Margarita Fofanova

Born Sept. 20 (Oct. 2), 1883, in the village of Zyrianka, in what is now Solikamsk Raion, Perm’ Oblast; died Mar. 29, 1976, in Moscow. Participant in the Russian revolutionary movement from 1902. Member of the CPSU from April 1917.

Fofanova was the daughter of an office worker. She conducted revolutionary work in Perm’, Arkhangel’sk, Simferopol’, and Ufa. In 1910 she settled in St. Petersburg, where she studied at the Advanced Agricultural Courses for Women. In 1917 she was a deputy to the Petrograd soviet. For a short time after the July Days of 1917 and in October, the party sheltered V. I. Lenin in Fofanova’s apartment at 1/92 Serdobol’skaia Street, Apartment 41 (now 106 K. Marx Prospect, Apartment 20); a Lenin memorial museum was established in the apartment in 1938. Fofanova was one of the liaisons between Lenin and the Central Committee of the RSDLP(B). After the October Revolution of 1917 she was a member of the board of the People’s Commissariat of Agriculture of the USSR, and after 1922 she was engaged in economic administrative work. Beginning in 1934, Fofanova received a personal pension. She is the author of reminiscences about Lenin.

A delegate to the Twenty-fifth Congress of the CPSU, Fofanova was awarded the Order of Lenin, the Order of the October Revolution, and various medals.