Mariia Mikhailovna Kostelovskaia

Born Mar. 19, 1878, in Ufa; died Jan. 29, 1964, in Moscow. Figure in the revolutionary movement in Russia. Member of the Communist Party from 1903. Daughter of a minor official.

Kostelovskaia studied at the Higher Women’s Training Courses in St. Petersburg but was exiled in 1901 for participating in student circles. She took part in the Revolution of 1905-07 in the Crimea. Kostelovskaia conducted party work in Novocherkassk, Ekaterinodar, Sevastopol’, Odessa, Lugansk, Orenburg, and Moscow and was repeatedly persecuted. After the February Revolution of 1917 she became secretary of the Presnia raion committee of the party in Moscow. She was a delegate to the Seventh (April) Conference of the RSDLP (Bolshevik) and was one of the organizers and editors of the newspaper of the Moscow military organization of the RSDLP(B), Derevenskaia pravda.

During the October Revolution of 1917, Kostelovskaia was deputy chief of staff of the Red Guards of the Moscow soviet. In 1918 she was chairman of the Food Requisition Military Rations Bureau, and she directed workers’ food requisition detachments. In 1919 she was chief of the political section of the Second Army of the Eastern Front and then deputy chairman of the revolutionary committee in the Donbas. She worked as the head of the section on party life in Pravda and as a secretary of the Krasnaia Presnia raion committee of the ACP (Bolshevik). Kostelovskaia was the head of the political section of a machinetractor station during the period of the collectivization of agriculture. She was a delegate to the Eighth, Eleventh, and Seventeenth Party Congresses and began to receive a special pension in 1946. Kostelovskaia was awarded the Red Banner of Labor.