Osip Piatnitsky

Osip Aaronovitch Piatnitsky (; ; born Iosif Oriolovich Tarshis; – 29 July 1938) was a Russian revolutionary and Soviet politician. Piatnitsky is best remembered as head of the International Department of the Communist International during the 1920s and early 1930s, a position which made him one of the leading public faces of the international communist movement.

Biography

Early years Iosif Oriolovich Tarshis was born on , There he took up his father's trade of carpentry and was radicalized by the illegal trade union movement among the city's carpenters, joining a workers' self-education circle. This early "party name" became the root of Tarshis's best-known pseudonym, Osip Piatnitsky, and it is by this name that he will henceforth be referred to here.

In 1901, Piatnitsky became associated with the Internationalist wing of the RSDLP, a group prominently including Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin), which was at the time publishing the revolutionary newspaper Iskra from emigration in Germany. also helping to organize the transportation of party members to and from the country. As he sought to return to Russia to work in industry, Piatnitsky went to Paris following the Prague party conference, where he trained as an electrician. In that year, Piatnitsky was made a full member of the governing Central Committee of the RKP(b) in which he continued until the time of his arrest in 1937. He remained in jail for a year before finally being given a summary trial and sentenced to death. On 30 October 1938, Osip Piatnitsky was executed. He was 56 years old at the time of his death.

Legacy Osip Piatnitsky was posthumously rehabilitated in 1956, following the 20th Congress of the CPSU, at which Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev revealed the systemic abuses of the Soviet secret police during the Stalin period in a so-called "Secret Speech."

Works The Organisation of a World Party. London: Communist Party of Great Britain, 1928. The Immediate Tasks of the International Trade Union Movement. New York: Workers Library Publishers, n.d. [c. 1930]. World Communists in Action: The Consolidation of the Communist Parties and Why the Growing Political Influence of the Sections of the Comintern is Not Sufficiently Maintained. New York: Workers Library Publishers, n.d. [c. 1930]. Unemployment and the Tasks of the Communists. New York: Workers Library Publishers, 1931. Urgent Questions of the Day: Unemployed Movement, Factory Organisation, Fluctuation of Membership. Moscow: Cooperative Publishing Society of Foreign Workers in the USSR, 1931. The Bolshevisation of the Communist Parties by Eradicating the Social-Democratic Traditions. London: Modern Books, n.d. . The World Economic Crisis: The Revolutionary Upsurge and the Tasks of the Communist Parties. New York: Workers Library Publishers, n.d. . The Work of the Communist Parties of France and Germany and the Tasks of the Communists in the Trade Union Movement. New York: Workers Library Publishers, n.d. [c. 1932]. The Present Situation in Germany. New York: Workers Library Publishers, 1933. The Twenty-One Conditions of Admission into the Communist International. New York: Workers Library Publishers, 1934. The Communists in the Fight for the Masses. New York: Workers Library Publishers, 1934. Memoirs of a Bolshevik. New York: International Publishers, 1935.

Footnotes