Nicolas Lazarévitch

Nicolas Lazarévitch (17 August 1895 – 24 December 1975) was a Belgian-born French electrician, a building worker, a proof-reader and, most consistently, a libertarian-anarchist writer and activist. He was born and grew up in Belgium, the child of Russian exiles.

Biography Provenance and early years Nikolaï Ivanovitch Lazarevitch, the second of his parents' three sons, He linked up with local anarchists, notably Francesco Ghezzi and the group around Errico Malatesta, and was involved in street fights against the fascisti, who were, according to at least one source, "protected by the police". Shortly after teaming up with Lazarévitch she was expelled from the hardline anarchist group with which she had become involved in Paris on account of her "religious practices": she lit a candle to celebrate her father on the day of his death. Her own left-wing political commitment and activism remained undiminished, however. He also contributed reports from Spain that appeared in "La Révolution prolétarienne", a Paris-based syndicalist magazine, and another publication using the (frequently revived) title, "Le Cri du Peuple". It is not clear that their repeated applications for French citizenship were ever successful, but their "administrative situation" was later regularised through the intervention of their friend Boris Souvarine.

Arrest and detention War returned in September 1939 when the French and British governments declared war on Germany in response to the German invasion of Poland. Germany and the Soviet Union were at this stage bound by a mutual non-aggression pact, and two weeks after the German invasion from the west, Poland was subjected to a Soviet invasion from the south and east. Despite the French declaration of war, on the streets of Paris eerily little changed for slightly more than eight months. On 10 May 1940 Germany invaded France, taking just six weeks to over-run the country. It was almost certainly only in June 1940 that Nicolas Lazarévitch and Ida Mett were both arrested: sources differ as to why. Either Lazarévitch was arrested because he refused to join the army Lazarévitch was apparently carrying a Belgian passport, and was fairly soon was placed on a train to take him across France to Belgium.

Escape He escaped from the transport train and spent the next couple of years living "underground" (unregistered), supporting himself through farm work in Les Landes. They were assigned a residence permit at La Garde-Freinet (along the coast to the east of Marseille) in 1942 and then at nearby Draguignan in 1943. During the three decades from 1945 till his death Lazarévitch continued the struggle to make his views known, contributing to political publications and organising conferences, but mostly within a relatively restricted circle of friends, work-comrades, political soul-mates, Russian political exiles and, especially after 1960, students whom he came across when he returned to study on his own account. At the end of 1950 he was still displaying a certain frustration over their dissolution. Between 1950 and 1958, in the context of intensifying Cold War tensions between the two side of the "Iron Curtain" across Europe, he was instrumental in creating and producing "La Réalité russe", his contributions appearing under the pseudonym "Petrov".

Publications (selection)