Bulgarian revolutionary who conducted subversive activities in Romania before joining the Russian Bolshevik Party and becoming a leading political figure in Soviet Russia.

The grandson of the Bulgarian revolutionary Georgi Rakovski, he became involved in socialist activities and was forbidden to attend the university at Sofia (1890). At Montpellier, Fr., he earned a medical degree, and, under the pseudonym of Insarov, he contributed articles to Iskra and Pravda, the Russian revolutionary newspapers.

Upon his return to Romania, Rakovsky organized a socialist party and was twice arrested and imprisoned. After the Russians released him (May 1, 1917), Rakovsky became a member of V.I. Lenin's Bolshevik Party; when it seized power (October Revolution), he was elected to its central committee (1919) and also was made chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the Ukraine (1919).

As he became more closely associated with the interests of the Ukraine, he became an advocate of real autonomy for the non-Russian nationality groups under Soviet rule. Consequently, he clashed with the increasingly powerful Joseph Stalin, who was organizing the Soviet Union into a tightly centralized, Russian-dominated state. After a sharp disagreement on this issue at the Twelfth Party Congress (1923), Rakovsky was removed from his position in the Ukraine and appointed the Soviet chargé d'affaires in London. In 1926 he became the Soviet ambassador to France.

In December 1927, however, Rakovsky was expelled from the Communist Party for his anti-Stalin, pro-Leon Trotsky views and banished first to Astrakhan, then to Kazakhstan. He formally renounced his views—the last member of the Trotskyite opposition to do so—only in 1934 after Adolf Hitler had risen to power in Germany.

The following year he was reinstated in the party and given the post of a departmental chief in the Commissariat of Health. But he was soon dismissed (1937) and arrested (February 1938). Appearing with 20 other defendants at the third show trial of the Great Purge, Rakovsky was found guilty of fabricated charges and sentenced to 20 years' hard labour (March 1938). It is presumed that he died in a Soviet labour camp.