Boris Georgiyevich Bazhanov (Russian: Бори́с Гео́ргиевич Бажа́нов; 9 August 1900 – 30 December 1982) was a secretary of the Secretariat of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union who published memoirs about Stalin and his secrets.
[10] Ukraine's political disputes ended in a victory for the communists and the territory split among the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Romania.
[6] Bazhanov applied to the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the highest policy-making authority within the CPSU, for a technical position.
"[12] According to Bazhanov's notes, Trotsky refused the position of deputy leader because he was Jewish, reasoning "We should not give our enemies the opportunity to say that our country was being ruled by a Jew.
"[12] Bazhanov's notes were discovered in early 1990 by Soviet historian Victor Danilov and were seen as providing the answer to a long-asked question about the Bolshevik Revolution: why Trotsky refused Lenin's offer to name him heir-apparent.
[12][13] After Lenin's death in January 1924, Stalin, Lev Kamenev, and Grigory Zinoviev together governed the CPSU as a triumvirate, placing themselves ideologically between Trotsky (on the left wing of the party) and Nikolay Bukharin (on the right).
Bazhanov was Stalin's personal secretary at the beginning of his power struggle with Trotsky and rise to becoming the undisputed leader of the Soviet Union.
[1] The Iranian authorities protected Bazhanov from the Joint State Political Directorate, the Soviet secret police, who had sent agents from Moscow to assassinate him.
[22] Bazhanov also recalled a later assassination attempt in 1937, stating that a "Spaniard, doubtless an anarchist or communist, tried to stab me as I was returning home, as I did each evening, after having left the car in the garage.
[24] According to Bazhanov himself, on the eve of Operation Barbarossa, he visited Berlin and met with Alfred Rosenberg, the head of the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories of Nazi Germany, and his deputy Georg Leibbrandt.
[25][26] In the conclusion of the 1978 book The Storm Petrels: The Flight of the First Soviet Defectors,[1] Bazhanov remarked on "the twisted path of Marxism": You know, as I do, that our civilization stands on the edge of an abyss ... Those who seek to destroy it put forth an ideal.