Boris Suvarin French politician of Russian origin; historian. Country: France

Biography of Boris Suvarin

Boris Suvarin (born Lifshitz Kon) was a French political figure and historian of Russian origin. He was born in 1895 and passed away in 1984. Suvarin was one of the founders and leaders of the Communist Party of France, serving as the representative of the French Communist Party in the Comintern and a member of the Comintern Executive Committee. However, in 1924, he was expelled from the party for supporting Leon Trotsky.

After his expulsion, Suvarin distanced himself from Trotskyism and began collaborating with the bourgeois press. From 1918 to 1925, he lived in Moscow, and upon returning to France, he started collecting materials on the history of the revolutionary movement in Russia. He also gathered documents, memoirs, and publications related to the life and activities of Joseph Stalin. In 1926, he published "Lenin's Testament" ("Letter to the Congress") in France, which was entrusted to him by N.K. Krupskaya.

In the 1930s, Suvarin wrote prophetic articles about Stalin, which went unnoticed in the West. Long before the outbreak of World War II, Suvarin remarked that "young Russia, drained by Stalin, leaves a free field for German dynamism." In 1935, he published a comprehensive work titled "Stalin: An Essay on the History of Bolshevism" in Paris, which left no doubts about the totalitarian and terrorist nature of Stalinism.

Interestingly, this work, which provided a deep analysis of the origins and stages of the Stalinist regime, was not well-received by both Stalin and Hitler. According to Suvarin himself, during the occupation of France, the Gestapo seized his personal library and archives. In the preface to the 1977 edition of his book, the author emphasizes that the theft of his archives was also the work of the NKVD, which, according to Suvarin, occasionally collaborated with the Gestapo in France.

Suvarin's monograph was translated into Russian and printed in a single copy specifically for Stalin. Reflecting on the mythical communist paradise and the numerous victims sacrificed in pursuit of the "ghost of communism," Suvarin expressed a thought that held significance: "No one has yet been able to seriously justify sacrificing living generations for the hypothetical happiness of future generations."