Early life and pre-revolution Pyatakov (party pseudonyms: Kievsky, Lyalin, Petro, Yaponets (Japanese), Ryjii) was born 6 August 1890 in the
Cherkasy district in the
Kiev Governorate of the
Russian Empire, now modern-day
Ukraine, where his father, Leonid Timofeyevich Pyatakov (1847–1915), was an engineer and director of the large Mariinsky or . Leonid Pyatakov was also the co-owner of Musatov, Pyatakov, Sirotin, and Co. Pyatakov first became politically active at the age of 14 in secondary school in Kiev. During the
1905 revolution, he was expelled for leading a 'school revolution', and joined an
anarchist group, which carried out armed robberies. In 1907 he was involved in a plot to assassinate the Governor General of Kiev,
Vladimir Sukhomlinov, After this breach, Pyatakov, Bukharin, and Bosch moved to
Stockholm, but were expelled from
Sweden in April 1916 for being present at a conference organised by Swedish socialists to oppose attempts to involve Sweden in
World War I. They moved to
Oslo,
Norway (then called
Kristiania), where they lived in "extreme poverty". Pyatakov and Bosch remained together until she committed suicide by self-inflicted gunshot in January 1925, after hearing that
Trotsky had been forced to resign as leader of the
Red Army, as well as in pain from her heart condition and tuberculosis.
Revolution and Civil War After the
February Revolution, Pyatakov returned to Russia from Norway but was arrested at the border due to having a false passport. He was subsequently escorted to
Petrograd, and then finally to Kiev. he proposed that the party adopt the slogan "down with frontiers", which Lenin dismissed as "hopelessly muddled" and a "mess". After the
October Revolution, in November 1917, Lenin called Pyatakov to Petrograd to take over the state bank, whose staff were refusing to release funds for the new government. In January 1918, Pyatakov was one of the leaders of the
Left Communists, who opposed Lenin's decision to end the war with Germany through the
Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (signed 3 March 1918). In protest, he resigned his post at the state bank and returned to Ukraine, intending to organise
partisan warfare against the advancing
Imperial German Army. --> At the
founding congress of the
Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Ukraine, in
Taganrog in July 1918, Pyatakov was elected as
Central Committee Secretary. He maintained that Ukraine was not a signatory to the Brest-Litovsk treaty, and could therefore justifiably go to war against Germany. He and his supporters on the left, who included Bosch and
Andrei Bubnov, remained in control of the Ukrainian party during most of 1918, but the insurrection which they launched against the pro-German
Hetman,
Pavlo Skoropadskyi, failed. From November 1918, after the German army withdrew from Ukraine, to mid-January 1919, Pyatakov was a head of the Provisional Worker's and Peasant's Government of Ukraine (). In January 1919 Lenin replaced Pyatakov as head of the Ukrainian government with
Christian Rakovsky In March 1919, while attending the
8th Congress of the Russian Communist Party, Pyatakov again unsuccessfully opposed Lenin's position on
national self-determination, which he denounced as a 'bourgeois' slogan that "unites all counter-revolutionary forces." Pyatakov collaborated with
Nikolai Bukharin to co-author the chapter on "The Economic Categories of Capitalism in the Transition Period" in
The Economics of the Transformation Period, published in 1920. Pyatakov served as a
political commissar with the
Red Army in Ukraine during the
Russian Civil War, and again during the 1920
Polish–Soviet War. From 1 January to 16 February 1920, he led the Registration Directorate, the Red Army's
military intelligence arm that went on to become the
GRU.
Post-Civil War , in Gorky, 1922 From the end of the civil war, in 1920, until 1936, Pyatakov worked as an economic administrator, with short interruptions. From 1920–1921, he was placed in charge of the management of the coal mining industry in the
Donbas. In February 1921, he was appointed deputy chairman of the
Gosplan (State Planning Committee) of the
RSFSR. From 1923–1926, he was deputy chairman of the
Supreme Council of the National Economy of the
Soviet Union. From June–August 1922, Pyatakov was chairman of the panel of judges during the
Trial of the Socialist Revolutionaries. At the conclusion of which, he sentenced all 12 defendants to death- though the death sentences were later commuted. In October 1923, travelling under the name 'Arwid', Pyatakov was part of the
Comintern sent to Germany during the abortive attempt to bring about a communist revolution. Pyatakov was one of only six leading Bolsheviks mentioned in
Lenin's Testament, dictated in December 1922, during Lenin's terminal illness. The other five-Stalin, Trotsky,
Grigory Zinoviev,
Lev Kamenev, and Bukharin- were all members of the
Politburo, while Pyatakov was not even one of the 27 full members of the
Central Committee, to which he had been elected a candidate member, for the first time, in April 1922. He became a full member only in May 1924. Lenin described Pyatakov as "a man undoubtedly distinguished in will and ability, but too much given over to administration and the administrative side of things to be relied on in a serious political situation." Pyatakov supported
Leon Trotsky in the power struggle that began during Lenin's terminal illness. He was a signatory of
The Declaration of 46 in October 1923, and in the debate that followed he was "their most aggressive and effective spokesman" who "wherever he went easily obtained large majorities for bluntly worded resolutions." But his personal relationship with Trotsky was distant. Simon Liberman, who worked for the Soviet government during part on the 1920s was with Pyatakov in the Crimea, in 1920, and witnessed how he reacted when Trotsky rang: Despite his support for Trotsky, Pyatakov was anxious that the communist party did not split irreconcilably. After an angry meeting in October 1926, at which Trotsky called Stalin the 'gravedigger of the revolution' to his face, Pyatakov was visibly distressed and demanded of Trotsky "Why, why have you said this?", but Trotsky simply brushed him aside. In 1927, Pyatakov was sent to Paris as trade representative at the USSR embassy. In December 1927, he was expelled from the Communist Party for belonging to the "Trotskyite–Zinovievite" bloc. He was the first prominent "
Trotskyist" to renounce Trotskyism after the Left Opposition's December 1927 suppression. His capitulation was reported in
Pravda on 29 February 1928. For the next eight years he stuck to the party line. This prompted a scathing comment from Trotsky: When the former
Menshevik,
Nikolai Valentinov met Pyatakov in Paris early in 1928 and suggested to him that he has capitulated out of cowardice, Pyatakov riposted with a eulogy about the historic role of the Soviet communist party saying that, for the party, nothing was inadmissible, and nothing impossible, and that a true Bolshevik submerged his personality in the party to the extent that he could break with his own beliefs and honestly agree with the party. Pyatakov was recalled to Moscow and restored to party membership in 1928. He was deputy governor of Gosbank in 1928–29, and governor, 1929–30. After Stalin had ordered the start of the campaign to
force peasant farmers to move on to collective farms, Pyatakov gave a speech in October 1929 calling for "extreme rates of collectivisation" and declaring that "the heroic period of our socialist construction has begun." But in August 1930, Stalin complained in a letter to the head of the soviet government,
Vyacheslav Molotov that Pyatakov was a "poor commissar" and a "hostage to his bureaucracy". In September, he called him a "genuine rightist Trotskyist" and a "harmful element". Pyatakov was removed from office on 15 October, and appointed head of the All-Union Chemical Industry Association. In 1932, when the Supreme Economic Council was broken up, and part of it became the
People's Commissariat of Heavy Industry of the USSR, Pyatakov was appointed deputy People's Commissar, under
Sergo Ordzhonikidze. In February 1934, he was restored to full membership of the Central Committee. In October 1935, he chaired the first congress of
Stakhanovite workers.
Arrest and execution Pyatakov's wife was arrested July 1936, during the preliminary stage of the
Great Purge. He was in
Kislovodsk at the time, but returned to Moscow, and met Stalin and other senior communists, who told him that several former members of the Left Opposition being held by the
NKVD had confessed to being part of an anti-soviet conspiracy, and had implicated Pyatakov. He insisted that they were lying. According to what Stalin told a Central Committee plenum six months later, Pyatakov was invited to act as public prosecutor in the forthcoming
show trial, to which he readily agreed, but, according to Stalin, when told that he would not be suited to the task, he exclaimed: "How can I prove that I am right? Let me! I will personally shoot all those you condemn to be shot. All the bastards!" This has been taken to imply that Pyatakov was volunteering to shoot his wife, the mother of his children, if she were convicted and condemned to death. Pyatakov was allowed to put his name to an article that appeared in
Pravda on 21 August 1936, halfway through the first of the Moscow show trials, in which Zinoviev and Kamenev were lead defendants, declaring: "These people have lost the last semblance of humanity. They must be destroyed like carrion polluting the pure bracing air of the lands of the soviets...", but that evening the prosecutor
Andrey Vyshinsky publicly announced that Pyatakov, among others, had been named by the defendants as being involved in 'criminal counter-revolutionary activities, and was under investigation. On 11 September 1936, the Politburo ruled that he was to be expelled from the Central Committee and from the party. On 12 September 1936, Pyatakov was arrested in his service car at the in
Nizhny Tagil. From 23–30 January 1937, he was the lead defendant at the second of the Moscow show trials, the trial of the so-called 'Anti-Soviet Trotskyite Centre', a 'parallel' centre that was supposedly run from abroad by Trotsky with the intention of overthrowing the Soviet government. At his trial he was accused of conspiring with Trotsky in connection with the case of a so-called Parallel anti-Soviet Party Centre to overthrow the Soviet government in collaboration with Nazi Germany, the latter being promised a reward of large tracts of Soviet territory, including Ukraine. On the opening day of the trial Pyatakov told a story that while he was on an official visit to Berlin in December 1935, he secretly flew by private plane to an airdrome 'in Oslo' where he was taken by car to meet Trotsky, who was in exile in Norway, to receive instructions. This was provably false. Within a few days, Norwegian journalists had established that no aircraft had landed at Oslo's Kjeller airfield in December 1935, nor on any date between September and May. On 30 January 1937, he was sentenced to death, and executed on 1 February. Pyatakov was posthumously
rehabilitated and reinstated in the party on 13 June 1988 by a decision taken under the leadership of
Mikhail Gorbachev. ==Family==