Silvestrov, (Seliverstov) Nikolai Grigorevich (1896-1937)

Nikolai Silvestrov was born at Kharkov in the Ukraine on 21st May 1896. He became an anarchist communist in 1914 and was a member of the anarchist underground from 1920 onwards.

He suffered continuous persecution from 1920, experiencing years of prisons, camps and exiles, including the appalling Solovki camp but refusing to capitulate and going on several hunger strikes to protest at conditions.

He was arrested in 1924, and the following year sentenced by the Crimean OGPU (Joint State Political Directorate, abbreviated as OGPU, was the secret police of the Soviet Union) to a term of 6 years in a concentration camp, of which he served 4 ½ years, and was then released with exile to Arkhangelsk. There he was one of sixteen anarchists rounded up by the OGPU in February 1932, accused of setting up a counter-revolutionary anarchist organisation. He was a supporter of the Organisational Platform of the Libertarian Communists, the so-called Arshinov Platform. He told the OGPU tribunal that "I left the Solovki concentration camp around May 26, 1930. Initially, I worked in a metalworkers' artel (semi-formal associations for craft, artisan, and light industrial enterprises) as a fitter, later in a handicraft union. My last job was at the Iodine Plant. I quit my job when the plant closed. I didn't go to work, I just decided to take a rest and lived on the money I earned from my metalwork."

On May 16th, 1932 he was sentenced to three years in the political isolator (special prisons of Soviet Union) of Suzdal. He was again arrested in Kursk and sentenced on November 16th 1936 to five years of prison camp. He was sentenced to death on October 9th 1937 by a NKVD troika (Soviet court) and shot on 3rd November 1937 at Sandarmokh in Karelia, where thousands of others were shot and buried.

Thanks to Kate Sharley Library for photograph of Silvestrov

Nick Heath

Sources

Kate Sharpley Library: Russian anarchist letters
Anarchic Chronograph. May. Part 2, June 16, 2014
Maximov, G. The Guillotine At Work.