Melnichanskii, Grigorii Natanovich

Born June 6, 1886, in the city of Bobrinets, now Kirovograd Oblast, Ukrainian SSR; died Oct. 26, 1937. Soviet party, trade union, and economic figure. Member of the Communist Party from 1902.

Mel’nichanskii was born into a petit bourgeois family. He was a steelworker. While engaged in party work in the southern Ukraine, he became a member of the Odessa soviet in 1905 and then worked in the party and trade union organizations of Sormovo, Nizhny Novgorod, and Tiumen’. He was repeatedly arrested and exiled. In 1910 he emigrated to the USA and joined the American Socialist Party. From May 1917, Mel’nichanskii engaged in party and trade union work, first in Petrograd and then in Finland, the Donbas, and Moscow. He was a delegate to the Sixth Congress of the RSDLP (Bolshevik). He became a member of the Moscow Military Revolutionary Committee in October 1917.

Mel’nichanskii was secretary of the Moscow provincial council of trade unions in 1917-18 and became chairman of the council in 1918 and a member of the Presidium of the Central Council of Trade Unions and of the Council of Labor and Defense. After serving as head of the organization department of the Central Council of Trade Unions from 1924 to 1926, he was chairman of the Central Committee of the Textile Workers Union from 1926 to 1929 and chairman of the All-Union Textile Association and a member of the Presidium of the Supreme Council on the National Economy from 1929 to 1931. From 1931 to 1934, Mel’nichanskii served as a member of the Presidium of the Gosplan (State Planning Commission) of the USSR and a member of the Collegium of the People’s Commissariat of Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection. From 1934 to 1936 he was chairman of the Committee on Inventions of the Council of Labor and Defense.

Mel’nichanskii was a delegate to the Eighth through Sixteenth Party Congresses and was elected a candidate member of the Central Committee of the ACP (Bolshevik) at the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Congresses. He was a member of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR. He was a member of the Presidium of the Red International of Trade Unions. He at-tended congresses of the Red International of Trade Unions and several international trade union conferences and was a member of the Anglo-Russian Committee on Unity and of the Commission on Foreign Relations under the Central Council of Trade Unions.