Boris Bazhanov

Boris Georgiyevich Bazhanov (; 9 August 1900 – 30 December 1982) was a secretary of the Secretariat of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union who published memoirs about Stalin and his secrets.

Bazhanov was the personal secretary of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin from August 1923 to 1925 and held several prominent positions in the Politburo until defecting from the Soviet Union in 1928. Bazhanov was granted French citizenship and survived subsequent Soviet assassination attempts, writing and publishing memoirs and books from 1930 about Stalin and the secrets behind the Stalin regime. Bazhanov was the only member of Stalin's Secretariat to defect, and one of the first major defectors from the Eastern Bloc.

David W. Doyle, who translated Bazhanov's book "Bazhanov and the Damnation of Stalin", described him as "a usually reliable source," but that "he should be read with caution where he displays bias or discusses his own motive". Similarly, Western historian Robert Conquest, viewed his account as "very useful, though not always authenticable".

Early life Boris Georgiyevich Bazhanov was born on 9 August 1900, in Mogilev-Podolskiy, Russian Empire (present-day Vinnytsia Oblast, Ukraine). Bazhanov was 16 years old upon the beginning of the Russian Revolution in March 1917. Bazhanov's native Ukraine witnessed some of the worst splintering of power, and the Ukrainian territory was fought over continuously by various ideological factions during the Ukrainian Civil War. In 1918 Bazhanov graduated from high school, and that September entered the University of Kiev despite the political situation. However, the university was closed shortly after his arrival, and during a student protest of the closure, Bazhanov was shot and returned home to recover. On 26 October 1923, Bazhanov took notes at a Central Committee meeting attended by Stalin, Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin, and Leon Trotsky, at a time when Lenin was very ill and just three months before his death. During the meeting, Lenin offered to appoint Trotsky as his "heir." After Lenin's death in January 1924, Stalin, Lev Kamenev, and Grigory Zinoviev together governed the CPSU as a triumvirate, placing themselves ideologically between Trotsky (on the left wing of the party) and Nikolay Bukharin (on the right). Bazhanov was Stalin's personal secretary at the beginning of his power struggle with Trotsky and rise to becoming the undisputed leader of the Soviet Union. Trotsky was eventually forced into exile in Mexico, where he was later assassinated in 1940 by Ramón Mercader, a pro-Stalin agent. Bazhanov scheduled a business trip to Ashgabat, in the Soviet Union's territory in Central Asia, and crossed the border into Iran. Bazhanov defected the same year that the first of Stalin's five-year plans for the national economy of the Soviet Union was accepted, avoiding the first purges that led up to the Great Purge in the mid-to-late 1930s. Bazhanov was the only member of Stalin's Secretariat who would turn against the Soviet regime, and subsequently he was granted asylum in France.

Bazhanov became an enemy of Stalin and an enemy of the state through his defection, and was subject to numerous assassination attempts during the remainder of his life. Soviet security agencies immediately launched a manhunt for Bazhanov led by Georges Agabekov, the chief Soviet spy in the Near East at that time, until Agabekov himself defected to France shortly afterwards in June 1930. According to Bazhanov himself, on the eve of Operation Barbarossa, he visited Berlin and met with Alfred Rosenberg, the head of the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories of Nazi Germany, and his deputy Georg Leibbrandt. Rosenberg was studying the possibility of using Bazhanov to form a new government in the Soviet Union's territory, but Bazhanov was skeptical of Germany's plans and returned to Paris.

Later career and death In the conclusion of the 1978 book The Storm Petrels: The Flight of the First Soviet Defectors,

Bazhanov published an edition of his memoirs in France in 1980, entitled Memoirs of a Secretary of Stalin's. He died in the 4th arrondissement of Paris on 30 December 1982, and is buried at Père Lachaise cemetery.

Editions of Bazhanov's memoirs

Retracted parts of the first edition The 1930 edition of Bazhanov's memoir had him becoming an anti-communist well before he came to Moscow and took up positions with the Central Committee. In later editions, Bazhanov retracted these statements, explaining that in reality he soured on the communist ideology during 1923 to 1924, while working at the Central Committee. However, he was bound to protect his closet-dissident friends remaining behind in the USSR, by casting himself as a "lone avenger" figure.

List of editions