Iosif Sigizmundovich Iuzefovich

Born July 6, 1890, in Warsaw; died Aug. 12, 1952. Figure in the Soviet and international trade union movements. Member of the CPSU from 1919 (with length of party service reckoned from May 1917).

The son of an artisan, Iuzefovich was a leather worker by trade. He joined the Bund in 1905, and in 1917 he became a Social Democrat-Internationalist, a member of the Moscow Central Bureau of Trade Unions, and a secretary of the Leatherworkers’ Union. He became executive secretary of the central committee of the trade union of workers in the leather industry in 1918 and chairman in 1924. He was named executive secretary and editor of the journal Mezhdunarodnoe rabochee dvizhenie (International Working-class Movement) in 1928 and chairman of the central committee of the trade union of water transport workers in 1933. Between 1938 and 1949 he worked in the Sovetskaia Entsiklopediia Publishing House, the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, and the Soviet Information Bureau.

Iuzefovich was a delegate to the Thirteenth through Seventeenth Congresses of the CPSU, the Fourth, Sixth, and Seventh Congresses of the Comintern, and the First through Fifth Congresses of the Red International of Trade Unions (Profintern). From 1928 to 1937 he was a member of the Executive Bureau of the Central Council and the Secretariat of the Red International of Trade Unions. Iuzefovich was a member of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR.