26 Facts About Leonid Krasin

Leonid Krasin was an early and close associate of Vladimir Lenin and his financier and the first finance wizard of the Communist Party.

The composer and Proletkult activist Boris Borisovich Krasin was one of his younger brothers.

Leonid Krasin was educated at a technical school in Tyumen.

Leonid Krasin was a star pupil at school, and met the American explorer George Kennan when he visited Siberia.

In 1887, Leonid Krasin enrolled at the Petersburg Technological Institute, to study chemistry.

Leonid Krasin was briefly expelled from Saint Petersburg for his part in a student demonstration in 1890.

Leonid Krasin was expelled from the Institute and banished from Petersburg again in 1891, for taking part in a student demonstration.

Leonid Krasin moved to Nizhny Novgorod where he started military service, only to be arrested in 1892 because of his link with Brusnev, and taken to Moscow, where he spent ten months in prison.

On his release from exile in 1900, Leonid Krasin moved to Baku on the Caspian Sea, where he worked as an engineer in a large electric-power plant, and played an important role in the electrification of the Baku oilfields.

At its 2nd Congress in 1903, the RSDLP split into Menshevik and Bolshevik factions; Leonid Krasin supported the Bolsheviks, led by Lenin, and was elected to the Bolshevik Central Committee.

Leonid Krasin lived his double life as an apparently law-abiding factory-manager so convincingly that the workers at one point called for his dismissal, unaware that he was secretly helping produce the literature that encouraged them to resist.

Leonid Krasin raised the money from wealthy liberals that made it possible for the RSDLP to organise its first clandestine printing-press in Baku, a huge underground operation accessed by a disappearing trap-door designed by Leonid Krasin.

Leonid Krasin obtained a job as the chief engineer for the industrialist, Savva Morozov who owned textile works in Orekhovo-Zuyevo, near Moscow, and to whom he had been introduced by Maxim Gorky.

Leonid Krasin's activities were a tight secret at the time.

In summer 1907, Leonid Krasin clashed with Lenin over whether the Bolsheviks should participate in elections to the Third Duma.

Lenin refused to concede, and the Bolshevik faction split, with Leonid Krasin supporting the Vpered faction.

Lenin, who was usually acerbic in such circumstances, remained complimentary towards Leonid Krasin, and continued to exhort him to rejoin the Party.

Wise was representing the Entente's Supreme Economic Council; with him Leonid Krasin negotiated the Anglo-Soviet Trade Agreement, signed in March 1921.

In 1924 Leonid Krasin was elected to the Communist Party's Central Committee, an office he held until his death in 1926.

Leonid Krasin left a year later to become the Soviet Plenipotentiary in London, where he died.

Shortly afterwards Leonid Krasin wrote an article on "The Immortalization of Lenin" and proposed a monument containing Lenin's corpse that would become a center of pilgrimage like Jerusalem or Mecca.

Leonid Krasin attempted - unsuccessfully - to preserve Lenin's body cryogenically.

Leonid Krasin was unlike the general run of Lenin's communist aides.

Leonid Krasin's necktie matched his suit and shirt in colour, and even his stickpin was stuck with the special jauntinees of a well-dressed man.

Leonid Krasin always emphasised his foreign experience and contacts - his cosmopolitanism.

Leonid Krasin broadly hinted that he had accepted hardships and privations by returning from Germany to Russia of his own free will.