Aleksei Stetsky

Aleksei Stetsky was born in a village called Borovishchina, in the Vyazemsky district of Smolensk[1] the son of an official. He joined a Marxist circle as a schoolboy, and joined the Bolsheviks as a student at a polytechnic in Petrograd (St Petersburg) in 1915. Arrested in 1916, and expelled from Petrograd after two months in prison, he returned illegally on the eve of the February Revolution. During the Russian Civil War, he served as a commander of a regiment fighting against the White Army of General Denikin.

In 1921, Stetsky was enrolled in the Institute of Red Professors, where he joined the 'Bukharin School' of young communists intellectuals who looked to Nikolai Bukharin, rather than Joseph Stalin as their leader. A party official from 1923, he was sent to Leningrad in 1925, to assist in defeating the faction there loyal to Stalin's rival, Grigory Zinoviev, as head of the Agitprop brueau for the Leningrad region, and editor-in-chief of the newly created youth newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda.[2]

In October 1928, when it became clear that Bukharin had lost his power battle with Stalin, Stetsky went to Stalin's allies Sergo Ordzhonidze and Sergei Kirov that he had severed his relationship with the Bukharin school. He later told Stalin that he was "ashamed" to have been associated with the Bukharin school. [3] His defection was announced in Pravda in March 1929. He was the only member of the 'Bukharin School' to defect to the Stalin faction.[4]

Stetsky was appointed head of the Agitprop of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on 19 November 1929. In April 1932, he was appointed a member of the organising committee of the USSR Writers' Union. In May 1933, he wrote to Stalin denouncing an almanac edited by Maxim Gorky and Leopold Averbakh, which contained a story by the talented writer Nikolai Erdman, which he described as a "malicious insult" and a "counter-revolutionary joke". He blamed Averbakh, whom he described as a political intriguer hiding behind Gorky's prestige.[5]

Stetsky was head of the Culture Department of the CPSU from 10 February 1934 to 26 April 1938, and a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and of the Orgburo from February 1934 - making him one of the two dozen or so most senior figures in the communist party. In 1934, he was also appointed editor of the magazine Bolshevik.[6] In August 1934, he was one of the main speakers at the Soviet Writers' Congress, in Moscow, in which he claimed that there was creative freedom in the USSR, but at the same time laid down that "we cannot portray a single character without showing how this man struggled...Our entire Party, the Party of Lenin and Stalin, has grown up and become hardened in the struggle for socialism... Our artists should let this be felt and understood in their works."[7]

Stetsky was arrested on 4 April 1938, and accused of having been part of a secret conspiracy dating back to 1932. He was sentenced to death and shot four months later.