Ivan Bakayev
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ivan Petrovich Bakayev (Russian: Ива́н Петро́вич Бака́ев; 1887 – 25 August 1936) was a Russian Bolshevik revolutionary and Soviet politician. A member of the Left Opposition, he was a defendant at the first Moscow show trial.
Bakayev was born into a poor peasant family of Russian ethnicity in the Saratov Governorate of the Russian Empire.[1] He joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party as an 18-year-old, during the 1905 revolution, in Kamyshin – where the local RSDLP branch had not split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, as it had in other cities, and where he was one of the organisers of an armed uprising. He joined the Bolsheviks in 1906, and worked for them illegally in Baku, Astrakhan, and, from 1910, in Saint Petersburg. He was arrested several times, and spent six years in prison altogether. At the time of the February Revolution, in 1917, he was working as a lathe operator in a factory in Petrograd (Saint Petersburg). During the October Revolution he was deputy secretary, and later secretary, of the Petrograd Soviet. During the Russian Civil War, he was a political commissar with the Red Army on the Ural and Petrograd fronts. In September 1919 – August 1920, he served as chairman of the Petrograd Cheka, then, after the Red Army conquest of Siberia, he headed the Cheka in the South-East territory.[2]
Persecution of the church
Bakayev returned to Petrograd in 1922 and took charge of the attempt to force the head of the Russian Orthodox Church in Petrograd, Metropolitan Benjamin to recognise the pro-Soviet "Renovationist" church. He supervised the seizure of church property and ordered the Metropolitan to rescind the excommunication of renovationist priests. When he refused, the Metropolitan was arrested, tried with ten others, and executed.[3] (In 1992, Benjamin was declared a saint.)
Opposition to Stalin
In 1924–26, Bakayev was chairman of the Communist Party Control Commission for the Leningrad province. In December 1925, when a rift arose between the Leningrad party organisation, headed by Grigory Zinoviev and supported by Lev Kamenev, and the centre, controlled by Joseph Stalin, Bakayev backed the opposition. He was expelled from the executive of the Central Control Commission on 14 November 1927, and from the Communist Party in December 1927. He then capitulated, along with Zinoviev, Kamenev and the other leaders of the Leningrad opposition, and was readmitted to the Communist Party in 1928, after which he held various economic posts.