before the demise of Communist rule in the early 1980s, Rachmaninov’s music again adorned the repertoires of Russian orchestras. See also: BOLSHOI THEATER; MIGHTY HANDFUL; MUSIC
ALBERT L. WEEKS
(1885-1939), revolutionary internationalist and publicist.
Born Karl Sobelsohn to Jewish parents in Lvov, Karl Radek dedicated his life to international revolution and political writing. He was active in socialist circles from age sixteen and in 1904 joined the Social Democratic Party of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania. Before World War I, Radek moved comfortably among Europe’s Marxist revolutionaries. He became a member of the German Social Democratic Party’s left wing in 1908, and wrote on party tactics and international affairs for the party’s press.
Radek opposed World War I and was active in the Zimmerwald movement, an international socialist antiwar movement organized in 1915. He joined the Bolsheviks after the 1917 Revolution and was a delegate to the Brest- Litovsk peace talks, although he opposed the treaty and supported the Left Communist opposition. Nonetheless, in 1918, he became the head of the Central European Section of the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs and helped to organize the founding congress of the German Communist Party. In 1919, he was elected to the Bolshevik Party’s Central Committee and became the Comintern secretary. He was removed from this post in 1920, but remained a member of the Comintern’s executive committee and the Central Committee, and was active in German communist affairs until 1924.
In 1924, Radek sided with Trotsky’s Left Opposition and in consequence was removed from the Central Committee. That same year he also opposed changes in Comintern policy and thus was removed from its executive committee. He was expelled from the Party in 1927 and exiled. After recanting his errors in 1929, he was readmitted to the Party and became the director of the Central Committee’s information bureau and an adviser to Joseph Stalin on foreign affairs. Radek helped to craft the 1936 Soviet constitution, but later that year he was arrested and again expelled from the Party. At his January 1937 Moscow show trial, he was convicted of being a Trotskyist agent and sentenced to ten years in prison. He died in 1939.
Radek published routinely in the Soviet press and authored several books on Comintern and international affairs. See also: CENTRAL COMMITTEE; COMMUNIST INFORMATION BUREAU; COMMUNIST INTERNATIONAL; COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE SOVIET UNION; LEFT OPPOSITION; PURGES, THE GREAT; TROTSKY, LEON DAVIDOVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Lerner, Warren. (1970). Karl Radek: The Last Internationalist. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
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Radek, Karl B., with Haupt, Georges (1974). “Karl Bern-hardovich Radek.” In Makers of the Russian Revolution, ed. Georges Haupt and Jean-Jacques Marie, tr. C.I.P. Ferdinand and D.M. Bellos. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
(1749-1802), poet, thinker, and radical critic of Russian society.
Alexander Nikolayevich Radishchev was arrested for sedition by Catherine II in 1790 for the publication of a fictional travelogue. Newly promoted from assistant director to director of the St. Petersburg Customs and Excise Department, he had benefited from Catherine’s earlier enthusiasm for the European Enlightenment. Following service as a page at the Imperial Court from 1762 to 1767, he had been selected as one of an elite group of students sent to study law at Leipzig University, where he had absorbed the progressive thinking of the leading French philosophes. After completing his studies in 1771 he returned to Russia, where he responded to Catherine’s encouragement for translating the works of the European thinkers of the Enlightenment. His first literary venture, in 1773, was a translation of Gabriel Bonnot de Mably’s Observations sur l’histoire de la Gr?ce, which idealized republican Sparta. Radishchev’s first significant original work, published in 1789, was his memoir, Zhitie Fedora Vasilevicha Ushakova (The Life of Fedor Vasilevich Ushakov), recalling idealistic conversations with a fellow student in Leipzig on oppression, injustice, and the possibilities for reform. This was a prelude for Puteshestvie iz Peterburga v Moskvu (A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow), in which an observant, sentimental traveler discovers the various deficiencies in contemporary Russian society.
At each staging post, an aspect of the state of Russian society is revealed. For example, at Tosna, the traveler observes feudalism; at Liubani, it is forced peasant labor. Chudovo brings unchecked bureaucratic power to his attention; he learns of autocracy at Spasskaya Polest; and at Vydropusk his attention is taken by the imperial court and courtiers. Other stops along the road illuminate issues such as religion, education, health, prostitution, poverty, and censorship in an encyclopedic panorama of a sick society. No single cure is proposed for Russia’s ills, but the underlying message is that wrongs must be righted by whatever means prove to be effective.
Deeply affected by the French Revolution of 1789, Catherine now read the work as an outrageous attempt to undermine her imperial authority. An example was made of Radishchev in a show trial that exacted a death sentence, later commuted to Siberian exile. He was permitted to return to European Russia in 1797, but he remained in exile until 1801. Crushed by his experiences, he committed suicide the following year. His Journey remained officially proscribed until 1905. Its author’s fate, however, as much as the boldness of its criticism, had won Radishchev the reputation of being the precursor of the radical nineteenth-century intelli-gensia. See also: CATHERINE II; ENLIGHTENMENT, IMPACT OF; INTELLIGENTSIA
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Clardy, Jesse V. (1964). The Philosophical Ideas of Alexander Radishchev. New York: Astra Books. Lang, David M. (1959). The First Russian Radical: Alexander Radishchev (1749-1802). London: Allen and Un-win. McConnell, Allen. (1964). A Russian Philosophe: Alexander Radishchev 1749-1802. The Hague: Nijhoff.
(b. 1936), playwright, author, popular historian, and television personality.
A man of the 1960s, Edvard Radzinsky was born in Moscow to the family of an intellectual. He trained to be an archivist but began writing plays during the late 1950s. During the 1960s and the 1970s Radzinsky dominated the theatrical scene in Moscow and gained international recognition. His early plays explored the themes of love, commitment, and estrangement (101 Pages About Love; Monologue About a Marriage; “Does Love Really Exist?,” Asked the Firemen). In the final decades of stagnation under mature socialism, Radzinsky wrote a cycle of historical-philosophical plays exploring the
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themes of personal responsibility, the struggle between ideas and power, and the roles of victim and executioner (Conversations with Socrates; I, Lunin; and Theater in the Time of Nero and Seneca). In the same period he also wrote several grotesques that drew their inspirations from great literary themes and myths: The Seducer Kolobashkin (the Faust legend) and Don Juan Continued (Don Juan in modern Moscow).
Radzinsky refused to define his dramatic imagination by the political events of 1917 and looked to a larger intellectual world. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, he shifted his creative efforts to literature, writing Our Decameron on the decon-struction of the Soviet intellectual life and history, as well as writing unconventional biographies of Nicholas II (The Last Tsar), Stalin, and Rasputin. In each work Radzinsky enjoyed access to new archival sources and wrote for a popular audience. His works became international bestsellers. Some historians criticized the special archival access he obtained through his close ties with the government of Boris Yeltsin. Others noted his invocation of mystical and spiritual themes in his treatment of the murder of the tsar and his family. Radzin-sky has shown a profound interest in the impact of personalities on history but is much opposed to either a rationalizing historicism or an ideology-derived historical inevitability. Radzinsky became a media celebrity thanks to his programs on national television about riddles of history. In 1995 he was elected to the Academy of Russian
