Mikhail Alekseevich Burmistenko
Burmistenko, Mikhail Alekseevich
Born Nov. 9 (22), 1902; died Sept. 9, 1941. Soviet government and Party official. Member of the CPSU from 1919.
Burmistenko was born in the village of Aleksandrovka, in present-day Atkarsk Raion, Saratov Oblast. From 1919 to 1927 he was engaged in Komsomol and military work in Morshansk, Engel’s, and Penza, and was assistant managing editor of the newspaper Trudovaia pravda in the city of Engel’s. In 1929 he graduated from the Moscow Institute of Journalism and worked as the managing editor of Trudovaia pravda. From 1932 to 1935 he was second secretary of the Kalmyk Oblast Committee of the ACP (Bolshevik). From 1936 to 1938 he worked in the apparatus of the Central Committee of the ACP (Bolshevik) and then in the Ukraine. In January 1938 he became the second secretary of the Central Committee of the Ukrainian CP (Bolshevik). At the Fourteenth (1938) and Fifteenth (1940) Congresses of the UCP (Bolshevik) he was elected a member of the Central Committee; he was a member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the UCP (Bolshevik). A delegate to the Sixteenth Congress of the ACP (Bolshevik), he was elected a member of the Central Committee of the ACP (Bolshevik) at the Eighteenth Congress of the ACP (Bolshevik—1939). From the beginning of the Great Patriotic War he took an active part in organizing the partisan movement in the Ukraine and was a member of the Military Council of the Southwestern Front. He was killed in combat. He was awarded the Order of Lenin and, posthumously, the Order of the Patriotic War First Class.