Konkordiia Nikolaevna Samoilova

(maiden name Gromova). Born 1876 in Irkutsk; died June 2, 1921, in Astrakhan. Participant in the women’s proletarian movement in Russia. Member of the Communist Party from 1903.

The daughter of a priest, Samoilova in 1896 entered the Advanced Courses for Women in St. Petersburg. Beginning in 1897, she took part in the student movement. She was arrested in 1901. In 1902 she went to Paris, where she joined the staff of Iskra. In 1903, Samoilova was a member of the Tver’ committee and from 1905 to 1907 a member of the Odessa, Rostov, and Moscow okrug committees and the Lugansk committee of the RSDLP. After serving as a delegate to the Fifth Congress of the RSDLP in 1907, she carried on work in Baku. In 1909 and 1910 she was a member of the St. Petersburg committee of the RSDLP. She was secretary of the editorial board of the newspaper Pravda in 1912 and a member of the editorial board of the journal Rabotnitsa (The Woman Worker) in 1914. She was arrested and exiled several times.

After the February Revolution of 1917, Samoilova carried on organizational and propaganda work in Petrograd. She was a delegate to the Seventh (April) All-Russian Conference of the RSDLP(B). After the October Revolution, she chaired a commission organized by the St. Petersburg committee of the RSDLP(B) for party work among women workers. She headed the first conference of women workers in November 1917 and was one of the organizers of the first All-Russian Congress of Women Workers in January 1918. Samoilova was a traveling instructor of the Central Committee of the RCP(B) for work among women. She contributed to the newspaper Pravda and the journal Kommunistka (Communist Woman). In 1919 she was a member of the Samara provincial and city committees of the RCP(B) and then head of the section of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of the Ukraine for work among women in Kharkov. In 1920 and 1921 she was head of the political section of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee’s agitational steamship Krasnaia Zvezda on the Volga. Samoilova was a delegate to the Eighth Congress of the RCP(B) in 1919.