Iurii Figatner

(also Iakov Isaakovich Figatner). Born 1889 in Odessa; died Sept. 20, 1937. Soviet party, state, and trade union figure. Member of the Communist Party from 1903.

The son of an artisan, Figatner worked as a lathe operator. He took part in the Revolution of 1905–07 in Warsaw. In 1906 he emigrated to Europe, where he joined Bolshevik groups in Liège and in Paris and studied in V. I. Lenin’s Paris circle in 1909. He was then sent to Moscow, where he served as secretary of the Moscow committee of the RSDLP. He was arrested in the autumn of 1909; in 1911 he was sentenced to seven years at hard labor, which he served at the Butyrka Prison. After the February Revolution of 1917, he first worked for the Moscow committee of the RSDLP(B); in May he became chairman of the Kislovodsk soviet and also secretary of the Kislovodsk committee of the RSDLP(B).

Figatner took part in the struggle to establish Soviet power in the Northern Caucasus. In November 1917 he became a member of the Caucasian Regional Committee of the RSDLP(B), and in 1918, people’s commissar of internal affairs for the Terek Soviet Republic. In 1919 he was an underground party worker in Transcaucasia. In 1920 he became a member of the oblast committee of the RCP(B) and chairman of the Council of Trade Unions in Krasnodar. Subsequently he became a member of the Caucasian Bureau of the Central Committee of the RCP(B), and in 1921, secretary of the bureau. That same year, he also became chairman of the Caucasian Bureau of the All-Russian Central Council of Trade Unions.

In 1922, Figatner became a member of the Siberian Bureau of the Central Committee of the RCP(B), a member of the Siberian Revolutionary Committee, and chairman of the Siberian Bureau of the All-Russian Central Council of Trade Unions. He was appointed chairman of the Central Committee of the trade union of Soviet workers in trade in 1924. In 1930 he became a member of the Presidium and head of the Chief Inspectorate of the Supreme Council on the National Economy. Beginning in 1932, he was a member of a collegium of the People’s Commissariat of Forest Industry, and head of the Central Board of Forest Industry in Northern Regions.

Figatner was a delegate to the Fourteenth through Seventeenth Congresses of the ACP(B). In 1925 he became a member of the Central Control Commission of the ACP(B) and from 1927 to 1930 served as a member of the commission’s Presidium. He was a member of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and the Central Executive Committee of the USSR.