Boris Bazhanov

Who was Boris Bazhanov?

Boris Georgiyevich Bazhanov was a secretary of the Soviet Union's Politburo, and personal secretary to Joseph Stalin from August 1923 through 1925. After holding several different positions in the Politburo from 1925 to 1928, Bazhanov defected from the Soviet Union, and remains the only assistant of Stalin's secretariat to have done so. Stalin's subsequent attempts to hunt down and kill Bazhanov in France failed. From 1930 on, Bazhanov wrote and published memoirs and books about the secrets behind Stalin's actions, which continued to be published and translated after his death in Paris in 1982.