Yemelyan Yaroslavsky[1] was born on 3 March 1878, into a Jewish family as Minei Israilevich Gubelman in Chita, then the capital of Russia's Transbaikal Oblast, where his parents were political exiles.

In 1903, Yaroslavsky married Olga Mikhailovna Genkina, a 21-year-old student at the Women's Medical Institute in St Petersburg, from which she was expelled after being caught in possession of revolutionary literature in February 1904.

After his return from London, he was arrested, held for 18 months, then sentenced to five years hard labour in the Gorny Zerentu Prison in the Nerchinsk region.

In the months after the October Revolution of 1917, Yaroslavsky became associated with the Left Communist tendency, which opposed the negotiated settlement of military hostilities with the invading army of the German empire.

He supported the 'Military Opposition', who objected to the strategy deployed by the People' Commissar for War Leon Trotsky, which relied on professional army officers and set-piece battles, rather than guerilla tactics.

He was appointed one of three secretaries of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolshevik) (CPSU {B}), and raised to full membership of that body.

He performed this function for nearly two decades, until the German invasion of the USSR when Stalin turned to the Russian Orthodox church for help in the war effort.

He appears to have been the first prominent communist to attack Trotsky personally, during a meeting of the Moscow party organisation, for which he was heckled by part of his audience.

When Trotsky addressed the Central Committee for the last time in October 1927, before his expulsion, while others barracked and insulted him, Yaroslavsky threw a heavy book at his head.

[11] In an 8 March 1931 speech before the Communist Academy held in the aftermath of the 1931 Menshevik Trial, Yaroslavsky attacked David Riazanov, scholarly head of the Marx-Engels Institute and a former member of the Menshevik Party, for the allegedly insufficient number of Communist Party members employed at that archive and research center.

[12] Later that year the academy would officially condemn Riazanov as "an agent of counter-revolutionary Menshevism," leading to his arrest and exile outside of the city of Moscow.

[12] In February 1937, when the two former party leaders Nikolai Bukharin and Alexei Rykov were arraigned before the Central Committee, prior to being arrested, put on trial and executed, Yaroslavsky denounced them as treasonous, and claimed that the charges against them were "totally proven".

[15] Yaroslavsky was also a frequent writer on the history of the Bolshevik Party and an editor of one of the main historical journals of the 1920s, Istorik-Marksist (Marxist Historian).

In the 1920s, the Soviet Union's most eminent historian had been Mikhail Pokrovsky, who had depicted Russia under the Tsars as an aggressor that persecuted smaller nations such as the Jews and Poles, and which shared the blame for the outbreak of war against France in 1812, Japan in 1905, and Germany in 1914.

With the outbreak of the German-Soviet War, in the summer of 1941, the Soviet state reduced its anti-religious activities in an effort to make use of the Russian Orthodox Church as an institution to rally the population to defend the nation.

"[21] Yaroslavsky's high-profile Pravda piece, along with a similar patriotic and nationalist article by Agitprop chief G. F. Alexandrov, was taken as an official signal to the historical profession to mine the imperial Russian past for examples of heroic unity and national defense which might be transformed into illustrative propaganda to aid the USSR in its attempt to rebuff the Nazi German invaders.

His remains were cremated and the urn with his ashes was interred to the left side of the Senate Tower in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis behind Lenin's Mausoleum.