Nikolai Sukhanov (1882-1940)

He was originally named J.M. Nikolayevich. A participant in the Russian revolutionary movement; an agrarian economist and political commentator. In the early years, he was originally a Narodnik. During 1900-1902, he became acquainted with Lenin, Trotsky, and other leaders of the social democrat movement. In 1903, he began to study linguistics and philosophy in Moscow and joined the Social-Democratic Labor Party. He was arrested in May 1904 for revolutionary activities and released in October 1905, soon after he joined the December uprising in Moscow. He started his political career in the Socialist-Revolutionary Party, which he left around 1907. Since then, he and the leaders of the Social-Democratic Labor Party have debated how to treat Narodnism and Marxism correctly.

In 1911, he was arrested again and sent to exile. After his release, he returned to St. Petersburg and worked as an editor in radical journals such as Sovremennik (Contemporary) and Letopis (Chronicle), which were financed by Gorky. During the World War I, he claimed to be an internationalist without faction and opposed Russia’s participation in the war and propagated against the World War I.

In 1917, he joined the ranks of Mensheviks. After the 1917 February Revolution, he was one of the founding members of the Central Executive Committee of Petrograd Soviet but supported the bourgeois interim government led by Kerensky. After the October Revolution, he worked in Moscow, Ural, Berlin, Paris and served in several Soviet institutions as an agrarian economist and journal editor.

During 1919-1921, he wrote the Notes on the Revolution (7 Volumes). He argued that Russia’s level of productive forces were backward, and that Russia lacked the economic premise to realize socialism. In his late days when Lenin was ill, he dictated his work “Our Revolution” which criticized the fallacies in Sukhanov’s book as well as, his views on building socialism in Russia.

When he worked in economic and agrarian institutions, including the Commissariat of Agriculture and the Agrarian Section of the Communist Academy, Sukhanov opposed the policy of agricultural collectivization and industrialization, and was disqualified as a member in July 1930. In 1931, he was arrested for participating in the underground organization of the Mensheviks and released after several fasts in prison. He was arrested again in 1937 and trialed on charges of espionage activities favoring Germany and involvement in incitement against the Soviet Union, was executed in 1940.