Lev Iakovlevich Karpov

Born Apr. 18 (30), 1879, in Kiev; died Jan. 6, 1921, in Moscow. Figure of the revolutionary movement in Russia, one of the organizers of the Soviet chemical industry. Became a member of the Communist Party in 1897. The son of a sales clerk.

Karpov graduated from the Moscow Higher Technical School in 1910 and trained as a chemist. He joined the Moscow Union of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class in 1898, moved to Voronezh in 1900, and was one of the organizers and leaders of the Northern Workers’ Union. He was assigned by the Central Committee of the RSDLP to organize and lead the Eastern Bureau of the Central Committee (Samara) in 1903, and in 1904 he headed the Southern Bureau of the Central Committee (Kiev) and participated in founding an underground printing press in Poltava. In July 1904 he was co-opted into the Central Committee of the RSDLP. He was one of the organizers of the newspaper Vpered in late 1904. Karpov participated in the December armed uprising of 1905 in Moscow and was the secretary of the Moscow Committee of the RSDLP from August 1906 to May 1907. He was repeatedly arrested by the authorities.

From 1911 to 1915, Karpov organized the production of rosin and turpentine in Russia and set up the first domestic production of chloroform and liquid chlorine. He became director of the Bondiuzhskii chemical plant in 1915 and in February 1918 became chief of the department of the chemical industry and a member of the presidium of the Supreme Council on the National Economy (VSNKH). In 1918, Karpov helped found the Central Chemical Laboratory of the VSNKH in Moscow, now the L. Ia. Karpov Physical Chemistry Institute. He is buried on Red Square at the Kremlin Wall.