Iakov Zelmanovich Erman

(Zinov’evich). Born Feb. 4 (16), 1896, in the village of Velikie Krynki, in present-day Globino Raion, Poltava Oblast; died July 17, 1918, in the sloboda (tax-exempt settlement) of Nikolaevskaia. One of the leaders of the struggle to establish Soviet power in Tsaritsyn (present-day Volgograd). Became a member of the Communist Party in 1915.

Erman was a student in the Petrograd Polytechnic Institute from 1915. After the February Revolution of 1917, he became a member of the Vyborg Raion party committee in Petrograd. In May 1917 he became a member of the Tsaritsyn committee of the RSDLP (Bolshevik), as well as a member of the Executive Bureau of the Tsaritsyn soviet. In July he became chairman of the city duma and, in October, the chairman of the executive committee of the Tsaritsyn soviet. He was also a delegate to the first, second, fourth, and fifth All-Russian Congresses of Soviets. At the first he was elected a candidate member of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee (VTsIK), and at the second he became a full member. In late 1917 and early 1918 he was a member of the staff for the defense of Tsaritsyn. As a delegate to the fifth All-Russian Congress of Soviets, he took part in putting down the rebellion of the “left” Socialist Revolutionaries on July 6, 1918, in Moscow. On his return trip to Tsaritsyn, he was fatally wounded by counterrevolutionaries.