Yakov Drobnis

Yakov Naumovich Drobnis (Russian: Яков Наумович Дробнис; 6 March 1890 – 1 February 1937) was a Bolshevik revolutionary who supported Leon Trotsky.

On his release, he moved to Vilnius, where he was arrested, for the third time in January 1915 and deported to Poltava, where he joined the local Bolshevik organisation.

In this period, he supported the Democratic Centralist opposition group, led by Timofei Sapronov and Vladimir M. Smirnov.

Drobnis signed the Declaration of the Forty-Six in 1923, and backed Trotsky in the split that opened up within the Communist Party after the death of its founder, Vladimir Lenin.

In 1924, Drobnis was passed a letter written by a fellow oppositionist named Pililenko, who called for mass recruitment to the left opposition, and reputedly advocated creating a breakaway political party.

[3] In January 1937, he appeared as a defendant alongside Yuri Pyatakov, Karl Radek and others at the second of three major Moscow show trials, where he confessed to having organised the explosion on Trotsky's orders, and pleaded with the court: "If you find it in the least possible to save me from shameful death, and, after putting me to the severest test, permit me to return to the ranks of the class from which I came, I shall regard it as my great and sacred duty fully to justify this gift.".