Turning the pages back... February 22, 1959 (02/18/96)

Turning the pages back...

February 22, 1959

An Old Guard Bolshevik, Dmytro Manuilsky was a survivor who was instrumental in Joseph Stalin's manipulation and betrayal of the Communist International. Born in Sviatets in 1883, near Kremianets in Volhynia, he studied in St. Petersburg and helped organize the Sveaborg and Kronstadt mutinies there in 1906.

Arrested and exiled by the tsarist police, he escaped and fled to Paris in 1907, where he studied law at the Sorbonne. He returned to Ukraine in the last days of the first world war, and in 1918, Manuilsky became an executive committee member of the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Ukraine.

He served as people's commissar for agriculture during the famine of 1920-1921, first secretary of the CP(B)U's central committee until 1922, and a member of Ukraine's Politburo until 1923.

In 1922, Manuilsky traveled to Moscow to an administrative post in the Communist International (Comintern), eventually rising to the top post of secretary of its executive committee in 1928.

This was the year that Stalin began announcing the heretofore ideological heresy of "socialism in one country," a signal that the goal of world revolution was being abandoned. As such, the Comintern, which was initially seen as the world Communist Party to effect a global change, would be subverted.

Manuilsky supervised the Stalinist purges and terror in the Comintern's apparat and in foreign Communist parties, such as those of Spain, France, Germany and western Ukraine. It was Manuilsky who saw to it that the body became an instrument of Soviet foreign policy and espionage.

In 1943, the external purges seemingly complete and needing a sop to throw to his Western allies, Stalin abolished the Comintern and appointed Manuilsky deputy chairman of Ukraine's Council of Ministers.

Although he fell into disfavor in 1950 and was forced to retire, Manuilsky was among the few of Stalin's snakes that outlived their charmer. He died on February 22, 1959.

Sources: "Manuilsky, Dmytro," "Communist International," Encyclopedia of Ukraine, Vols. 1, 3 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984, 1993).

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