RUSSIA: Death of Joffe

Death came last week to Adolf A. Joffe who put an end to his life by firing a bullet through his brain. For several years be had suffered intensely from polyneuritis (inflammation of several trunk nerves), aggravated by kidney trouble and heart disease. No motive other than to end his misery is ascribed to the suicide.

M. Joffe was one of Soviet Russia’s foremost diplomats and represented his country in many lands, the most notable, perhaps, being China, where he was able to prepare the way for Bolshevist influence in the civil warstill raging.

In recognition of his services his body was encased in a red coffin and taken to the Foreign Commissariat, where it lay in state, despite the fact that M. Joffe, close and good friend of Lev (Leon) Davidovitch Trotsky, was a member of the opposition group.

An imposing funeral procession made its way through Moscow several days after his death to the ancient monastery of Novo Devichi, where Peter the Great’s elder sister, Sofia, was for many years imprisoned. Grey-clad troops acted as escort to the hearse, which was followed by many Communist notables and members of the Oppositionist ranks. In their rear came some 500 of the populace followed again by a company of troops. They were no untoward incidents along the route.

Arriving at the cemetary which surrounds Novo Devichi, the coffin was carried to the edge of the grave by Trotsky, Zinoviev, Radek, Kamenev, Rakovsky and an unspecified member of the Joffe family—all Oppositionists. Foreign Commissar Georg Tchitcherin, representing the Central Committee of the Communist Party, spoke first, paying an eloquent tribute to M. Joffe’s services and ability as a diplomat. But the greatest of all the speeches was that of Leon Trotsky, the Communist outcast:

“Though Joffe came of a bourgeois family, he broke body and soul with the old ideals and devoted himself wholly to the cause of the proletariat. At the end of an overburdened physical suffering, he yielded to a temporary depression, but I ask you, comrades, to imitate him not in his death, but in his life, which was dedicated to the purest principles of Marx and Lenin, under whose flag he marched, as we march, to the bitter end.”

A great ovation greeted Trotsky’s words, but he made no acknowledgement of the plaudits, standing stiffly at attention, turning neither to the right nor to the left.

Adolf Joffe was 44 years old when he died. Born in the sunny Crimea, he joined (at the age of 17) the ranks of the Social Democratic Party, the left wing of which became the present Bolshevist movement. An education in Russia being consequently denied to him, he went to Berlin and there studied medicine (1903-6), thence to Zürich to study law (1907), thence to Vienna to study law & medicine. His departure from Berlin was precipitated by the authorities who, on account of hisradicalism, considered him an undesirable alien.

The next era in his life was spent as an exiled revolutionary. In 1908 he had met Trotsky in Vienna and together they founded the Pravda, now flourishing in Moscow under the editorship of Nikolai Bukharin. On one of his many trips to Russia under a pseudonym he was taken prisoner and exiled for life to Siberia. The 1917 revolution freed him. Returning to Petrograd, he became a member of the municipal council under the Kerensky regime, and a few months later became one of the leading Bolshevist victors.

The final period in his life was devoted to consolidating the revolution. He was first entrusted with the peace negotiations at Brest-Litovsk, being later succeeded there by Leon Trotsky. He then was appointed first Soviet Ambassador to Berlin, whence twelve years before he had been expelled. His activities in preparing the way for the German revolution, however, forced the Imperial Government to hand him his passports. He returned home to become Commissar for Foreign Affairs.

In 1921, having held two other posts in the interim, he attended the Genoa conference and soon afterwards became ambassador to both China and Japan. It was while in the Orient that he contracted the disease that was so to torment him as to compel him to take his own life.