Wladimir S. Woytinsky

Who was Wladimir S. Woytinsky?

Wladimir S. Woytinsky was a Russian politician and economist.

Woytinsky was born in St. Petersburg into a literati family, he studied economics there and authored a well-received monograph in 1905. During the Russian Revolution of 1905, Woytinsky joined the Bolshevik wing of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. He was arrested by the police and exiled to Siberia. During the World War I years, he became close to the leading Georgian Menshevik Irakli Tsereteli and defected to the more moderate Mensheviks. During the Russian Revolution of 1917, he was a member of the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets, edited the newspaper Izvestia, and served as a commissar at front. After the Bolshevik coup, he was briefly arrested and subsequently fled to the newly-established Democratic Republic of Georgia, which he represented abroad from 1919 until that republic’s fall in 1921. Woytinsky then lived in Germany, working as a researcher for the German Federation of Trade Unions and International Labour Organization. In 1935, Woytinsky left for the United States in 1935 where he worked for the Central Statistical Board and Social Security Board. He belonged to the Mensheviks in emigration, but gradually distanced himself from Russian emigration as a whole.