Leonid Krasin
Leonid Borisovich Krasin (; 15 July 1870 – 24 November 1926) was a Russian Soviet politician, engineer, social entrepreneur, Bolshevik revolutionary politician and a Soviet diplomat. In 1924 he became the first soviet ambassador to France. A year later, he left Paris to become ambassador to London, where he remained until his death. He was an early and close associate of Vladimir Lenin and his financier and the first finance wizard of the Communist Party. Early years. Krasin was born in Kurgan, Tobolsk Governorate in Siberia. His father, Boris Ivanovich Krasin, was the local chief of police. The composer and  Proletkult activist Boris Krasin was one of his younger brothers. He was educated at a technical school in Tyumen. He was a star pupil at school, and met the American explorer George Kennan when he visited Siberia. In 1887, Krasin enrolled at the Petersburg Technological Institute, to study chemistry. He was briefly expelled from St Petersburg for his part in a student demonstration in 1890. On his return, in October, he joined a Marxist circle founded by Mikhail Brusnev, which was one of the first social democratic groups to make contact with factory workers. He was expelled from the Institute  and banished from Petersburg again in 1891, for taking part in a student demonstration. He 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. After his release, he resumed military service in Tula. During a visit to St Petersburg, he delivered a talk to a Marxist circle organised by Stepan Radchenko, and was aggressively challenged by Vladimir Ulyanov, later known as Lenin, who was in the audience. In 1893, Krasin visited Leo Tolstoy, the author of "War  and Peace", who lived nearby, but, according to Krasin's wife, Liubov, who was present, they argued so furiously about revolutionary politics that Tolstoy "began to stamp with rage." Later, Krasin also became friendly with the writer Maxim Gorky, who described Krasin as: Arrested again in January 1895, he spent three months in prison before being deported to Irkutsk, where he worked as a draughtsman on the Trans-Siberian Railway. He graduated from Kharkov Technological Institute in 1901. Career. On his release from exile in 1900, Krasin had 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. In Baku, he also joined the underground Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP). At its 2nd Congress in 1903, the RSDLP split into Menshevik and Bolshevik factions; Krasin supported the Bolsheviks, led by Lenin, and was elected to the Bolshevik Central Committee. In these early years he was "the most influential Leninist in the whole of Russia", although, unlike Lenin, Krasin was a 'conciliator' who hoped to reunite the opposing factions of the RSDLP. He 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. 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 Krasin. This Nina Printing House, whose main operators were Lado Ketskhoveli and Avel Yenukidze,became for a period the main vehicle for Vladimir Lenin's newspaper "Iskra". In the late 1930s, Soviet history books  were revised to attribute the creation and running of the printing press to "Koba" Djughashvili (later known as Joseph Stalin), who was also in Baku at the time. Krasin left Baku in 1904 for the sake of his health, after contracting malaria, and obtained a job as to work as the chief engineer for the industrialist, Savva Morozov who owned textile works in Orekhovo-Zuyevo, near Moscow, to whom he had been introduced by Maxim Gorky. Morozov gave Krasin 2000 rubles per month to support the Bolsheviks and other needs. In April 1905, Krasin chaired the Third Congress the RSDLP , called to create a Bolshevik organisation that excluded Mensheviks and others, and was re-elected to the Central Committee. His activities during the 1905 Revolution primarily involved sourcing finance for the Bolshevik revolutionaries, including organizing bank robberies. Krasin helped plan the 1907 Tiflis bank robbery, a bloody crime that took place in the middle of Yerevan Square, killing forty and injuring 50. Yuri Felshtinsky identified Leonid Krasin as the most likely assassin of Savva Morozov, who died on 26 May 1905 in Cannes, France, by gunshot wound. Krasin enjoyed the excitement of terrorism. His home was the main laboratory in  which were manufactured the bombs used to attack Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin (in office: 1906-1911). The quest for excitement caused a break with Lenin. Lenin, who was usually acerbic in such circumstances, remained complimentary towards Krasin, and continued to exhort him to rejoin the Party. In 1908 Krasin left Russia and in 1909 collaborated with Alexander Bogdanov in the launch of the Vpered faction of the RSDLP. Later he withdrew from political activities for many years. He had a successful career as an electrical engineer, working for Siemens in Germany and in Russia and becoming a millionaire. After the  February Revolution of 1917 he returned to the fold and rejoined the Bolsheviks. In the Russian Bolshevik government Krasin served as People's Commissar of Foreign Trade from 1920 to 1924. Diplomatic career. Krasin met E. F. Wise in Copenhagen in April 1920. Wise was representing the Entente's Supreme Economic Council; with him Krasin negotiated the Anglo-Soviet Trade Agreement, signed in March 1921. In 1924 Krasin was elected to the Communist Party's Central Committee, an office he held until his death in 1926. In 1921 in Paris and prior to his death, he established the second Soviet  overseas bank as the Commercial Bank for Northern Europe () or BCEN-Eurobank. After Krasin organized Bolshevik supporters obtained BCEN-Eurobank in Paris as the first overseas Soviet bank, he, as head of the mission, which was formed on 24 February 1920 and was an attempt by the Bolshevik's Council of People's Commissars to break through the trade and political blockade of Bolshevist Russia by Western countries, travelled to London, met with British authorities beginning on 31 May 1920, and established "Soviet House" or "Russia House" at 49 Moorgate in London, which was known as the All-Russian Cooperative  Limited Liability Company "ARCOS" () and supported Bolshevik control of the Moscow Narodny Bank Limited, which had formed in October 1919, through Centrosoyuz as the next Soviet bank located overseas. In 1924 he became the first Soviet Ambassador to France. He left a year later to become the Soviet Plenipotentiary in London, where he died. His role in London was filled by Christian Rakovsky after his death. Role in project of Lenin's tomb. Krasin, in the tradition of Nikolai Federov, believed in immortalization by scientific means. At the funeral of Lev Karpov in 1921, he said: Lenin died in January  1924. Shortly afterwards 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. Krasin, along with Anatoly Lunacharsky, announced a contest for designs of the permanent monument/mausoleum. Krasin also attempted - unsuccessfully - to preserve Lenin's body cryogenically. Personal life. With his wife, they were the parents of three daughters, including: While Krasin was negotiating formal recognition of the Bolshevik government by the United Kingdom and France, and despite remedies proposed by his old friend, the physician Alexander Bogdanov, he died from  a blood disease. Krasin's funeral procession three days later included 6,000 mourners, many of them Bolshevik sympathizers; he was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium before being buried at the Kremlin Wall Necropolis in Moscow. Honors and legacy. During the Great Purge and until Stalin's death in 1953, he was largely omitted from the history of the Communist Party and the Soviet government. Two icebreakers (one launched in 1917 and one in 1976) commemorated Krasin.