Ian Ianovich Grunt

Born Apr. 16 (24), 1892, in Val-miera, in the present-day Latvian SSR; died Dec. 8, 1950, in Leninsk, in present-day Volgograd Oblast. Active figure in the struggle for the establishment of Soviet power in Kolomna; journalist. Member of the CPSU from 1907.

The son of a merchant, Grunt graduated from a gymnasium. He was a political agitator and party organizer in Riga during 1912–13, and during 1914–15 he helped create the Latvian Social Democratic organization—the so-called Tver’ Group of the RSDLP. Grunt maintained the group’s underground printing press. He spent almost ten years at hard labor and in exile. In April 1917, Grunt became a party organizer in Kolomna for the Moscow District committee of the RSDLP (Bolshevik). He was also a member of the revolutionary committee in Kolomna and editor of the journal Bolshevik, the organ of the Kolomna regional committee. After October 1917 he was chairman of the district committee of the RSDLP (Bolshevik) and commissar of the town and district of Kolomna. In September 1918 he became editor of the newspapers of the political department of the Fifth Army, and from that time he did other editorial and publishing work. In Ufa he was editor of the newspaper Izvestiia and the magazine Pakhar’ , in Moscow he was head of the department of Pravda that dealt with the workers’ life, and in Khabarovsk and Stalingrad he was editor in chief of the local newspapers. From 1931 to 1939, Grunt worked in the Mos-sovet Publishing House, and from 1939 to 1941 he was an editor at a factory making diapositives on agriculture. In 1941, Grunt became an individual pensioner.