A unique resource on revolutionary history, this first-person account by Osip Piatnitsky, a major figure in the European workers’ movement, the Bolsheviks, several revolutions, and the Comintern, was first published in 1926. It would disappear from Party circulation with Piatnitsky’s fall, arrest, and execution a decade later. Osip Aaronovitch Piatnitsky was born Iosif Aronovich Tarshis in today’s Lithuania in 1882. The son of a Jewish carpenter, Osip followed in the trade and became a member of illegal unions and the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party at 16. In Vilnius he became a leading activist in the ladies’ garment workers union and took “Piatnitsa” (“Friday”) as his underground name. In 1901 he joined Lenin’s Iskra group and moved to Germany where he sided with the Bolsheviks during the 1903 split. Returning to the Russian Empire, he was active in the 1905 Revolution, leading the Odessa general strike. Jailed until 1908, Piatnitsky returned to Party work in Germany and France, where he also trained to become an electrician. Back again in Russia by 1913, he was arrested and exiled to Siberia shortly before the outbreak of World War One.
Released in the February Revolution of 1917, Piatnitsky moved to Moscow where he joined the Party’s Moscow Committee helping to lead the October Revolution in that city. In 1920 he was first elected as alternate to the Communist Party’s Central Committee and began his long work on the leadership of Communist International in 1921. Replacing Zinoviev’s Comintern leadership in 1926, he sat on the four-person Secretariat in 1926 until 1935. Elected as a full member of the CC in 1927, he was at first loyal to the leadership group around Stalin though fell from power with the rise of Dimitrov and the Popular Front at the Seventh World Congress in 1935. Refusing to support the Purges and openly rejecting the veracity of the NKVD’s claims at a CC Plenum to endorse the Purges. Arrested, he refused to recant, even after torture. Comrade Osip Piatnitsky was executed a year later on October 30, 1938 at 56 years old.
Memoirs of a Bolshevik by Osip Piatnitsky. International Publishers, New York. 1926.
Contents: Preface, A Few Remarks about My Memoirs, I Begin My Revolutionary Activities (1896-1901), The First Arrest, Imprisonment in Kiev and Escape (1902), My Activity Abroad (1902-1905), Party Work in Odessa, Arrest and Imprisonment (1905-1906), Party Work in Moscow (1906-1908), A Stupid Arrest (1908), My Return Abroad (1908-1913), Ideological and Organisational Confusion in the Ranks of the R.S.D.L.P. (1906-1911), The All-Russian Congress (End of 1911 and Beginning of 1912), My Experience with the German Labour Movement (1903-1912), Paris (1912-1913), With Lenin at Poronino (End of July, 1913), Volsk (1913-1914), Samara (1914), Arrest, Imprisonment and Exile (1914-1915), The Life of Political Prisoners in the Villages of the Angara Valley (1915- 1917), How We Heard about the February Revolution. 248 pages.
International Publishers was formed in 1923 for the purpose of translating and disseminating international Marxist texts and headed by Alexander Trachtenberg. It quickly outgrew that mission to be the main book publisher, while Workers Library continued to be the pamphlet publisher of the Communist Party.
Revolution's Newsstand 