Ksenofontov, Ivan

Born Aug. 29, 1884, in Moscow; died there Mar. 23, 1926. Soviet statesman and party leader. Member of the Communist Party from 1903. Son of a worker and a worker himself.

Ksenofontov carried on party work in Moscow and Riga from 1908 to 1914. During World War I (1914–18) he was drafted into the army. In February 1917, Ksenofontov was one of the organizers and a member of the Bolshevik committee of the Second Army of the Western Front; he was a delegate to the First All-Russian Congress of soviets. Ksenofontov took part in the October Armed Uprising in Petrograd in 1917; he was a delegate to the Second Congress of soviets and was elected to the All-Russian Central Executive Committee.

After the October Revolution of 1917 he was one of the organizers of the Cheka. From December 1917 through April 1921 he was a member of the collegium of the Cheka. In 1919 and 1920, Ksenofontov was vice-chairman of the Cheka, while at the same time chairman of the Special Tribunal of the Cheka and of the Supreme Tribunal of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee. Ksenofontov took part in the liquidation of the counter-revolutionary Kronstadt anti-Soviet mutiny of 1921. Between 1922 and 1925 he was charge d’affaires of the Central Committee of the RCP (Bolshevik). He subsequently became deputy people’s commissar of social security. He was a delegate to the Tenth, Twelfth, and Thirteenth Party Congresses. He was elected a member of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee.