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Concept
Boris Souvarine
Summary
Boris Souvarine (1 November 1895 – 1 November 1984), also known as Varine, was a French Marxist, communist activist, essayist and journalist.
A founding member of the French Communist Party, Souvarine is noted for being the only non-Russian communist to have been a member of the Comintern for three years in succession. He famously authored the first biography of Joseph Stalin, published in 1935 as Staline, Aperçu Historique du Bolchévisme (Stalin, Historic Overview of Bolshevism) and kept close correspondence with Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky until their deaths.
His anticonformism and early criticism of Stalin made him break away from the party in 1924. In the decades that followed, Souvarine continued publishing as a leading Sovietologist and anti-Stalinist. He was also the founder of the Institute of Social History and an author, historian, publisher and journalist.
Souvarine was born Boris Konstantinovich Lifschits in Kyiv to a Jewish family. Souvarine's family moved to Paris in 1897, where he became a socialist activist from a young age. He trained as a jewelry designer.
At the age of 14, he came into contact with the French socialist movement while he was working as an apprentice in an aviation factory. He began to attend meetings held by Jean Jaurès.
Souvarine experienced his first trauma with the outbreak of World War I. Mobilised as part of the French army in 1914, he quickly discovered the horrors of trench warfare and in March 1915, he lost his older brother who died fighting on the front-line.
War pushed Souvarine into politics and the antimilitarist movement. He joined the French Section of the Workers' International (SFIO). in 1916 and began contributing to publications of the antiwar socialist minority like Le Populaire, signing articles with the pseudonym he held onto for the rest of his life. He borrowed the name Souvarine from a character in Émile Zola's Germinal.
Souvarine's journalistic reputation grew rapidly during the war years as a talented, subtle writer and a skillful polemicist.
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