Nicolas Lazarévitch (17 August 1895 – 24 December 1975) was a Belgian-born French electrician, a building worker, a proof-reader and, most consistently, a libertarian-anarchist writer and activist.
By 1916 he had left Belgium, fearful of conscription, and was working as a mechanic in the mines in Germany's Ruhr region: in 1917 he was able to escape to the Netherlands which had been able to avoid direct military involvement in the war.
[1][2] As Denikin's anti-Bolshevik forces gained the upper hand in the Odessa area, Lazarévitch fled across the border into Romania where he was briefly arrested.
[4] He linked up with local anarchists, notably Francesco Ghezzi and the group around Errico Malatesta, and was involved in street fights against the fascisti,[5] who were, according to at least one source, "protected by the police".
[4] During all this time the government was implementing its New Economic Policy and Lazarévitch became acutely aware that traditional workers' remedies involving trades unionism and strikes no longer existed.
Souvarine and another friend, the Russia expert Pierre Pascal, organised an "international support campaign" which eventually, in 1926, caused Lazarévitch to be expelled from the Soviet Union.
One source indicates that he settled in the Jura department, near the Swiss border, but he was evidently in close contact with Paris-based comrades, and engaged in a large amount of travelling between 1926 and 1928.
[1][6] Shortly after teaming up with Lazarévitch she was expelled from the hardline anarchist group with which she had become involved in Paris on account of her "religious practices": she lit a candle to celebrate her father on the day of his death.
[6] Ida continued to contribute to Le Libertaire, an anarchist journal which enabled her to taking a leading role in denouncing the dire situation facing the workers in the Soviet Union.
[6] On account of their continuing campaigning the French authorities expelled them towards the end of November 1928 and they moved to francophone Belgium where between 1928 and 1930 Lazarévitch worked as a miner in the Liège area.
[5] In 1931 they crossed back (illegally and briefly) into France where they made the acquaintance of Simone Weil, with whom Lazarévitch would remain in contact for the rest of his life.
[4] It appears that, traveling separately, Ida Mett had already arrived in Spain where, with the help of Francisco Ascaso and Buenaventura Durruti, the two of them succeeded in organising a number of public meetings.
[7] He also contributed reports from Spain that appeared in "La Révolution prolétarienne", a Paris-based syndicalist magazine, and another publication using the (frequently revived) title, "Le Cri du Peuple".
Lazarévitch nevertheless continued to keep in touch with the politically precarious situation in Spain and to provide commentaries on it for readers of "La Révolution prolétarienne" from his home in Belgium.
In April 1937 Lazarévitch and Félix Guyard founded a fortnightly political magazine based along the lines of the former "Réveil syndicalist" that he had produced in Brussels till the previous year.
Both camps had been used, since February 1939, to accommodate former internationalist fighters returning, defeated, from the Spanish Civil War, and now regarded by the increasingly nervous French authorities as a security threat.
He escaped from the transport train and spent the next couple of years living "underground" (unregistered), supporting himself through farm work in Les Landes.
He also met up with the writer Albert Camus whom he helped with work on documentation of nineteenth century Russian terrorists (which preceded the 1949 five-act drama, "Les Justes").
[4] At a time when the prestige of the Soviet Union in leftwing political circles and with the public more generally in the west, Lazarévitch was keen to persuade everyone – but especially the workers and trades unionists – of the lies about conditions back home ("le plus terrible des mensonges, celui de la réalisation du "socialisme" en URSS ...") of the Soviet propaganda.
[3] He teamed up with Lucien Feuillade to publish a selection of anti-Soviet texts in a volume entitled, "Tu peux tuer cet homme, scènes de la vie révolutionnaire russe" ("You can kill this man: scenes from revolutionary Russian life") which comprised a series of factual testimonies exposing the contradictions of the Soviet Union's revolutionary journey and its ultimate failure.
Between 1950 and 1958, in the context of intensifying Cold War tensions between the two side of the "Iron Curtain" across Europe, he was instrumental in creating and producing "La Réalité russe",[3] described as a bimonthly "information bulletin" which reproduced, with its own commentaries, articles translated from the official Soviet press.