Lev Mikhailovich Khinchuk

Born Nov. 16, 1868, in Poltava; died Mar. 14, 1944. Participant in the Russian social democratic movement; Soviet state figure.

Born into a petit bourgeois family, Khinchuk studied at the University of Bern. In 1890 he helped organize Social Democratic circles in Tula. He was arrested in 1893 and exiled to Yakutia for six years. He subsequently carried out party work in Simferopol’, Tula, and Moscow.

After the Second Congress of the RSDLP in 1903, Khinchuk became a Menshevik. In 1905 he served as a member of the executive committee of the St. Petersburg soviet, and at the Fourth Congress of the RSDLP in 1906, he was elected a member of the Central Committee of the party. During the reactionary period from 1907 to 1910, he worked in trade union and cooperative organizations in Moscow. From March to September 1917 he was chairman of the Moscow soviet. Together with the rest of the Menshevik faction, he walked out of the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets.

Khinchuk abandoned Menshevism in 1919, and in 1920 he was admitted to the RCP(B). From 1919 to 1921 he was a member of the collegium of the People’s Commissariat for Foodstuffs, and in 1921 he became chairman of the Central Cooperative Alliance. Between 1926 and 1930 he served first as trade representative of the USSR in England and then as deputy people’s commissar of trade of the USSR. From 1930 to 1934, Khinchuk was the Soviet plenipotentiary in Germany. From 1934 to 1937 he served as people’s commissar of internal trade of the RSFSR, and in 1938 he was chief arbiter of the State Arbitration Tribunal of the Council of People’s Commissars of the RSFSR.

Khinchuk was a delegate to the Twelfth through Seventeenth Congresses of the ACP(B) and was a member of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR.