Isaak Izrailevich Shvarts

(party pseudonym, Semen). Born Jan. 6 (18), 1879, in Nikolaev; died Oct. 26,1951, in Moscow. Russian revolutionary and party figure. Member of the Communist Party from 1899.

The son of a worker, Shvarts in 1892 obtained a job as a worker and became active in Social Democratic circles. He was exiled to Yakutia, from which he fled to Switzerland; he later helped rebuild various Bolshevik organizations, including the Ekaterinoslav committee of the RSDLP in 1905 and the Urals party organization in 1906. In 1911 he attended lectures at the party school in Longjumeau, served as a commissioner of the Organizational Commission Abroad for Convening a Party Conference, and was a member of the Russian Organizational Commission for Preparing the Sixth (Prague) All-Russian Conference of the RSDLP(B), which was held in 1912. Seven times he was arrested and exiled to Eastern Siberia, from which he escaped six times.

After the February Revolution of 1917 he engaged in party work in the Ukraine and served on the bureau of the oblast committee of the RSDLP(B) of the Donbas and the Krivoi Rog region. During the Civil War of 1918–20, he was a leader of the party underground and the partisan movement in the Ukraine. In 1918 he was a delegate to the First Congress of the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of the Ukraine, a member of the Central Committee, and chairman of the All-Ukrainian Extraordinary Commission; he served as a commissioner of the Central Committee of the RCP(B) in the Donbas. Shvarts became chairman of the Central Committee of the Miners’ Union in 1921 and a member of the Presidium of the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions in 1925. In 1930 he undertook administrative work.

Shvarts was a delegate to the Ninth and the Eleventh through Seventeenth Party Congresses. At the Tenth and Twelfth Congresses he was elected a member of the Central Control Commission. He was elected a member of the Central Committee by the Thirteenth through Sixteenth Congresses and a candidate member of the Central Committee of the ACP(B) by the Seventeenth Congress. In 1946 he became a personal pensioner. Shvarts was awarded the Order of the Red Star.