Jan Sten


Jan Ernestovich Sten was a Soviet specialist in Marxist philosophy, who once acted as personal tutor to Joseph Stalin.

Early Career

Born into a peasant family in modern-day Latvia, Jan Sten joined the Bolsheviks as a teenager, in 1914, shortly before taking up a place a teachers' seminary in Valmiera. In 1917, when Latvia was overrun by the German army, he was evacuated to Syzran After graduating, in 1919, he fought in the Russian Civil War. In 1921, he was one of the original batch of students enrolled in the Institute of Red Professors, and graduated form its philosophy department in 1924, after which he taught at Moscow State University and served on the editorial board of the magazine Under the Banner of Marxism. In 1924-27, he was head of the propaganda department of Comintern. He was a member of the Central Control Commission of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union; in 1927-28, he was deputy head of the propaganda department of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In 1928-30, he was Deputy Director of the Marx-Engels Institute.

Stalin's Tutor

According to Yeveny Frolov, an Old Bolshevik who survived Stalin's purges:

Arrest and Execution

It can be assumed that Jan Sten privately sided with Nikolai Bukharin in his opposition to the campaign to force the Soviet Union's rural population onto collective farms. Although he did not express his opposition openly, he was dismissed from his posts in 1930. He then joined the conspiratorial group led by Martemyan Ryutin who plotted to remove Stalin from office. He was arrested in October 1932, held for two months in Butyrka prison, then deport to Akmolinsk, in Kazakhstan. He was permitted to return to Moscow in 1934, after making an admission of error, and was employed on the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. He was re-arrested on 3 August 1936, and during the first of the Moscow Show Trials on 20 August, the lead defendant, Grigory Zinoviev named him as one of the conspirators who had supposedly been plotting against Stalin. He was shot on 20 June 1937.

Personality

Bukharin's widow, Anna Larina, described Sten as "an independent-minded party man who always looked down on Stalin from a position of superior intellect" adding "There was something majestic in the proud bearing of this Latvian with his expressive, intelligent face, Socratic brow, and shock of white hair."
Jan Sten was posthumously rehabilitated in August 1988.