(party pseudonym of Simon Arshakovich Ter-Petrosian). Born May 15 (27), 1882, in Gori; died July 14, 1922, in Tbilisi. Professional revolutionary. Became a member of the Communist Party in 1901. The son of a trader.

Kamo began to distribute illegal literature in Tbilisi, Baku, Batumi, Kutaisi, Gori, and other cities in 1901 and organized underground printing shops. Arrested in November 1903, he escaped from prison in September 1904. He took part in organizing armed workers’ druzhiny (detachments) in 1905. During the armed clashes between the workers and troops in Tbilisi in December 1905, Kamo led a detachment of worker-fighters and was wounded five times in an encounter with the cossacks. He was arrested and imprisoned in the Metekhi Castle. Tortured, he managed to escape. He came to St. Petersburg in March 1906, where he met V. I. Lenin for the first time. On Lenin’s instructions, Kamo went abroad to arrange for the purchase and transport of arms into Russia. He organized a series of expropriations of money from tsarist agencies from 1905 to 1907, in order to secure funds for the party. Arrested by German police in Berlin in November 1907, he avoided being tried and handed over to the tsarist government by feigning insanity. He was delivered to the Russian police at the end of 1909, imprisoned in the Metekhi Castle, and tried by a military court. He escaped from the prison hospital on Aug. 15, 1911, and went to Paris. On Lenin’s instructions, Kamo arranged for the transport of party literature into Russia. Returning to Russia in 1912, he was arrested and sentenced to death. The sentence was commuted by a 1913 amnesty to 20 years at hard labor, which he served in the Kharkov convict prison. He was freed in March 1917.

In December 1917, on the instructions of S. G. Shaumian, Kamo carried a letter from Baku to V. I. Lenin in Petrograd. On Jan. 8, 1918, he returned to Tbilisi with letters from Lenin and the decree of the Council of People’s Commissars of the RSFSR appointing Shaumian temporary extraordinary commissar of the Caucasus. In the summer of 1919, Lenin instructed Kamo to organize a guerrilla detachment for action in the enemy’s rear and wrote to the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic that he knew Kamo “to be a man of absolutely exceptional dedication, courage, and energy …” (Poln. sobr. sock, 5th ed., vol. 51, p. 42). Kamo organized a guerrilla detachment in 1919 that operated near Kursk and Orel and then in the rear of the troops of General Denikin on the Southern Front. Kamo used a fishing boat to deliver weapons and money from Astrakhan to Baku for the underground party organization and the guerrillas of the Northern Caucasus. In January 1920 he was arrested by the Menshevik government in Tbilisi and was exiled. He helped prepare the armed uprising in April 1920 in Baku to transfer power to the Soviets. Kamo came to Moscow in May 1920 and studied at the Military Academy. He worked in the Ministry of Foreign Trade in 1921. In early 1922 he started work in the People’s Commissariat of Finance of Georgia. Later that year he was hit by a motor vehicle and killed.

(until 1959, Nor-Baiazet), a city in the Armenian SSR. Situated on the Gavaraget River, 8 km from where the river empties into Lake Sevan, on the Sevan-Martuni-Sevan highway, 39 km from the Sevan railroad station and 90 km northeast of Yerevan. Population, 20,000 (1970). Kamo has a plant for the production of cables, an instrument-making plant, an auto-repair plant, a fish farm, and the Sevan Mineral Water Plant. Cheese is also produced. There are also knitted-goods, clothing, furniture, carpet-weaving, and footwear factories in the city. Kamo has an industrial technicum and a zoological-veterinary sovkhoz-technicum, as well as a museum of local lore and a dramatic theater. The city was renamed in honor of Kamo, the Armenian revolutionary and Bolshevik.

(also Levaia Kamo or Katalanga), a river in the Evenki National Okrug, Krasnoiarsk Krai, RSFSR, a left tributary of the Podkamennaia Tunguska River. The Kamo measures 339 km long and drains an area of 14, 500 sq km. It flows in a deep valley and meanders in its lower course. The river is fed primarily by snow. There is high water in the spring and low water in the winter, and there are flash floods in the summer and fall. The main tributary is the Tokhomo (on the left).