Ivan Lychev

Born May 30 (June 11), 1881, in the village of Obsharovka, in present-day Kuibyshev Oblast; died Nov. 16, 1972, in Moscow. Participant in the revolutionary movement in Russia. Soviet party figure. Became a member of the Communist Party in 1904. The son of a peasant.

Lychev worked as a fireman (stoker) and assistant engineer in Astrakhan and Samara. He served in the Black Sea fleet from 1902. In 1905 he took part in the uprising on the battleship Potemkin and was a member of the ship’s committee. From 1907 to 1917 he was an emigre in Rumania, Canada, and the USA; he was involved in the workers’ movement. In November 1917 he returned to Russia. Between 1918 and 1923 he was chairman of the revolutionary committees of Samara and Pugachev districts, deputy chairman of the Samara province executive committee, and chairman of the province league of consumers’ societies. From 1923 to 1925 he was secretary of the Samara province committee of the party. In 1929 he became consul general of the USSR in Great Britain. From 1932 to 1935 he was chairman of the Central Control Commission and people’s commissar of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection of Byelorussia. From 1935 he was the executive manager of the Central Committee of the ACP (Bolshevik). He held managerial posts in the national economy from 1938.

Lychev was a delegate to the Eleventh, Thirteenth, Sixteenth, and Seventeenth Congresses of the party; at the Fifteenth Congress he was elected to the Central Control Commission and, at the Seventeenth, to the Party Control Commission of the ACP(B). He was a member of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and the Central Executive Committee of the USSR. From 1948 on he was the recipient of a special pension. His memoirs have been published: The Potemkin Crew (1935; 3rd ed., 1965). He was awarded three orders and several medals. He is buried in Odessa.