Meer Abramovich Trilisser

Born 1883 in Astrakhan; died Feb. 2, 1940. Soviet party and state figure. Member of the Communist Party from 1901.

The son of a petit bourgeois, Trilisser carried out party work in Odessa, Astrakhan, Samara (Kuibyshev), Kazan, Ekaterinburg (Sverdlovsk), and St. Petersburg as a member of the local committees of the RSDLP in these cities. In 1907 he was sentenced to five years’ hard labor in the Shlissel’burg Fortress; he was subsequently exiled to Siberia.

After the February Revolution of 1917, Trilisser became the secretary of the Irkutsk soviet. In 1918 he was made deputy chairman of the Siberian Military Commissariat and became a member of the Central Executive Committee of Siberian Soviets (Tsentrosibir’). Between 1918 and 1920 he helped organize the party underground in Amur Oblast; during this period he was a member of the underground central operations headquarters in Blagoveshchensk, the chairman of the oblast revolutionary committee, and a member of the Far East Bureau of the Central Committee of the RCP(B).

In 1921, Trilisser became a member of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission (subsequently reorganized as the Unified State Political Directorate [OGPU]); he was deputy chairman of the OGPU from 1926 to 1930. After serving as deputy people’s commissar of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate of the RSFSR from 1930 to 1934, he became a member of the Commission of Soviet Control.

Trilisser was a delegate to the Fifteenth through Seventeenth Congresses of the ACP(B). At the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Congresses he was elected a member of the Central Control Commission of the ACP(B); he was a member of the presidium of the Central Control Commission from 1930 to 1934. It was at the Seventeenth Congress that he was elected to the Commission of Soviet Control. Trilisser was awarded the Order of the Red Banner.