Iosif Dubrovinsky

Dubrovinsky was born in the village of Pokrovskoye-Lipovets, in the Maloangelsk district of Orel, the second of four sons of a mechanic, who died in 1882, soon after the birth of the fourth son. He was the elder brother fellow Bolshevik revolutionary Yakov Dubrovisnky His widowed mother, Lyubov, moved with all four boys to Kursk, then returned in 1895 to Orel.^[1] As a schoolboy in Kursk, Dubrovinsky joined a populist circle modelled on Narodnaya Volya, the group that assassinated the Tsar Alexander II, but later became a Marxist. From about the age of 18, he was a full-time revolutionary. He was arrested in December 1897, as an organiser of a workers' circle in Moscow, and the following year was sentenced to four years exile in Siberia. While there, he contracted tuberculosis. In 1902 he was moved to Astrakhan, where he made contact with the illegal newspaper Iskra, of which Lenin was the main organiser, and acted as its local distributor. He joined the Bolsheviks after the party split in 1903.

Arrested in February 1905, Dubrovinsky was released under amnesty in October. The Bolsheviks sent him to the naval base in Kronstadt, where, on 23 October, he addressed a crowd of thousands, who agreed resolution calling for better conditions for servicemen, and political demands for the overthrow of the monarchy and the creation of a democratic republic.^[2] The following day, thousands demonstrated, and for a couple of days Kronstadt was under rebel control, but martial law was imposed and thousands arrested, though Dubrovinsky slipped past the police by pretending to be blind drunk.^[3] He moved to Moscow, where he took part in the armed rising in December. He was arrested again in the summer of 1906.

Dubrovinsky was released in February 1907, and joined Lenin in Finland, which was under Russian rule. He was a delegate to the Fifth Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in London, in May 1907 - the last major gathering before the revolution at which both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks were present, and afterwards was elected to the 15 member Bolshevik Centre. He was almost the only member of that Centre to back Lenin over the issue of armed robberies carried in Georgia by revolutionaries secretly directed by 'Koba' (later known as Stalin) to raise funds for the party, but he opposed Lenin over the question of whether to have a final break with the Mensheviks.^[4] After the Congress, he returned to Russia to try to rebuild the party organisation, shattered by the defeat of the 1905 revolution. In February 1908 he joined Lenin in Geneva, where he was part of a triumvirate, which also included Alexander Bogdanov, running the Bolshevik publication, Vperyod (Forward).^[5] When this group split up, he supported Lenin against Bogdanov. He returned to Russian jurisdiction, hoping to unite the various illegal Marxist groups, but was arrested in Warsaw in November 1908, and was deported to Solvychegodsk, in north Russia, in iron fetters that left deep wounds in his legs.^[6] He escaped and joined Lenin in Paris in 1910.