page_title: Christian Rakovsky
section_title: Second Ukrainian government
hierarchical_section_title: Christian Rakovsky / Biography / Second Ukrainian government
context_page_description: Christian Georgievich Rakovsky was a Bulgarian socialist revolutionary, a Bolshevik politician and Soviet diplomat; he was also noted as a journalist, physician, and essayist. Rakovsky's political career took him throughout the Balkans and into France and Imperial Russia; for part of his life, he was also a Romanian citizen.
  A lifelong collaborator of Leon Trotsky, he was a prominent activist of the Second International, involved in politics with the Bulgarian Workers' Social Democratic Party, Romanian Social Democratic Party, and the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. Rakovsky was expelled at different times from various countries as a result of his activities, and, during World War I, became a founding member of the Revolutionary Balkan Social Democratic Labor Federation while helping to organize the Zimmerwald Conference. Imprisoned by Romanian authorities, he made his way to Russia, where he joined the Bolshevik Party after the October Revolution, and, as head of the Rumcherod, unsuccessfully attempted to generate a communist revolution in the Kingdom of Romania.
context_section_description: After the subsequent Soviet offensive in Ukraine, Lenin appointed Rakovsky  as the Chairman of the Provisional Revolutionary Government of the Workers and Peasants of Ukraine, replacing Georgy Pyatakov on January 16, 1919 due to the latter's argument with Fyodor Sergeyev for excessive interference in Ukrainian affairs. On March 29, 1919 the government was reorganized as the Soviet of the People's Commissars. According to the British author Arthur Ransome, present in Moscow during early that year, "It had been found that the views of the Pyatakov government were further left than those of its supporters, and so Pyatakov had given way to Rakovsky who was better able to conduct a more moderate policy". While in office, Rakovsky totally ignored Ukrainian issues, considering Ukraine and its language merely "an invention" of intellectuals.
  At the time, Rakovsky assessed the situation created by the Treaty of Versailles, and advised his superiors to build warm relations with both Mustafa Kemal's Turkey and the Weimar Republic, as a camp of countries dissatisfied with policies of the Allied Powers. Rakovsky subscribed to the Bolshevik condemnation of Greater Romania, stance that journalist Victor Frunză considered a revision of his previous views on Bessarabia. During the Paris Peace Conference, the Romanian delegation attributed the shortage in supply in Bessarabia and Transylvania a Bolshevik conspiracy centered on Rakovsky; various French reports of the time gave contradictory assessments (while some credited Rakovsky with direct influence on Soviet foreign policy, others dismissed the notion that Russia had any such projects).
  Rakovsky simultaneously served as Soviet Ukraine's Commissar for Foreign Affairs and a member of the South West Front's Revolutionary Military Council, contributing to the defeat of the White Army and Ukrainian nationalists during the Russian Civil War, while theorizing that "Ukraine was a laboratory of internationalism" and "a decisive factor in world revolution". Rakovsky's presence was also decisive in rallying the dissident Borotbists to the Bolshevik faction's central bodies—he was subsequently confronted with a degree of Borotbist opposition inside his government. According to American politologist Jerry F. Hough, his appointment and policies were evidence of Russification, a program requested by Lenin himself; Rakovsky's view contrasted with that supported by Stalin, who, at the time, was calling for increased Ukrainianization. On 13 February 1919 at the session of Kiev city council Rakovsky as a head of Ukrainian government stated following: "Decreeing the Ukrainian language as a state language is reactionary and unnecessary".
  In March 1919, Christian Rakovsky was one of the founding members of the Comintern, where he represented the Balkan Communist Federation. During those months, when control over the entire Ukraine was made possible by the offensive against Directorate forces, he expressed his support for the Yekaterinoslav wing of the Ukrainian Communist Party—following its wishes, he subordinated the Ukrainian Communists to the Russian Communist Party and argued that a separate Central Committee was "luxury" for such a small grouping.
  In summer, as Rakovsky's government briefly lost control of Ukraine, his policies became hotly contested by partisans of Ukrainian autonomy inside the Party, who held a conference in Homyel (one which Rakovsky did not attend). At the Fourth Congress of the Ukrainian Party (March 1920), the leadership of Rakovsky, Stanislav Kosior, and Dmitry Manuilsky was not reelected. Attacks on them caused problems with the Russian Party; as Lenin himself sided with Rakovsky, a delegation comprising Trotsky, Lev Kamenev and Adolph Joffe left for Kiev to discuss the matter with local leaders. In order to curb the crisis, the Ukrainian Party was subjected to a major purge, during which pro-autonomy opposition was removed from its ranks and the former leaders were reinstated.
  
  At the time, Rakovsky and Georgy Chicherin received harsh criticism from the Hungarian communist le
caption: 1920 theater of war: farthest advances of Polish and Ukrainian People's Republic Directorate forces during the Kiev Offensive
exif: {}