Sergey Ivanovich Gusev

[1] Yakov Davidovich Drabkin was born on January 1, 1874, in Sapozhok, Ryazan Governorate, in the Russian Empire into a Jewish family.

In 1896, as a student at the St Petersburg Institute of Technology, using the alias S.I.Gusev, he joined the League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class, whose leading figure was Vladimir Lenin.

[1] Working full-time as a revolutionary organiser, he recreated the Rostov branch of the RSDLP, which had been destroyed after a wave of arrested in 1899, organised a political demonstration in February 1902, to mark the anniversary of the abolition of Serfdom in Russia, and pulled together scattered groups of student revolutionaries, who met in August 1902 to form the 'South Russian Student Group'.

Returning to St Petersburg in 1909, he fled to Terijoki when he feared that he was about to be arrested, and had a nervous breakdown, after which he withdrew from party activity for eight years.

Early in 1919, he was a member of the Military Revolutionary Committee directing operations on the Eastern Front during the Russian Civil War.

In July 1919, after the Red Army had had a spectacular success in driving the White army across the Urals into Siberia, Gusev was appointed to the six-member Military Revolutionary Committee, chaired by Leon Trotsky, who mistrusted Gusev, and later described him as a "genuine agent" of Josif Stalin, Trotsky's rival.

[10] Gusev was, with Mikhail Frunze, the leading theorist of the so-called 'Military Opposition', of which Stalin's crony Kliment Voroshilov was a supporter, who claimed that there was a specifically proletarian way of training an army and waging war, which Trotsky disputed.

In December 1924, he published an article in Pravda that was one of the first attacks on Trotsky's record as the head of the Red Army during the civil war.

Addressing the 14th Congress of the CPSU in December 1925, he said that every party member had a duty to report anyone to the CCC anyone who was involved in organised opposition to Stalin's leadership.

B. Matthews, chief investigator for the Dies Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives, inquired into activities of Gusev (transliterated as "Gussev" in the transcript) in the U.S. during the 1920s with Max Bedacht, a co-founder of the Communist Party of the USA and long-time general secretary of the International Workers Order (IWO): Mr. Matthews: Do you know a man by the name Gussev?

[15]Gusev's involvement in Comintern affairs began in March 1925, when, as representative of the CCC, he led the condemnation of Trotsky's ally Karl Radek, and Radek's German allies, Heinrich Brandler and August Thalheimer, who were banned from participation in the affairs of Comintern.

He called himself an 'Old Bolshevik'...His special vocation is that of falsifying the history of the civil war, for which his main qualification is his apathetic cynicism.

She recanted in 1929, and was readmitted to the party, but was expelled again in August 1936, arrested in December, and sentenced to five years in the Gulag.