Background
Grigori Sokolnikov was born Girsh Yankelevich Brilliant (Гирш Я́нкелевич Бриллиа́нт) to a railway doctor in Romny on 15 August 1888.
Grigori Sokolnikov was born Girsh Yankelevich Brilliant (Гирш Я́нкелевич Бриллиа́нт) to a railway doctor in Romny on 15 August 1888.
He served time in prison and studied economics whilst at the Sorbonne.
Sokolnikov was Jewish by birth. He moved to Moscow as a teenager and joined the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1905. He returned to Russia in April 1917 along with Vladimir Lenin in the "sealed train", and on arriving in Russia became part of the editorial board of the Bolsheviks" central party organization
After the October Revolution, he held various government positions.
Later, alongside Rosalia Zemlyachka, he became commissar of the Eighth army, using this position to order mass shootings during the Russian Civil War. Bajanov also notes that despite Sokolnikov"s past in the Red Army, he was not ruthless in his personality.
Privately, Sokolnikov lost faith in the Soviet Union under Stalin and later described the Soviet economy as "state capitalist". He was removed from his position in the Sovnarkom (Council of People"s Commissars) and demoted from the Political Bureau after calling for Joseph Stalin"s removal as General Secretary of the Communist Party at the Fourteenth Congress of the Bolsheviks in December 1925.
Sokolnikov was appointed instead as vice-chairman of State Planning Committee, the new economic planning agency (an appointment that carried cruel irony since Sokolnikov himself was a bitter opponent of heavy-handed centralized planning) and later as head of an oil company.
He was the Soviet ambassador to England from 1929 to 1932. During the Great Purge, Sokolnikov was arrested in 1937 and tried at the Trial of the Seventeen. He was sentenced to ten years of imprisonment.
Reportedly, he was killed in a prison by other convicts on 21 May 1939.
A post-Stalin investigation during the Khrushchev Thaw revealed that the murder was orchestrated by the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs. In 1988, during perestroika, he was rehabilitated along with many other victims of the Great Purge.
Bolsheviks, Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union]
Grigori Sokolnikov was a member of the first Political Bureau, with seven members: Lenin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Trotsky, Stalin, Sokolnikov and Bubnov. He was a member of the delegation for peace negotiations with Germany (he replaced Leon Trotsky as chairman, and signed the Brest-Litovsk treaty in 1918). He was appointed People"s Commissar of Finance following the introduction of the New Economic Policy and became a candidate member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party in May 1924.
