Georgy (Yury) Leonidovich Pyatakov (; 6 August 1890 – 30 January 1937) was a Russian Bolshevik revolutionary, leader of the Bolsheviks and a key Soviet politician during and after the 1917 Russian Revolution. Pyatakov was considered by contemporaries to be one of the early communist state's best economic administrators, but with poor political judgement.
Biography
Pre-revolution
Pyatakov (party pseudonyms: Kievsky, Lyalin, Petro, Yaponets (Japanese), Ryjii) was born 6 August 1890 in the Cherkasy district in the Kiev Governorate of the Russian Empire, now modern-day Ukraine, where his father, Leonid Timofeyevich Pyatakov, was an engineer and director of the large Mariinsky or . Leonid Pyatakov (1847–1915), was also co-owner of Musatov, Pyatakov, Sirotin, and Co.
Pyatakov first became politically active as 14 year old in secondary school in Kyiv. During the 1905 revolution, he was expelled for leading his 'school revolution', and joined an anarchist group, which carried out armed robberies. In 1907 was involved in a plot to assassinate the Governor General of Kiev, Vladimir Sukhomlinov, but broke with anarchism that same year and began to study Marxism, particularly the writings of Georgi Plekhanov and Vladimir Lenin.
From 1907, he was a student at the Faculty of Economics of St Petersburg University, until he was expelled in 1910, and deported back to Kyiv, for taking part in student disturbances. There, he joined the Bolshevik wing of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. Arrested in June 1912, he spent a year and a half exiled to Siberia with his partner, Yevgenia Bosch, in the village of Usolye, Irkutsk.
In October 1914, he and Bosch escaped from exile through Japan and the USA to Switzerland, where they joined the émigré revolutionary community, and joined the editorial board of the journal Kommunist. But during 1915, the Bolshevik group in Switzerland was split over the rights of small nations to national self-determination, which Lenin supported, but Nikolai Bukharin, Pyatakov and Bosch opposed. On 30 November 1916, Lenin wrote to his confidant Inessa Armand, complaining that "neither Yuri (Pyatakov), quite a little pig, nor E. B. has a particle of brain, and if they had allowed themselves to descend to group stupidity with Bukharin, then we had to break with them, more precisely with Kommunist. And that was done."
After this breach, Pyatakov, Bukharin and Bosch moved to Stockholm, but were expelled from Sweden in April 1916 for being present at a conference organised by Swedish socialists to oppose attempts to involve Sweden in World War I. They moved to Oslo, Norway (then called Kristiania), where they lived in "extreme poverty".
Pyatakov and Bosch remained together until she committed suicide by self-inflicted gunshot in January 1925, after hearing that Trotsky had been forced to resign as leader of the Red Army, as well as in pain from her heart condition and tuberculosis.
Revolution and Civil War
After the February Revolution, Pyatakov returned to Russia from Norway but was arrested at the border for his false passport, escorted to Petrograd, then to Kyiv. He lived in Ukraine from March 1917, becoming a member, then in April, chairman, of the Kyiv Committee of the RSDLP. He was elected a of the on 5 August 1917.
For the next ten years, Pyatakov was a leader of the left wing of the communist party. His opinions on some points of the theory and tactics of the revolutionary struggle contradicted that of the party's Central Committee. He was one of Vladimir Lenin's fiercest opponents on the national problem regarding both the course to be followed towards the socialist revolution and the Bolsheviks' peace settlement with Germany. After Lenin's death, he campaigned to prevent the rise of Joseph Stalin.
During the party conference in Petrograd, in May 1917 – at a time when there movement gaining support in Finland for independence from Russia – Stalin put forward a motion in favour of self-determination of small nations, which Pyatakov opposed. He declared that the party had to end the idea of self-identification of every nation, and stood for anti-chauvinistic international principles., and proposed that the party adopt the slogan "down with frontiers", which Lenin dismissed as "hopelessly muddled" and a "mess".
After the October Revolution, in November 1917, Pyatakov was called to Petrograd, by Lenin, to take over the state bank, whose staff were refusing to release funds for the new government.