Solomon Lozovsky

[North Star]

He's an interesting character to be sure. Expelled twice from the Bolsheviks, close to the Workers' Opposition. Led the Profintern but survived the Great Purge. After the purges became a deputy foreign minister. He eventually was purged during the Rootless Cosmopolitan campaign. I'm just curious if anyone can shed some light how how he survived so long especially since he was very much on the left of the Bolsheviks in the early days of the revolution standing for independent trade unions.

[A Marxist Historian]

He's an interesting character to be sure. Expelled twice from the Bolsheviks, close to the Workers' Opposition. Led the Profintern but survived the Great Purge. After the purges became a deputy foreign minister. He eventually was purged during the Rootless Cosmopolitan campaign. I'm just curious if anyone can shed some light how how he survived so long especially since he was very much on the left of the Bolsheviks in the early days of the revolution standing for independent trade unions.

No, he was to the right of the Bolsheviks, halfway inbetween Martov and his "Internationalist Mensheviks" and the Bolsheviks. He was in favor of a coalition government including the Mensheviks in 1917.

He was for independent trade unions alright, and he was also a bitter opponent of the factory committees, and opposed to workers taking over factories, which he thought (quite correctly actually) would disrupt the economy.

He was Russia's leading trade union bureaucrat, distrustful of spontaneous mass initiative. When it became clear that it was necessary to move from spontaneous local workers management to an organized, centralized structure, curbing all the revolutionary chaos out there in the name of production, then his attitudes converged with those of the Bolsheviks and he joined the party.

He was eased out of running the Russian trade unions in favor of Bolshevik trade unionists many of whom joined Kollontai's "Workers Opposition." They didn't care for him much at all.

The Profintern under his leadership was never a great success.

He was a natural to become a Stalinist bureaucrat.

-M.H.-

[North Star]

Thank you! I had just read in passing that he was for the independence of the trade unions so I assumed especially at that time it meant he was aligned with the Workers' Opposition. He definitely wrote an article in a Menshevik paper after the October Revolution, though I am curious to see what he said. Lenin claims in his statement about Lozovsky's expulsion that he denied the necessity of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Given the pressure of the Civil War on the Soviet government and the bureaucratic degenerations, it's not surprising he was brought back. It was probably assumed he could bring "stability" after the radical agitating of people like Shliapnikov and reconcile the trade unions to the NEP. Given this track record, it's actually not that surprising that he survived the Great Purge! Given his bureaucratic inclinations, his execution alongside the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, seems nothing more than Stalinist paranoia and anti-Semitism. There is nothing to suggest a bureaucrat such as Lozovsky would be aligned with Zionists.

[A Marxist Historian]

Thank you! I had just read in passing that he was for the independence of the trade unions so I assumed especially at that time it meant he was aligned with the Workers' Opposition. He definitely wrote an article in a Menshevik paper after the October Revolution, though I am curious to see what he said. Lenin claims in his statement about Lozovsky's expulsion that he denied the necessity of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Given the pressure of the Civil War on the Soviet government and the bureaucratic degenerations, it's not surprising he was brought back. It was probably assumed he could bring "stability" after the radical agitating of people like Shliapnikov and reconcile the trade unions to the NEP. Given this track record, it's actually not that surprising that he survived the Great Purge! Given his bureaucratic inclinations, his execution alongside the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, seems nothing more than Stalinist paranoia and anti-Semitism. There is nothing to suggest a bureaucrat such as Lozovsky would be aligned with Zionists.

Lozovsky by 1918 or 1919 or so had moved to the left, repudiated his previous rightist political errors, and self-criticized. And he was after all the head of the Soviet trade unions, so bringing him back into the party seemed to make sense. He was however eased out of leadership of the unions and replaced by future Workers Oppositionists, as well of course as Tomsky, the guy who actually replaced him in the job, and became Bukharin's right hand man in the "right opposition."

The "party line" in the late '40s was to support Israel, and Molotov's wife was Golda Meir's tour guide when she was the Israeli ambassador in '48. Israel could never have won the '48 war without all those tanks and whatnot cranked out at the old Skoda Works in Czechoslovakia and given to the Israelis.

So when the line changed, Jewish Stalinist bureaucrats like Lozovsky were often a bit slow on the uptake. He was involved with the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, who were more enthusiastic about Zionism than Stalin was, and really didn't want to support the Arabs.

Kaganovich, who was nimbler than Lozovsky, at the height of Soviet-Israeli alliance had a truly Stalinist solution to the "Palestinian problem." Just deport them all to Kazakhstan...

-M.H.-