Adolf Ioffe

(pseudonyms, V. Krymskii and Viktor). Born Oct. 10 (22), 1883, in Simferopol’; died Nov. 17, 1927. Soviet government and party figure and diplomat. Joined the Communist Party in 1917.

The son of a merchant, Ioffe became a doctor. He joined the revolutionary movement in the 1890’s and was subjected to repression. At the Sixth Congress of the RSDLP (Bolshevik) in 1917 he was admitted to the Bolshevik Party as one of the mezhraiontsy (interfaction group). He was a member of the Petrograd Soviet and the All-Russian Central Executive Committee (VTsIK). In October 1917 he became a member of the Petrograd Military Revolutionary Committee. As a representative of the Bolsheviks, he participated in the Democratic Conference and the Pre-Parliament and was a deputy to the Constituent Assembly. In 1918 he was chairman and later a member of the Soviet delegation in negotiations with Germany at Brest-Litovsk; he adhered to Trotsky’s position of “neither war nor peace.”

Ioffe was named Soviet ambassador to Berlin in 1918. In 1919 he was a member of the Defense Council and was people’s commissar for state control in the Ukraine. In 1920 he was a member of the delegation for peace negotiations with Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania and, later, with Poland. In 1921 he was deputy chairman of the Commission on Turkestan of the VTsIK and of the Turkestan Bureau of the Central Committee of the RCP (Bolshevik). In 1922, Ioffe was a member of the Soviet delegation at the Genoa Conference and then ambassador to China; from 1924 he was ambassador to Austria. In 1925 he became deputy chairman of the Central Committee on Concessions of the USSR.

A delegate to the Sixth, Seventh, and Ninth Congresses of the party, Ioffe was elected a candidate member of the Central Committee of the CPSU at the Sixth and Seventh Congresses. He was one of the leaders of the Trotskyist opposition (1925–27). He committed suicide.