Ivan Smirnov (politician)

During the Russian Civil War, Smirnov was a member of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Eastern Front (August 1918–April 1919), and the 5th Army (April 1919–May 1920).

Smirnov is known to have had close ties with the Cheka and administered massacres of the rebellious peasants in Tyumen and the Altai Mountains.

From April 1922 through July 1923, Smirnov was a member of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the National Economy (ВСНХ) of the RSFSR; from September 1922 through May 1923, its deputy chairman.

In October 1923, Smirnov signed "The Declaration of 46", which attacked by implication the influence of Joseph Stalin as General Secretary of the Party.

Then on 14 January 1933, Smirnov was arrested, and a month later again expelled from the Party, accused of forming an "anti-party group" in order to remove Stalin.

[3] Historian Pierre Broué showed that by the end of 1932 Smirnov had joined a clandestine bloc which Trotsky characterized as an alliance to fight Stalinist repression.

]From the available evidence, it seems that Trotsky envisioned no “terrorist” role for the bloc, although his call for a “new political revolution” to remove “the cadres, the bureaucracy” might well have been so interpreted in Moscow.

In 1936, the 1932 bloc would be interpreted by the NKVD as a terrorist plot and would form the original pretext for Ezhov’s campaign to destroy the former opposition.

Smirnov, Gol’tsman, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Trotsky (in absentia) would be the defendants at the 1936 show trial, and the 1932 events would form the evidential basis for their prosecution.