Kurskii, Dmitrii

Born Oct. 22, 1874, in Kiev; died Dec. 20, 1932, in Moscow. Soviet state and party figure. Member of the Communist Party from 1904. Son of an engineer.

Kurskii graduated from the faculty of law of Moscow University in 1900. He was a member of the Butyrka raion committee of the RSDLP in 1905. Kurskii played a prominent part in the December armed uprising in Moscow. He was elected to the regional bureau of the Moscow organization of the Bolsheviks in 1906, participated in the publication of several Bolshevik newspapers in the pre-October period, and became a member of the Moscow regional bureau of the Central Committee of the RSDLP in 1907. In 1914 he was drafted into the army, where he continued his revolutionary activity. From May to August 1917, Kurskii was chairman of the soviet of soldiers’ deputies of the Fourth Army on the Rumanian Front and delegate to the First All-Russian Congress of Soviets, held in June 1917. He was a member of the military revolutionary committee in Odessa in October 1917.

Kurskii served in 1919–20 as commissar of the Chief and Field Staffs of the Red Army and was a member of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic. From 1918 to 1928, Kurskii was people’s commissar of justice of the RSFSR and the first Soviet procurator general. He became a member of the Presidium of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee in 1921 and a member of the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR in 1923. He was a delegate to the Eighth and Tenth through Fifteenth Party Congresses. He was chairman of the Central Auditing Commission from 1924 to 1927 and was elected member of the Central Control Commission of the ACP (Bolshevik) at the Fifteenth Congress (1927). Kurskii was ambassador of the USSR to Italy from 1928 to 1932.