Yakov Sverdlov

The name of Yakov Sverdlov is instantly recognizable by communists and revolutionaries who know of his epoch-making work beside the great Lenin and Stalin in the ranks of the Bolshevik Party leading towards Great October and consolidating its victories. Lesser known, even among the most well-read, is precisely Sverdlov’s role in all these events. And this is only logical, for most of his life everything he wrote was destroyed of necessity, either by himself or someone he was in correspondence with, due to the harsh illegality imposed on the most steel-like Bolshevik cadres. Right at the historic moment when he could begin to write openly, only shortly after the Bolsheviks had taken state power, he passed away suddenly. Recognizing a lack of material on his life, his wife and life companion, Klavdiya Sverdlova, took up the work to write a biography of the man. Beginning in October 1905, when the whole of Tsarist Russia was buzzing with the revolutionary enthusiasm of the workers and peasants on the heels of the events earlier that year, it covers their first interactions, through their first challenges together with autocratic repression and moving about from place to place to avoid the gendarmes. Sverdlova then touches on some personal notes from Sverdlov's childhood and spring into adulthood, moving on to the long periods of time he spent in prison, separated from her and their children. Indeed, until the February Revolution of 1917, Sverdlov had been everywhere -- Ekaterinburg, Perm, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Narym, Turukhansk, accompanied by the harshest parts of Siberia while in exile. However, from February on, he played a chief role as one of Lenin's closest comrades, as organizing secretary and one of those Bolsheviks who directly organized the uprising in the Great October Socialist Revolution. And following October, he was Chairman of the Congress of Soviets, crucial in the victories of dissolving the bourgeois Constituent Assembly and manoeuvring around the intrigues of the Left SRs.