions.

In December 1920-April 1921, she was secretary of the Moscow organisation. In April–August 1921, she was secretary of the Siberian party organisation. In 1922, she was appointed to a senior role in the

In 1923, Yakovleva signaled her continued support for the left opposition by signing the Declaration of the 46, but afterwards she severed contact with the opposition. In December 1929, she was appointed RFSFR People's Commissar for Finance.

Family

Yakovleva's younger brother, Nikolai (1886–1918) also joined the Bolsheviks in 1904–05, and is reputed to have been arrested 12 times over a decade. In 1914–16, he was in exile in Narym.^[7] According to Lenin's widow, he was a "staunch and reliable Bolshevik".^[8] In 1916, he was conscripted into the Imperial Army, and stationed in Tomsk, where he was elected Chairman of the Tomsk Soviet after the February Revolution. In February, he was appointed chairman of the Central Executive of the Siberian soviets, but was forced into hiding when soviet collapsed in Siberia. In November 1918, he was one of a group of Bolsheviks captured by White guards and killed on the spot.

Yakovleva's first husband was Pavel Shternberg, whom she converted to Bolshevism.

In 1921, she married Ivan Smirnov, but this marriage dissolved when she broke with the left opposition. Their daughter, Vladlena, fled Moscow after her parents' arrests, to avoid being placed in an orphanage, and later worked as a teacher in Siberia. She married Dmitri Zolnikov, a lecturer at Novosibirsk State University. Their daughter, Natalya Zolnikova (1949–2018), was one of the foremost historians of the Russian Orthodox Church.^[9]

Imprisonment and death

Yakovleva was arrested on 12 September 1937.^[3] Following the Third Moscow Trial, in March 1938, she appeared as a witness, to testify that in 1918, Bukharin and other Left Communists had plotted to arrest and possibly assassinate Lenin, Stalin and Yakov Sverdlov. Bukharin, who was on trial, accused her of talking "patent nonsense".^[10] According to the historian Roy Medvedev, her 'evidence' was "a fraudulent deposition written for her by the investigators." Afterwards, she asked her cellmates to spread the word - if they survived - that the deposition was lies that she had been forced to sign.^[11] At a secret trial on 14 May 1938, she was convicted of sabotage and terrorism, and sentenced to 20 years in prison. She was held in solitary confinement Oryol Prison, where she was executed, together with all other inmates, three months after the German invasion of the USSR.^[3] The order to kill her was signed by Stalin. (Soviet sources later inaccurately gave her date of death as 1944).

She was posthumously rehabilitated in 1958.^[6]

Notes