The Man Who Knew Lenin

In the Sixties and Seventies I used to see Boris Souvarine every time I was in Paris. We would lunch in a good restaurant and then repair to his office, which was an impressive documentation center on Communism—veritably a one-man Hoover Institution. By that time Souvarine had been largely forgotten; I was probably one of the few people who knew that he had been born Boris Livshitz, a jeweler’s son, in Kiev. (He always insisted he was born in Paris.) By that time too it had been forgotten that Souvarine had served on Lenin’s Bolshevik councils and that he had masterminded the 1921 Congress of Tours, at which the Communists split from the Socialists.

Souvarine was already well known in international Communist circles before he was twenty. One of the young Boris’s letters had so impressed Lenin in exile in Zurich that he had responded to it, an answer that was later duly published. Souvarine was jailed briefly by the French government after World War I for Communist activities, and it was from his jail cell that he urged his comrades—then still allied with the Socialists—to secede from that alliance at the Congress of Tours. This made Souvarine one of the founders of the French Communist Party. The Party took with it the movement’s daily paper, l’Humanité, founded by the grand old man of French Socialism, Jean Jaurès. (Jaurès had been assassinated in 1914 for his opposition to France’s declaration of war.) For a while Souvarine was the key man at l’Humanité, his articles as vitriolic then as they would be years later when he was attacking the Stalinists.

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Thomas Molnar

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

In the Sixties and Seventies I used to see Boris Souvarine every time I was in Paris. We would lunch in a good restaurant and then repair to his office, which was an impressive documentation center on Communism—veritably a one-man Hoover Institution. By that time Souvarine had been largely forgotten; I was probably one of the few people who knew that he had been born Boris Livshitz, a jeweler’s son, in Kiev. (He always insisted he was born in Paris.) By that time too it had been forgotten that Souvarine had served on Lenin’s Bolshevik councils and that he had masterminded the 1921 Congress of Tours, at which the Communists split from the Socialists.

Souvarine was already well known in international Communist circles before he was twenty. One of the young Boris’s letters had so impressed Lenin in exile in Zurich that he had responded to it, an answer that was later duly published. Souvarine was jailed briefly by the French government after World War I for Communist activities, and it was from his jail cell that he urged his comrades—then still allied with the Socialists—to secede from that alliance at the Congress of Tours. This made Souvarine one of the founders of the French Communist Party. The Party took with it the movement’s daily paper, l’Humanité, founded by the grand old man of French Socialism, Jean Jaurès. (Jaurès had been assassinated in 1914 for his opposition to France’s declaration of war.) For a while Souvarine was the key man at l’Humanité, his articles as vitriolic then as they would be years later when he was attacking the Stalinists.