Adolph
Joffe was born in Simferopol, Russia, on 10th October, 1883.
The son of a wealthy merchant, he became involved in revolutionary
activity while a student in the late 1890s.
Joffe joined
the Social Democratic Party in 1903 and the
following year became involved in smuggling political propaganda to
Baku. He moved to Moscow during the 1905 Russian Revolution. The following
year he was forced into exile. He lived in Berlin before being expelled
from Germany in May, 1906.
Joffe now
moved to Vienna where he edited Pravda
with Leon
Trotsky. He often visited Russia and in 1912 he was arrested and
after spending ten months in solitary confinement before being exiled
to Siberia.
In 1917
Joffe escaped from Siberia and made his way to Petrograd. He was elected
to the Petrograd Soviet and the Bolshevik
Central Committee. During the October
Revolution Joffe was the chairman of the Military Revolutionary
Committee.
In December,
1917, Joffe went with Leon Trotsky as
a member of the Russian delegation at Brest-Litovsk
that was negotiating with representatives from Germany
and Austria. They had the difficult
task of trying to end Russian participation in the First
World War without having to grant territory to the Central
Powers. By employing delaying tactics Joffe and Trotsky hoped
that socialist revolutions would spread from Russia
to Germany and Austria-Hungary
before they had to sign the treaty.
After nine weeks of discussions without agreement, the German
Army was ordered to resume its advance into Russia. On 3rd March
1918, with German troops moving towards Petrograd, Vladimir
Lenin ordered Joffe and Trotsky to accept the terms of the Central
Powers. The Brest-Litovsk Treaty resulted
in the Russians surrendering the Ukraine, Finland,
the Baltic provinces, the Caucasus and Poland.
When Leon
Trotsky took control of the Red Army
during the Civil War, Joffe replaced
him as Commissar for Foreign Affairs and carried out negotiations
with Turkey and Germany. While in Berlin he was accused of planning
a communist revolution and was expelled from the country.
Joffe was
a loyal supporter of Leon Trotsky and
after Joseph Stalin gained power was sent
him abroad as a diplomatic. In 1927 Joffe was one of the few leading
Bolsheviks who was willing to defend
Trotsky. After the expulsion of Trotsky from the Central Committee,
Joffe decided to commit suicide. Adolph Joffe died on 16th November,
1927.
(1)
The Granat Encyclopaedia of the
Russian Revolution was published by the Soviet government in 1924.
The encyclopaedia included a collection of autobiographies including
one by Adolph Joffe.
In 1904 I was instructed by the Central Committee to convey
literature to Baku and to conduct propaganda there. I joined the Baku
SD organization, but I had to leave Transcaucasia in the same year
to avoid arrest, and I was sent to Moscow for the same sort of work.
I was soon exposed there, too, so I took refuge abroad, where I arrived
immediately after the events of 9 January 1905. I straightaway returned
to Russia and took part in the Revolution in various towns.
(2) Leon
Trotsky wrote about Adolph Joffe in his autobiography.
Joffe was a man of great intellectual ardour, very genial
in all his personal relations, and unswervingly loyal to the cause.
In connection with the activities of the Pravda Joffe went to Russia
for revolutionary work. He was arrested in Odessa, spent a long time
in prison, and was later exiled to Siberia. He was not set free until
February 1917, as a result of the revolution of that month. In the
October revolution which followed he played one of the most active
parts.
Joffe tried
to make his death a service to the same cause to which he had dedicated
his life. With the same hand that was to pull the trigger against
his own temple half an hour later, he wrote the last evidence of a
witness and the last counsel of a friend.
(3)
Adolph Joffe, suicide letter sent to Leon Trotsky (16th November,
1927)
I have never doubted the rightness of the road you pointed
out, and as you know, I have gone with you for more than twenty years,
since the days of 'permanent revolution'. But I have always believed
that you lacked Lenin unbending will, his unwillingness to yield,
his readiness even to remain alone on the path that he thought right
in the anticipation of a future majority, of a future recognition
by everyone of the rightness of his path.
Politically,
you were always right, beginning with 1905, and I told you repeatedly
that with my own ears I had heard Lenin admit that even in 1905, you,
and not he, were right. One does not lie before his death, and now
I repeat this again to you. But you have often abandoned your rightness
for the sake of an overvalued agreement or compromise. This is a mistake.
I repeat: politically you have always been right, and now more right
than ever. Some day the party will realize it, and history will not
fail to accord recognition. Then don't lose your courage if someone
leaves you know, or if not as many come to you, and not as soon, as
we all would like.
You are
right, but the guarantee of the victory of your rightness lies in
nothing but the extreme unwillingness to yield, the strictest straightforwardness,
the absolute rejection of all compromise; in this very thing lay the
secret of Lenin's victories. Many a time I have wanted to tell you
this, but only now have I brought myself to do so, as a last farewell.
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