Nicolas Lazarévitch

Nicolas Lazarévitch (1895 - 1975) was a refractory and militant Anarchiste then Russian Anarchist-trade unionist of origin.

Child of exiled fleeing the mode of the Tsar for their revolutionary activities, it passes his youth in Belgium. Nicolas Lazarévitch becomes with the Libraire Hem Day, one of some famous figures of the Anarchisme of Brussels.

He settles in France at the end of the Twenties.

He travels in the USSR during the storm. He forges there convictions anarchist-trade unionists which lead it to make a critical reading of the government Bolchevique. Self-educated, it works in factory and ends up being imprisoned in 1924, with Moscow, for its illicit trade-union activities. It indeed organized with some other anarchistic workmen a anarchist-trade unionist group with the factory Dynamo of Moscow, which publishes several leaflets - against the falls of wages, the economic agreement between the England and the USSR, against the campaigns taylorists, by always presenting an alternative trade unionist-revolutionist - posed of night on the benches, stuck on the posters official, read as a public or transmitted under the coat. They are located then stopped. Thanks to its relations of anti-Stalinist left, of which Boris Souvarine - which will become a privileged friend - an opinion campaign in France makes it release in 1926. The next September 29th, Nicolas Lazarevitch is expelled of the USSR.

It arrives to France. Following a campaign denouncing the situation of the workmen in Russia carried out by his wife Ida Mett, they are them two expelled.

They settle in Belgium until 1936. In 1932, is born a son whom they call Marc . They make illegal incursions in France, during two years, then in Spain. There, they meet Francisco Ascaso and Buenaventura Durruti. Thanks to their assistance, they organize several public meetings there.

They return clandestinely to France in 1936. They live with the Pre-Saint-Gervais. Their naturalization is systematically refused, obtaining only permits residence with lasted limited, and that until their death. Their friend Boris Souvarine manages to regularize their administrative status.

He is the author of obituaries, of which that of Andreu Nin Nin assassinated , appeared in the proletarian Revolution n°252 in August 1937.

June 8th, 1940, they are stopped then imprisoned again. He is sent to the camp of the Vernet and out of spring at the end of three months.

Consequently, beside its other political activities - primarily with the Trade union of the correctors, after 1945 - it launches out in a constant work of information on the Soviet Union, becoming acquainted with the USSR a true combat which it carries out against the Communists, hoping to convince a public preferably Ouvrier and Syndicaliste, as for the falseness of the messages conveyed by the Muscovite Propagande. Until its death, Lazarévitch will endeavor to make hear its point of view, while taking part in various periodicals, by organizing conferences, the whole within restricted circles made up of its close entourage (of the friends, of the comrades of work, the students whom he meets when he resumes his studies, after 1960 especially), of his political family and other groupings of active Russian emigrants in the denunciation of the Soviet mode.

It constitutes in company of great names like Albert Camus, but also Louis Mercier and Roger Lapeyre, the Groupes of international connection (GLI), in the first months of 1949. With the end of the year 1950, Lazarévitch feels a certain frustration related to the dissolution of the GLI.

With the beginning of the year fifty, and this in a context of Cold war relatively tended, it creates Russian Reality , specialized magazine in information on the USSR in which it remarkably tries to make known with the French public opinion certain aspects of social realities, economic and cultural in the USSR. It is helped by certain actors of the anti-Stalinist Extreme-left, by Ida Mett, and other personalities of the Parisian intellectual world. Exclusively made up of translations of recent articles of the Soviet press, this modest publication is made of a score of typed and roneoed pages. Semi-monthly in 1950, it will become quadri-annual nothing any more but as from 1956. It is diffused in a confidential way, in the entourage militant of the family, like at certain research centres - mainly with the Bibliothèque of contemporary international documentation. Thus, he wants to dismount certain mystifications of the propaganda of the mode. This review counts sixty numbers, published of 1950 to 1958. He collaborates at the end of the Fifties with the solidaristic Russian of the National federation of the work of the new generation (NTS).

Works

what I lived in Russia , Liege, ED. federalistic Trade union of the mechanics and comparable
the Soviet school: lesson primary education and secondary , with Ida Mett (foreword Pierre Pascal), ED. the Islands of Gold, 1954
You can kill this man: scenes of the Russian revolutionary life , with Lucien Feuillade, Paris, Gallimard, 1950.

Quotation

“It would be banal and simple to explain all the gaps morals, the serious offenses of the young people of the dormitories by the defective activity of the monitors in charge of their monitoring. The young worker does not want to be the simple executor of the will of others, of the projects of others, even if those are splendid. ”

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