by CLARA WEISS
Tatiana Ivarovna Smilga-Poluyan
It is with profound respect that the World Socialist Web Site bids farewell to Tatiana Ivarovna Smilga-Poluyan, the daughter of the revolutionist and Left Oppositionist Ivar Smilga, who died in Moscow on September 27, 2014, aged 95.
Tatiana Smilga dedicated her entire life to restoring historical truth about all those who had been murdered and whose names had been besmirched by Stalinist reaction.
Tatiana Smilga was born in 1919, two months after Lenin and Trotsky founded the Third Communist International (Comintern). She was a member of an outstanding family with long-standing revolutionary traditions, whose life and fate were intimately bound up with the development of the Russian Revolution in the 20th century.
Her grandfather, Tenis Smilga, participated in the Russian Revolution of 1905 in Latvia. He was executed in 1906 as one of the local leaders of the insurrection against the Tsar. One year later, Tatiana’s father, Ivar Smilga, joined the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Party at age 14. By 1917, he had become a leading member of the party and close confidant of Vladimir Lenin. As the struggle escalated within the party leadership between Kamenev and Zinoviev, who opposed the seizure of power, and Lenin and Trotsky, who fought to prepare the party for the insurrection, Lenin turned to Smilga and asked him to ready military forces in Finland to come to the aid of the revolution in Petrograd.
Ivar Smilga, along with two brothers of Tatiana’s mother, were among the civil war heroes who helped defeat the counter-revolutionary White armies and the interventionist armies of the imperialist powers. However, after the victory of Soviet power in the Civil War, immense pressure built up against the Soviet Union as the international revolution, on which the program of October had been based, was delayed in the West.
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