23 Facts About Boris Souvarine

Boris Souvarine, known as Varine, was a French Marxist, communist activist, essayist and journalist.

Boris Souvarine famously authored the first biography of Joseph Stalin, published in 1935 as and kept close correspondence with Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky until their deaths.

Boris Souvarine was the founder of the Institute of Social History and an author, historian, publisher and journalist.

Boris Souvarine's family moved to Paris in 1897, where he became a socialist activist from a young age.

Boris Souvarine began to attend meetings held by Jean Jaures.

Boris Souvarine joined the French Section of the Workers' International.

Boris Souvarine borrowed the name Souvarine from a character in Emile Zola's Germinal.

Boris Souvarine welcomed with fervour the Russian Revolution in 1917 and his Russian skills helped him relay the events closely to left-wing circles in France.

In 1919, Boris Souvarine joined the committee of the Communist International and became one of its most active members, helping to diffuse large numbers of political and propagandist literature across Europe.

Boris Souvarine was arrested on 17 May 1920 in a government crackdown that accused a number of communist leaders and revolutionary activists of anarchist plots and conspiracy.

In prison, Boris Souvarine buried himself in his journalistic, political and essay writing, writing almost non-stop for Bulletin communiste, l'Humanite, La Vague and La Vie Ouvriere.

In December 1920, Loriot and Boris Souvarine are named honorary presidents of the Tours Congress.

When Trotsky became the target of vilification in the All-Union Communist Party, Boris Souvarine conveyed the French Communist Party's support for Trotsky to the Bolsheviks' 13th Congress in 1924.

Boris Souvarine became associated with the communist opposition against Joseph Stalin.

Boris Souvarine was removed from his official roles in the French Communist Party in early 1924 and was expelled by the Comintern in July.

Boris Souvarine became close to anti-Stalinist communist figures in Paris.

Boris Souvarine shared some positions with the Left Opposition as well with the so-called Right Opposition, but he refused to take part in its international conference called by Heinrich Brandler and August Thalheimer in Berlin in 1930.

The Bulletin communiste was continued, and Boris Souvarine launched La critique sociale.

Boris Souvarine's growing break with Trotsky was indicated by his analysis of the Soviet Union as state capitalist, in contrast to Trotsky's designation of it as a degenerated workers' state.

In 1936, Boris Souvarine encouraged the newly exiled writer Victor Serge to continue his political activity.

In 1935, Boris Souvarine created the Institute for Social History, a French branch of the International Institute of Social History of Amsterdam, which was originally created to preserve the archives of the Social Democratic Party of Germany.

Boris Souvarine was the secretary general while Alexandre-Marie Desrousseaux was the president and Boris Nicolaevsky was the director.

Boris Souvarine was freed with the help of his friend Henri Rollin and emigrated to the USA.