Dmitriy Zakharovich Manuilsky or Dmytro Zakharovych Manuilsky (; ; 3 October 1883 – 22 February 1959) was an important Bolshevik revolutionary, Soviet Union politician and academic who was Secretary of the Executive Committee of Comintern, the Communist International, from December 1926 to its dissolution in May 1943.
Early life and career
Manuilsky was born to a peasant family of an Orthodox priest in the village of . After secondary school, he enrolled at the University of St. Petersburg in 1903, and joined the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1904.
During the 1905 revolution he was assigned by the Bolsheviks to the naval base in
Kronstadt where he took part in the naval revolt in July. Arrested, he was held in Kronstadt prison in 1905–06, then exiled, but escaped, arriving in Kiev and then, in 1907, to Paris. There he aligned with the
Vpered led by Alexander Bogdanov, who challenged
Vladimir Lenin for the leadership of the Bolsheviks, and worked on the newspaper
Vpered (
Forward). After the outbreak of war in 1914, he worked on the newspaper
Nashe Slovo and acted as the main contact between the Bolsheviks and the smaller group associated with
Leon Trotsky.
After his return to Russia in May 1917, he joined Trotsky's group, the
Mezhraiontsy, who amalgamated with the Bolsheviks in August 1917.
In the Soviet Union
During the Russian Civil War, Manuilsky worked in the
Gossnab, before being sent to Ukraine, where Lenin assigned him the task of organising the peasant population around Kharkiv to defeat the
White Army of
Anton Denikin. In January 1919, he and
Inessa Armand were sent to Paris, in the hope they could stoke a revolution in France, but he was arrested and deported. He was People's Commissar for Food in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic from 1920 to 1921, then switched to journalism, and from 1922 was working for the Comintern.
From 1923 to 1952 he was a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, as well as a member of the elite inner circle known as the "malaia comisiia", a five-member group that ruled the eleven-member Political Secretariat.
From 1935 until the dissolution of Comintern in 1943, he acted as deputy to its General Secretary, Georgi Dimitrov. Between 1944 and 1952, he held the largely meaningless post of Foreign Minister of Ukraine. From 1952 to 1953, he was Ukrainian ambassador to the United Nations.
Later life and career
During the
Great Purge, almost every
Old Bolshevik with a past link with Trotsky was killed or imprisoned, except Manuilsky, whom
Joseph Stalin despised but by whom he did not feel in any way threatened. In 1939, he told Dimitrov: "Manuilsky is a toady! He was a Trotskyite! We criticised him for keeping quiet and not speaking out when the purges of Trotskyite bandits were going on, and now he has started toadying!"
The Montenegrin communist
Milovan Djilas, who met Manuilsky in 1944, admired his learning and writing talent, but remembered him as "a slight and already hunched veteran, dark-haired, with a clipped moustache who spoke with a lisp, almost gently and – what astonished me at the time – without much energy." Seeing him again five years later, Djilas thought him an "almost senile, little old man who was rapidly disappearing as he slid down the steep ladder of the Soviet hierarchy."
See also
-
List of delegates of the 2nd Comintern congress
-
First Secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine
-
Permanent Representative of Ukraine to the United Nations
External links
-
Walter Lacquer, Russia and Germany; A Century of Conflict, London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson 1965.
