Leonid Krasin

Krasin was born in Kurgan, Tobolsk Governorate in Siberia. His father, Boris Ivanovich Krasin, was the local chief of police. The composer and Proletkult activist Boris Krasin was one of his younger brothers.[2] He was educated at a technical school in Tyumen. He was a star pupil at school, and met the American explorer George Kennan when he visited Siberia.[3]

In 1887, Krasin enrolled at the Petersburg Technological Institute, to study chemistry. He was briefly expelled from St Petersburg for his part in a student demonstration in 1890. On his return, in October, he joined a Marxist circle founded by Mikhail Brusnev, which was one of the first social democratic groups to make contact with factory workers.[4] He was expelled from the Institute and banished from Petersburg again in 1891, for taking part in a student demonstration. He moved to Nizhny Novgorod where he started military service, only to be arrested in 1892 because of his link with Brusnev, and taken to Moscow, where he spent ten months in prison. After his release, he resumed military service in Tula. During a visit to St Petersburg, he delivered a talk to a Marxist circle organised by Stepan Radchenko, and was aggressively challenged by Vladimir Ulyanov, later known as Lenin, who was in the audience.[5]

In 1893, Krasin visited Leo Tolstoy, the author of War and Peace, who lived nearby, but, according to Krasin's wife, Liubov, who was present, they argued so furiously about revolutionary politics that Tolstoy "began to stamp with rage."[6] Later, Krasin also became friendly with the writer Maxim Gorky, who described Krasin as:

Thin and bony, shrewd-looking, his face for all the world like an old icon. When you looked into it, the pursed lips, wide nostrils and square brow with a deep furrow in the middle, revealed a man of Russian charm, at the same time with an energy that was not Russian.[7]

Arrested again in January 1895, he spent three months in prison before being deported to Irkutsk, where he worked as a draughtsman on the Trans-Siberian Railway. He graduated from Kharkov Technological Institute in 1901.[1]

Leonid Krasin in Baku around 1903

On his release from exile in 1900, Krasin had moved to Baku on the Caspian Sea, where he worked as an engineer in a large electric power plant, and played an important role in the electrification of the Baku oilfields. In Baku, he also joined the underground Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP). At its 2nd Congress in 1903, the RSDLP split into Menshevik and Bolshevik factions; Krasin supported the Bolsheviks, led by Lenin, and was elected to the Bolshevik Central Committee. In these early years he was "the most influential Leninist in the whole of Russia",[8] although, unlike Lenin, Krasin was a 'conciliator' who hoped to reunite the opposing factions of the RSDLP. He lived his double life as an apparently law-abiding factory manager so convincingly that the workers at one point called for his dismissal, unaware that he was secretly helping produce the literature that encouraged them to resist.

Krasin raised the money from wealthy liberals that made it possible for the RSDLP to organise its first clandestine printing press in Baku, a huge underground operation accessed by a disappearing trap door designed by Krasin.[9] This Nina Printing House, whose main operators were Lado Ketskhoveli and Avel Yenukidze,became for a period the main vehicle for Vladimir Lenin's newspaper Iskra.[10] In the late 1930s, Soviet history books were revised to attribute the creation and running of the printing press to "Koba" Djughashvili (later known as Joseph Stalin), who was also in Baku at the time.[10]

Krasin left Baku in 1904 for the sake of his health, after contracting malaria, and obtained a job as to work as the chief engineer for the industrialist, Savva Morozov who owned textile works in Orekhovo-Zuyevo, near Moscow, to whom he had been introduced by Maxim Gorky. Morozov gave Krasin 2000 rubles per month to support the Bolsheviks and other needs.

In April 1905, Krasin chaired the Third Congress of the RSDLP, called to create a Bolshevik organisation that excluded Mensheviks and others, and was re-elected to the Central Committee. He was also the Bolsheviks' leading technical expert. His activities were a tight secret at the time. His wife, Liubov, whom he married in 1904, appears to have known nothing about them. In her memoirs, she wrote that Krasin went to Moscow on party business "quite frequently" but was "reticent" about what he was doing there. "It was only many years afterwards that I found out from his friends something about the personal dangers he used to run."[11]

Martyn Liadov, who led the Moscow Bolsheviks in 1905-06, said in memoirs published in 1928 that Krasin organised the bank robberies conducted by Bolsheviks to raise funds, and was involved in planning the 1907 Tiflis bank robbery, in Yerevan Square, during which forty people were killed and fifty injured. Lyadov also said that the bomb used to blow up the home of the Russian Prime Minister, Pyotr Stolypin was made under Krasin's direction.[12][13]

Yuri Felshtinsky identified Leonid Krasin as the most likely assassin of Savva Morozov, who died on 26 May 1905 in Cannes, France, by gunshot wound.[14]

In summer 1907, Krasin clashed with Lenin over whether the Bolsheviks should participate in elections to the Second Duma. During a conference near Vyborg, in July 1907, Krasin and Alexander Bogdanov led the call for a boycott. Lenin refused to concede, and the Bolshevik faction split, with Krasin supporting the Vpered faction. Lenin, who was usually acerbic in such circumstances, remained complimentary towards Krasin, and continued to exhort him to rejoin the Party.[15]

In 1908, Krasin was arrested in Finland and held in Vyborg prison for 30 days. After his release, he emigrated to Berlin, gave up revolutionary activity and focused on his career as an engineer, working for Siemens. In 1912, he was appointed manager of their Moscow office, and in 1914 was made managing director of the Russian subsidiary, based in St Petersburg. By now a wealthy man, he was approached by a mutual friend, George Soloman, who asked for a donation for Lenin. Krasin reportedly told him: "Lenin doesn't deserve help. He's a destructive type and you can never tell what wild scheme will suddenly emanate from his Tatar skull. To hell with him!"[16]

During 1917, Krasin supported the Provisional Government, predicting that a Bolshevik revolution would bring a "rush headlong into anarchy."[17] but early in 1918, he returned to the fold and rejoined the Bolsheviks.[18] though he was appalled by the Red Terror in September 1918, telling his wife that it was "one of the most disgusting acts of neo-Bolsheviks ... I had to fight for the release of at least thirty engineers - not a pleasant or easy job."[19]

In the Russian Bolshevik government Krasin served as People's Commissar of Foreign Trade from 1920 to 1924.

Role in Lenin's tomb project

Leonid Krasin (on right) with Alexander Shliapnikov, photo taken in 1924.

Krasin, in the tradition of Nikolai Federov, believed in immortalization by scientific means. At the funeral of Lev Karpov in 1921, he said:

I am certain that the time will come when science will become all-powerful, that it will be able to recreate a deceased organism. I am certain that the time will come when one will be able to use the elements of a person's life to recreate the physical person. And I am certain that when that time will come, when the liberation of mankind, using all the might of science and technology, the strength and capacity of which we cannot now imagine, will be able to resurrect great historical figures- and I am certain that when that time will come, among the great figures will be our comrade, Lev Iakovlevich.[25]

Lenin died in January 1924. Shortly afterwards Krasin wrote an article on "The Immortalization of Lenin" and proposed a monument containing Lenin's corpse that would become a center of pilgrimage like Jerusalem or Mecca. Krasin, along with Anatoly Lunacharsky, announced a contest for designs of the permanent monument/mausoleum. Krasin also attempted - unsuccessfully - to preserve Lenin's body cryogenically.[26]

Despite his Siberian upbringing, Krasin was considered one of the most urbane and westernised of the leading Bolsheviks. The Menshevik Simon Liberman, who worked with Krasin in Russia in the 1920s, wrote that:

Krasin was unlike the general run of Lenin's communist aides. Perfect taste always distinguished his attire. His necktie matched his suit and shirt in colour, and even his stickpin was stuck with the special jauntinees of a well-dressed man ... Krasin always emphasised his foreign experience and contacts - his cosmopolitanism. He broadly hinted that he had accepted hardships and privations by returning from Germany to Russia of his own free will.[27]

He and his wife were the parents of three daughters, including:[28]

• Liubov Krasin, who married French politician and diplomat Gaston Bergery, founder of the Frontist Party, from whom she was divorced in 1928. After the Second World War she married French politician and journalist Emmanuel d'Astier de La Vigerie.[29]
• Ludmilla Krasin, who was reportedly engaged to the Duc de La Rochefoucauld in 1927.[30] She married John Mathiessen Mathias (1906-1963), a son of Robert Moritz Mathias.[31]

While Krasin was negotiating formal recognition of the Bolshevik government by the United Kingdom and France, and despite remedies proposed by his old friend, the physician Alexander Bogdanov, he died from a blood disease. Krasin's funeral procession three days later included 6,000 mourners, many of them Bolshevik sympathizers; he was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium before being buried at the Kremlin Wall Necropolis in Moscow.

• "Our Trade Policy", Labour Monthly, Vol II, No.1, January 1922
• Archive of Leonid Borisovič Krasin Papers at the International Institute of Social History

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Leonid Krasin.

• Newspaper clippings about Leonid Krasin in the 20th Century Press Archives of the ZBW
• Leonid Borisovič Krasin Papers