Ivan Teodorovich

Ivan Adolfovich Teodorovich (; ; September 10 – 20 September 1937) was a Russian Bolshevik revolutionary and Soviet bureaucrat who served as the first Commissar for Food at the establishment of the Council of People's Commissars (October–November 1917). He also became a Soviet historian of the Russian revolutionary movement.

Life and political career Teodorovich, the son of a land-surveyor from Smolensk, was born into a family of ethnic Polish origin. His great-grandfather took part in the November Uprising in Warsaw in 1830. His father and two of his uncles fought in the January Uprising of 1863. From this background, Teodorovich would write, he first learned to hate "tsarism, its officials, and [the] military establishment".

In 1918, he returned to Siberia, and during the Russian Civil War he fought in a partisan detachment against the White Army of Admiral Kolchak. In 1920 he returned to the board of the Commissariat for Agriculture and rose to become Deputy Commissar in May 1922; in 1928-1930 he chaired the Peasants' branch of the Comintern.

In articles of the 1920s, Teodorovich interpreted the NEP as a means of accumulating funds in the capitalist agrarian sector through the development of "strong" peasant farms, which was to serve as a source of funds for industrialization, including its transition to socialism. In the People's Commissariat Teodorovich supervised the work of economist N. D. Kondratiev, who led the department of agricultural economics and statistics of the Department of Agriculture and provided Teodorovich with a degree of protection and patronage (in particular, Kondratiev contributed in 1920 to his release from arrest).

At the beginning of 1918 Teodorovich left for Siberia after parting ways with Lenin's first government. In 1919-1920 he was in the red partisan units in Siberia. In 1920-1928 Teodorovich served as a member of the College of the People's Commissariat of Agriculture of the RSFSR. From May 1922 to 1928 he was deputy of the People's Commissar of Agriculture of the RSFSR, 1926-1930 Director of the International Agrarian Institute.

Teodorovich was removed from his post as Deputy People's Commissar a few weeks after the People's Commissar, Aleksandr Smirnov had been sacked, in February 1928, for 'peasant deviation', meaning that he had resisted a decision taken by Joseph Stalin to send detachments into the countryside to seize grain form the peasants to revolve a food shortage in the cities. Teodorovich was not publicly denounced at this stage, even if he was suspected of sharing Smirnov's pro-peasant sympathies. In 1923, he had been a delegate to the founding conference of Peasant International (Krestintern), and in March 1928, he replaced Smirnov as in October 1923, and was secretary general of Krestintern.

In July 1930, the economist Nikolai Kondratiev was arrested, and accused of organising a clandestine "Peasants' Labour Party". This was near the start of the programme that forced peasant to give up their land and live in collective farms. Stalin suspected Teodorovich, whom he called a "scoundrel", of acting as a link between Kondratiev and Nikolai Bukharin, Alexei Rykov and Mikhail Tomsky, who had led the opposition to forced collectivisation.

Teodorovich was sacked from his position in Krestintern, but unlike Smirnov, Kondratiev and others, he was not arrested. He was allowed to continue working in Moscow, as a member of the Society of Former Political Prisoners and Exiled Settlers. In 1929–35, he edited the society's journal. An ordinance of the Central Committee of the VKP (b) of the Society of Former Political Prisoners and Exiled Settlers closed the magazine on June 25, 1935, for factional activities.

Teodorovich was arrested during the Great Purge on 11 June 1937, and convicted in the trial of the so-called Moskva Center group (involving a total of 120 people). Stalin and Molotov sanctioned the trial on September 15, 1937. Teodorovich was executed five days later.

Ivan Teodorovich was posthumously rehabilitated on April 11, 1956, and is buried in the Don Cemetery in Moscow.

Works

О государственном регулировании крестьянского хозяйства. М., 1921 Судьбы русского крестьянства, М., 1923, 1924, 1925 К вопросу о сельскохозяйственной политике в РСФСР, М., 1923 Уроки союза рабочих и крестьян в СССР. Доклад на 2-м съезде Международного крестьянского совета, М., 1925 Восемь лет нашей крестьянской политике. М., 1926 Вопросы индустриализации и сельское хозяйство. Свердловск, 1927 Историческое значение партии «Народной воли», М., изд. Политикаторжан, 1930 О Горьком и Чехове, М.—Л., ГИЗ, 1930 «1 марта 1881 г.», М., 1931

Family Wife - Okulova-Teodorovich, Glafira Ivanovna (23.4 (6.5) .1878–19.10.1957) - Soviet politician and party leader. Son - Konstantin Ivanovich Teodorovich (1907–1964) - an artist and writer