Ivan Teodorovich

Teodorovich in 1917

Ivan Adolfovich Teodorovich (Russian: Ива́н Адольфо́вич Теодо́рович; Polish: Iwan Adolfowicz Teodorowicz) (September 10 (O. S. August 29), 1875 in Smolensk – September 20, 1937^[1]), was a Russian Bolshevik activist and Soviet statesman, served as the first Commissar for Food at the establishment of the Council of People's Commissars (October - November 1917). He also became a Soviet historian of the Russian revolutionary movement.

Life and political career[]

Teodorovich, the son of a land-surveyor from Smolensk, was born into a family of ethnic Polish origin.^[2] His father, two maternal uncles, and grandfather had all participated in insurrectionary activity; from this background, Teodorovich would write, he first learned to hate "tsarism, its officials, and [the] military establishment".^[2] Teodorovich spent his childhood in severe poverty: his mother, struggling to support six sons, worked as a seamstress and laundrywoman.^[2]

Teodorovich attended Moscow State University, where he joined an early Marxist group in 1895. From 1902 to 1903 he served as a member of the Moscow Committee of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. After a series of arrests, in 1903 the tsarist authorities sent Teodorovich into exile in Yakutia. Escaping in 1905, he fled to Switzerland, where he made personal contact with Vladimir Lenin. In October 1905 Teodorovich returned to Russia and operated in Saint Petersburg; he gained promotion to become a member of the Central Committee in 1907. In May 1909 he was arrested again and remained in custody until the February Revolution of 1917.

After the February Revolution of March 1917 he left his place of exile and arrived in Petrograd in mid-March. He was a delegate to the 7th (April) All-Russian Conference (where he was elected a candidate member of the Central Committee^{[citation needed]}) and to the 6th Congress of the RSDLP (B). From August 1917 he served as deputy chairman of the  [ru],^[1] then as a member of the council and special presence in food. After the October Revolution of November 1917, in the first Council of People's Commissars of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (SNK) he took the post of People's Commissar for Food.

Immediately after the October Revolution, Teodorovich became the first Commissar for Agriculture^{[citation needed]} in the first Bolshevik government. In November he resigned due to political disagreement with Lenin's majority over a proposed coalition with the Mensheviks and other factions (Teodorovich supported a broad coalition, against Lenin's will). In 1920 he returned to the board of the Commissariat for Agriculture and rose to become Deputy Commissar in May 1922; in 1928-1930 he chaired the Peasants' branch of the Comintern.^[1] As the Bolsheviks' expert on agriculture, Teodorovich delivered speeches to various councils and international forums, and authored brochures, journal and newspaper articles dealing with agriculture and agrarian policy. Teodorovich was a proponent of Lenin’s New Economic Policy (the NEP); he further endorsed liberal land-reforms (delegating authority over land from the state to peasants). Contrary to the Bolsheviks' platform on agrarian policy, Teodorovich vehemently opposed the policy of food requisition and war communism. He supported the formation of a homogeneous socialist government with the participation of the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries. After The Central Committee of the RSDLP (B) rejected the agreement with these parties, Teodorovich on November 4 (17), 1917 signed a statement of withdrawal from the SNK, but continued to carry out his duties until December.^[2]

"(T)he disagreement concerned the question of whether our party had to start with "war communism" or whether it was possible to proceed from what was called the "new economic policy" in 1921. I held in 1917 the latter opinion .." - Ivan Teodorovich Autobiography^[3]

In articles of the 1920s, Teodorovich interpreted the NEP as a means of accumulating funds in the capitalist agrarian sector through the development of "strong" peasant farms, which was to serve as a source of funds for industrialization, including its transition to socialism. In the People's Commissariat Teodorovich supervised the work of economist N. D. Kondratiev, who led the department of agricultural economics and statistics of the Department of Agriculture and provided Teodorovich with a degree of protection and patronage (in particular, Kondratiev contributed in 1920 to his release from arrest).

At the beginning of 1918 Teodorovich left for Siberia after parting ways with Lenin's first government. In 1919-1920 he was in the red partisan units in Siberia. In 1920-1928 Teodorovich served as a member of the College of the People's Commissariat of Agriculture of the RSFSR. From May 1922 to 1928 he was deputy of the People's Commissar of Agriculture of the RSFSR, 1926-1930 Director of the International Agrarian Institute, from March 1928 to 1930 secretary general of the Peasant International (Krestintern), 1929-1935 editor of the Publishers of the Society of Former Political Prisoners and Exiled Settlers, 1929- 1935 editor of the magazine  [ru]. An ordinance of the Central Committee of the VKP (b) of the Society of Former Political Prisoners and Exiled Settlers closed the magazine on June 25, 1935 for factional activities.^{[citation needed]}

In November 1930 Teodorovich was condemned^{[by whom?]} as a counter-revolutionary "Kondratievist".^[4]

Teodorovich was convicted in the trial of the so-called Moskva Center group (involving a total of 120 people). Joseph Stalin and Vyacheslav Molotov sanctioned the trial on September 15, 1937.^[5] Teodorovich was executed five days later - a victim of Stalin's Great Purge.

Ivan Teodorovich was posthumously rehabilitated on April 11, 1956, and is buried in the Don Cemetery in Moscow.

Works[]

• On the state regulation of the peasant economy. M., 1921

• The fate of the Russian peasantry, M., 1923, 1924, 1925

• On the question of agricultural policy in the RSFSR, Moscow, 1923

• The lessons of the union of workers and peasants in the USSR. Report at the 2nd Congress of the International Peasant Council, Moscow, 1925

• Eight years of our peasant politics. M., 1926

• Issues of industrialization and agriculture. Sverdlovsk, 1927

• The historical significance of the party "Narodnaya Volya", M., ed. Politikatorzhan, 1930

• About Gorky and Chekhov, M. - L., GIZ, 1930

• "March 1, 1881", M., 1931

Family[]

• Wife - Okulova-Teodorovich, Glafira Ivanovna (23.4 (6.5) .1878–19.10.1957) - Soviet politician and party leader.

• Son - Konstantin Ivanovich Teodorovich (1907-1964) - an artist and writer

References[]

http://www.knowbysight.info/TTT/00395.asp