Leonid Serebryakov

Leonid Serebryakov
Леонид Серебряков
Member of the 10th Secretariat
In office
5 April 1920 – 16 March 1921
Personal details
Born Leonid Petrovich Serebryakov
11 June 1890
Samara, Russian Empire
Died 1 February 1937 (aged 46)
Moscow, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union

Leonid Petrovich Serebryakov (Russian: Леонид Петрович Серебряков) (11 June 1890 - 1 February 1937) was a Russian politician and Bolshevik victim of Joseph Stalin's Great Purge.

Life

Born at Samara, Serebryakov was originally a metalworker. In 1905 he joined the Bolsheviks, for which he actively campaigned. After the Russian Revolution (1917) he climbed to the higher ranks in the Communist Party. In 1919 he became a member of the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, together with Nikolai Krestinsky and Yevgeny Preobrazhensky.[1] The three secretaries supported Leon Trotsky when he had a dispute with Lenin over the trade unions. At the Tenth Party Congress in March 1921, Lenin's faction won a decisive victory on this dispute,[2] and Serebryakov and the other two secretaries of the Central Committee had to resign. Afterwards he worked with Stalin on the Military Council of the Southern Front during the Russian Civil War.[3] After Lenin's death he joined the Left Opposition of Leon Trotsky. Eventually this led to his downfall: in 1936 he was arrested for alleged membership of a terrorist Trotskyite organization. While Serebryakov was under arrest, his prosecutor Andrey Vyshinsky misappropriated his house and money.[4] During the second Moscow Show Trial in January 1937, Serebryakov was sentenced to death after a forced confession by torture and executed shortly afterwards.[1]

He was married to the writer Galina Serebryakova. She had been married before to Grigori Sokolnikov, who also died during the Great Purge. She spent twenty years in Stalin's camps, blaming her husbands for mixing her in their dirty dealings, realizing only years later that they were innocent.[5]

Serebryakov was rehabilitated in 1988.

References

  1. 1 2 Satter, David (2011). It Was a Long Time Ago, and It Never Happened Anyway. Yale University Press. ISBN 9780300178425.
  2. ↑ Tenth Congress of the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik) The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition (1970-1979).
  3. ↑ Marxists.org
  4. ↑ Raider Vyshinsky by Novaya Gazeta
  5. ↑ "Stalin's Purges Warp Soviet Life". The Salt Lake Tribune. October 3, 1967. p. 4. Retrieved September 6, 2017 – via Newspapers.com.


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