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PIATAKOV: A MIRROR OF SOVIET HISTORY 103I have decided to write my piece of this "normal" history of the USSRthrough the biography of Georgii Leonidovich Piatakov (1890-1937), aRussian born in Kiev into a family of industrialists, who was, during thecourse of his life, a leader of the Left Communists; a founder and firstsecretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party (KP[b]U); the premier of agovernment during the Civil War; the president of the State Bank (Gosbank)and of the First Labor Army; and, above all, the organizer of Sovietindustrialization as vice-president of the Supreme Council of NationalEconomy (VSNKh) in the 1920s and as first deputy of the Commissariat ofHeavy Industry (NKTP) in the 1930s. Lenin, in his "Testament," includedPiatakov among the six most important Bolshevik leaders, noting that hewas a man of exceptional abilities, though one who tended to see only theadministrative side of a problem. And, Piatakov was a friend of Bukharinand of Trotsky, whom he betrayed, and a close collaborator of Feliks Dzerzhinskiiand Sergo Ordzhonikidze, to whose deaths he was in some wayconnected.This brief outline alone would be sufficient explanation for the reasonsbehind my choice, given that little has been written about Piatakov. 2 It wasnot, however, the fact that his life is one of the many unexplored territoriesof Soviet history that attracted me. Rather, I chose Piatakov's life to studybecause of the role he played in two key fields—that of nationality and thatof state intervention in the economy—whose interplay determined the outcomeof Soviet history, and because it promised interesting insights into theworkings of ideology and the "personal" question.Furthermore, unlike other biographies that have been published—Trotsky's and Bukharin's, for example—whose relevance to Soviet historyceases around 1929, Piatakov's biography seemed to me to constitute agood observation point, not only for the Civil War and the 1920s, butequally for the 1930s. It thus reflects a larger slice of Soviet history, all themore so in view of the variety of people and places with which Piatakovwas linked.2See his autobiography in Deiateli SSSR і oktiabr'skoi revoliutsii, in Entsiklopedicheskii slovar'Granat 41, pt. 2, 133 (Moscow, 1989; new edition); J. Bushneil, "Pyatakov," in TheModern Encyclopedia of Russian and Soviet History (Gulf Breeze, Fla., 1976-1989); V. F.Soldatenko, "H. L. Piatakov: Epizody zhyttia і diial'nosti na Ukraini," Ukrains'kyi istorychnyizhurnal, 1989, no. 4; V. F. Soldatenko and M. M. Sapun, "Sekretär pershoho TsK KPbU," inPro mynule zarody maibutn'oho (Kiev, 1989); and the forthcoming M. M. Sapun, H. Piatakov:Shtrykhy do polytychnoho portreta (Kiev, 1992). I have published " 'Building the First Systemof State Industry in History': Piatakov's VSNKh and the Crisis of the NEP, 1923-1926,"Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique 32, no. 4 (October-December 1991): 539-80.