Адольф Иоффе: Революционер, саяхатшы және кеңес дипломаты

Russian revolutionary, politician and Soviet diplomat

Adolph Abramovich Joffe (Адо́льф Абра́мович Ио́ффе, alternative transliterations Adol'f Ioffe or, rarely, Yoffe) (10 October 1883 – 16 November 1927) was a Russian revolutionary, a Bolshevik politician and a Soviet diplomat of Karaite descent.

Adolf Abramovich Joffe was born in Simferopol, Crimea, Russian Empire in a wealthy Karaite family. He became a social democrat in 1900 while still in high school, formally joining the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party in 1903. In 1904 Joffe was sent to Baku, which he had to flee to avoid arrest. He was then sent to Moscow, but had to flee again, this time abroad. After the events of Bloody Sunday on 9 January 1905, Joffe returned to Russia and took an active part in the Russian Revolution of 1905. In early 1906 he was forced to emigrate and lived in Berlin until his expulsion from Germany in May 1906. In Russia, Joffe was close to the Menshevik faction within the Russian Social Democratic Party. However, after moving to Vienna in May 1906, he became close to Leon Trotsky's position and helped Trotsky edit Pravda from 1908 to 1912 while studying medicine and psychoanalysis with Alfred Adler. He also used his family's fortune to support Pravda financially. During the course of his underground revolutionary activity Joffe adopted the party name "V. Krymsky," the surname meaning "The Crimean." In 1912 Joffe was arrested while visiting Odessa, imprisoned for 10 months and then exiled to Siberia.

In 1917, Joffe, freed from the Siberian exile by the February Revolution, returned to the Crimea. Crimean social democrats sent him to the capital, Petrograd, to represent them, but he soon moved to an internationalist revolutionary position, which made it impossible for him to remain in an organization dominated by less radical Mensheviks. Instead, he joined forces with Trotsky, who had just returned from abroad. In May 1917, Joffe and Trotsky temporarily joined Mezhraiontsy who merged with the Bolsheviks at the VI Bolshevik Party Congress held between 26 July and 3 August 1917 (all dates are Old Style until February 1918). At the Congress, Joffe was elected a candidate (non voting) member of the Central Committee, but two days later, on 5 August, the Central Committee, some of whose members were in prison, in hiding or lived far from Petrograd and could not attend its meetings, made Joffe a member of its permanent ("narrow") bureau. On 6 August Joffe was made an alternate member of the Central Committee Secretariat and on 20 August made a member of the editorial board of the Bolshevik newspaper Pravda which was then temporarily called Proletary (Proletarian) for legal reasons. Joffe headed the Bolshevik faction in the Petrograd Duma (city government) in the fall of 1917 and was one of the Duma's delegates to the Democratic Conference between 14 and 22 September. Although Joffe, along with Lenin and Trotsky, opposed the Bolsheviks' participation in the consultative Pre parliament created by the Democratic Conference, the motion was carried by the majority of Bolshevik deputies at the Democratic Conference and Joffe was made a Bolshevik member of the Pre parliament. Two weeks later, on 7 October, once the more radical Bolshevik faction gained the upper hand, Joffe and other Bolsheviks walked out of the Pre parliament. In October 1917, Joffe supported Lenin's and Trotsky's revolutionary position against Grigory Zinoviev's and Lev Kamenev's more moderate position, demanding that the latter be expelled from the Central Committee after an apparent breach of party discipline. Joffe served as the Chairman of the Petrograd Military Revolutionary Committee which overthrew the Russian Provisional Government on 25–26 October 1917. Immediately after the revolution, he supported Lenin and Trotsky against Zinoviev, Kamenev, Alexei Rykov and other Bolshevik Central Committee members who would have shared power with other socialist parties.

In 1919–1920, Joffe was a member of the Council of Labor and Defense and People's Commissar (minister) of State Control of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic. He was not re elected to the Central Committee at the VIII Party Congress in March 1919 and would never again occupy a major leadership position. He negotiated a ceasefire with Poland in October 1920 and peace treaties with Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in late 1920. In 1921 he signed the Peace of Riga with Poland, ending the Polish Soviet War of 1918 1921, and was made deputy chairman of the Turkestan Commission of the VTsIK and Sovnarkom. Joffe was one of the Soviet delegates at the Genoa Conference in February 1922, an experience he described in a short book published later that same year. After the Soviet walkout, he was made ambassador to China (in office: 1922 to 1923 or 1924), as the Soviet troubleshooter (or Kuznetsov) of those days. In 1923, Joffe signed an agreement with Sun Yat Sen in Shanghai on aid to the Kuomintang on the assumption that the latter would cooperate with Chinese Communists, presumably with Lenin's approval. While based in China, Joffe traveled to Japan in June 1923 to settle Soviet Japanese relations. The negotiations proved long and difficult, and ended when Joffe became gravely ill and had to be sent back to Moscow. After a partial recovery, he served as a member of the Soviet delegation to Great Britain in 1924 and as Soviet representative in Austria in 1924–1926. In 1926 his declining health and disagreements with the ruling Bolshevik faction forced his semi retirement. He tried to concentrate on teaching, but it also proved difficult due to his ill health.

Joffe remained a friend and loyal supporter of Leon Trotsky through the 1920s, joining him in the Left Opposition. By late 1927, he was gravely ill, in extreme pain and confined to his bed. After a refusal by the Stalinist leadership of the Communist Party to send him abroad for treatment and Trotsky's expulsion from the Communist Party on 12 November 1927, he committed suicide on 16 November. He left a farewell letter addressed to Trotsky, but the letter was seized by Soviet secret police agents and later quoted by Stalinists to discredit both Joffe and Trotsky. Trotsky's eulogy at Joffe's funeral was his last public speech in the Soviet Union. Joffe's wife Maria Joffe was arrested as a left oppositionist Trotskyist by Stalin's security forces, yet she survived to write her memoirs One Long Night – A Tale of Truth. Joffe's daughter, Nadezhda Joffe, also an active Trotskyist, survived Stalin's prisons and labor camps and published a memoir, Back in Time: My Life, My Fate, My Epoch.