Ivan Kebin

(Johannes Kebin). Born Sept. 11 (24), 1905, in Rannu, now Kohtla-Järve Raion, Estonian SSR. Soviet state and party figure. Member of the CPSU since 1927. Hero of Socialist Labor (1975).

The son of a peasant, Kebin began work as a seasonal laborer in 1923 in Gatchina Raion, Leningrad Oblast. In 1925–26 he studied at the Leningrad Soviet and Party School, and from 1927 to 1931 he was chairman of the Susanin village soviet in Gatchina Raion, Leningrad Oblast. In 1931 he began party work in Leningrad Oblast. From 1936 to 1938, Kebin studied at the Institute of the Red Professoriat and in 1939 became an instructor at the I. M. Gubkin Moscow Petroleum Institute. From 1941 he held high party posts in the Central Committee of the CP (Bolshevik) of Estonia. In the years 1947–48 he was director of the Institute of Party History under the Central Committee of the CP(B)E, a branch of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism under the Central Committee of the ACP (Bolshevik). Kebin became secretary of the Central Committee of the CP(B)E in 1948 and its first secretary in 1950. He was elected a member of the Central Committee of the CPSU at the Nineteenth through Twenty-fourth Congresses of the CPSU and was a deputy to the third through ninth convocations of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. He was awarded six Orders of Lenin, the Order of the Red Banner of Labor, and a number of medals.