Varvara Yakovleva (politician)
{{short description|Russian Bolshevik politician}}
{{hatnote|This article is about the Russian Bolshevik leader. For information on Sister Varvara Yakovleva, a martyr of the Russian Orthodox Church, see Varvara Yakovleva.}}
{{Infobox officeholder
| name = Varvara Yakovleva
| image = File:Yakovleva VN.jpg
| width = 165px
| caption =
| order = People's Commissar for Finance of the RSFSR
| premier = Sergei Syrtsov (until 1930)
Daniil Sulimov (until 1937)
Nikolai Bulganin
| term_start = January 1930
| term_end = September 1937
| predecessor = Nikolai Milutin
| successor = Vasily Popov
| birth_date = {{Birth date|df=yes|1884|12|19}} (N.S.)
| birth_place = Moscow, Russian Empire
| death_date = {{Death date and age|df=yes|1941|9|11|1884|12|19}}
| death_place = Oryol Prison, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union
| party = RSDLP (Bolsheviks) {{nowrap|(1904–1918)}}
All-Union Communist Party (bolsheviks) (1918–1937)
| parents =
| relations = Nikolai Yakovlev, brother
| spouse = {{marriage|Pavel Shternberg|1906|1920|end=died}}
{{marriage|Ivan Smirnov
|1921|1928|end=div}}
| children = 1
| native_name_lang = ru
| native_name = {{nobold|Варвара Яковлева}}
}}
Varvara Nikolaevna Yakovleva ({{langx|ru|Варвара Николаевна Яковлева}}; ({{OldStyleDate|19 December|1884|7 December}} – 11 September 1941) was a prominent Bolshevik party member and Soviet government official who later supported Leon Trotsky's attempt to democratize the party. She was sentenced to 20 years in prison in 1938 for membership in a "diversionary terrorist organization." She was later shot in the Medvedev Forest massacre in Oryol.
Early life
Yakovleva was born in December 1884 in Moscow to the middle-class family of a tradesman of Jewish descent. Her father was a convert to Orthodox Christianity.{{cite web |title=Яковлева Варвара Николаевна (1884-1941) |url=https://nkvd.tomsk.ru/researches/passional/yakovleva-varvara-nikolaevna/ |website=Мемориальный Музей "Следственния Тюрьма НКВД" |publisher=Tomsk Museum |access-date=30 December 2020}}{{Cite web|title=К 100-ЛЕТИЮ РЕВОЛЮЦИИ. ВАРВАРА ЯКОВЛЕВА – Мосправда-инфо|date=30 March 2017 |url=http://mospravda.ru/2017/03/30/32075/ |access-date=2021-05-25|language=ru-RU}} She joined the Bolsheviks in January 1904, aged 19, as a student at a women's college in Moscow, where she was studying mathematics and physics, and was immediately involved in the illegal distribution of party literature.{{cite web |last1=Shishkin |first1=V.I. |title=ЯКОВЛЕВА Варвара Николаевна |url=http://bsk.nios.ru/enciklodediya/yakovleva-varvara-nikolaevna |website=Библиотека сибирского краеведення |access-date=30 December 2020}} During the 1905 Revolution, she was violently assaulted on the breasts, which damaged her health, and was a cause of the tuberculosis that she later contracted in exile in Siberia.{{cite book |last1=Stites|first1=Richard|title=The Women's Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism, and Bolshevism, 1860–1930|date=1991|publisher=Princeton University Press|location=Princeton, N.J.|isbn=0691100586|page=275|edition=Newwith afterword}} She was first arrested in 1906, and again in 1907, and barred from living in Moscow. Arrested again in December 1910, she was sentenced to four years exile in Narym, in Siberia, but escaped, and emigrated to Berlin to get medical treatment. She returned via Kraków, where she met Vladimir Lenin and made arrangements to smuggle illegal literature and correspondence across the border.{{cite book |last1=Krupskaya |first1=Nadezhda (Lenin's widow) |title=Memories of Lenin |date=1970 |publisher=Panther |page=205}} In October 1912, as an agent of the Central Committee in Moscow, but was arrested for the fourth time in 1913, and sent back to Narym, but escaped again, to St. Petersburg, where she was soon arrested and deported to Astrakhan.
Career post-1917
Yakovleva was able to return to Moscow late in 1916, and was appointed secretary of the Moscow regional committee of the Bolshevik Party. In August 1917, she was elected a candidate for membership in the Bolshevik Central Committee, making her the third most prominent woman Bolshevik, after Alexandra Kollontai and Elena Stasova. She took notes at the meeting that set the date for the October Revolution of 1917, and took a leading part in organising the takeover of power in Moscow alongside Nikolai Bukharin. In December 1917, Yakovleva was appointed a member of the collegium of the Cheka, but a month later was transferred to economic work as head of Vesenka.
In February 1918, Yakovleva supported the Left Communists, led by Bukharin, who opposed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, a treaty which ended the war between Russia and Germany at the cost of leaving most of Ukraine and the Baltic states under German occupation. She returned to work at Vesenka in June, and in September 1918 she was appointed the deputy head of the Petrograd (St Petersburg) Cheka. This was during the Red Terror that followed an attempt on Lenin's life on 30 August 1918, which also saw the assassination of the former head of the Petrograd Cheka, Moisei Uritsky. From January 1919, as a board member of the People's Commissariat of Food, Yakovleva led food inspections and parties that requisitioned food, her job being to make sure that grain was not destroyed by Kulaks and was used to feed Red Army soldiers during the Russian Civil War. She was known for her severity in this matter.{{cite encyclopedia|author=Encyclopedia of Marxism: Glossary of the People|title=Glossary of People: Ya|encyclopedia=Encyclopedia of Marxism|url=http://www.marxists.org/glossary/people/y/a.htm|access-date=March 27, 2007}} In March 1920, Yakovleva again backed Bukharin against Lenin during a dispute over the role of the trade unions.
From December 1920 to April 1921, Yakovleva was secretary of the Moscow party organisation. From April to August 1921, she was secretary of the Siberian party organisation. In 1922, she was appointed to a senior role in the RFSFR People's Commissariat for Education.
As Bukharin slowly moved rightwards inside the Bolshevik Party from 1921 onwards, Yakovleva stayed firmly on the left. In 1923, Yakovleva signaled her support for the Leon Trotsky led Left Opposition by signing the Declaration of the 46. In early 1926, the Left Opposition formed an alliance with the New Opposition group led by Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, to form the United Opposition. In 1927, Yakovleva ended her support for the United Opposition under growing pressure from the Joseph Stalin led government. In December 1929, she was appointed RFSFR People's Commissar for Finance.
Family
Yakovleva's younger brother, Nikolai (1886–1918) also joined the Bolsheviks in 1904–05, and is reputed to have been arrested 12 times over a decade. In 1914–16, he was in exile in Narym.{{cite web |title=Я́ковлев Никола́й Никола́евич |url=https://tomskmuseum.ru/nmps/nvtnarymzns/npsvin/vvtsnssYkovlev/ |website=C Нарымом связанные судьбы |publisher=Tomskmuseum.ru |access-date=30 December 2020}} According to Lenin's widow, he was a "staunch and reliable Bolshevik".{{cite book |last1=Krupskaya |title=Memories |page=224}} In 1916, he was conscripted into the Imperial Army, and stationed in Tomsk, where he was elected Chairman of the Tomsk Soviet after the February Revolution. In February 1917, he was appointed chairman of the Central Executive of the Siberian soviet, but was forced into hiding when the Siberian soviet collapsed in 1918 during the White forces' advance in Siberia. In November 1918, Nikolai Yakovlev was one of a group of Bolsheviks captured by White guards and killed on the spot.
Yakovleva's first husband was Pavel Shternberg, whom she converted to Bolshevism. Shternberg died in 1920.
In 1921, she married Ivan Smirnov, but this marriage disintegrated after she broke with the Left Opposition in 1927. Smirnov was arrested in January 1933, sentenced to five years in a prison labour camp in April 1933, and later executed in August 1936 after being caught up in the Great Purge. Their daughter, Vladlena, fled Moscow after her mother's arrest in September 1937, in order to avoid being placed in an orphanage, and she later worked as a teacher in Siberia. She married Dmitri Zolnikov, a lecturer at Novosibirsk State University. Their daughter, Natalya Zolnikova (1949–2018), was one of the foremost historians of the Russian Orthodox Church.{{cite news |last1=Petrov |first1=S.G. |title=Наталя Дмиетриевна Золникова: (Некролог) |url=https://sedmitza.ru/lib/text/8135499/ |newspaper=Церковно-Научный Центр "Православная Энциклопедия" |access-date=30 December 2020}}
Imprisonment and death
Yakovleva was arrested on 12 September 1937. Following the Third Moscow Trial, in March 1938, she appeared as a witness, to testify that in 1918, Bukharin and other Left Communists had plotted to arrest and possibly assassinate Lenin, Stalin and Yakov Sverdlov. Bukharin, who was on trial, accused her of talking "patent nonsense".{{cite book |title=Report of Court Proceedings in the Case of the Anti-Soviet 'Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites' |date=1938 |publisher=People's Commissariat of Justice of the USSR |location=Moscow |page=447}} According to the historian Roy Medvedev, her 'evidence' was "a fraudulent deposition written for her by the investigators." Afterwards, she asked her cellmates to spread the word - if they survived - that the deposition was lies that she had been forced to sign.{{cite book |last1=Medvedev |first1=Roy |title=Let History Judge, The Origin and Consequences of Stalinism |date=1976 |publisher=Spokesman |location=Nottingham |isbn=0-85124-150-6 |page=181}}
At a secret trial on 14 May 1938, she was convicted of sabotage and terrorism, and sentenced to 20 years in prison. She was held in solitary confinement at Oryol Prison, where she was executed on 11 September 1941 in the Medvedev Forest massacre, together with 156 other inmates, three months after the German invasion of the USSR. The order to kill her was signed by Stalin. (Several Soviet sources later inaccurately gave her date of death as 1944).
References
{{Reflist}}
{{Finance ministers of RSFSR}}
{{Authority control}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Yakovleva, Varvara Nikolaevna}}
Category:20th-century Russian women politicians
Category:Executed Soviet women
Category:Great Purge victims from Russia
Category:Jewish Russian politicians
Category:Jews executed by the Soviet Union
Category:Politicians from Moscow
Category:Russian Constituent Assembly members
Category:Russian Social Democratic Labour Party members