Muranov, Matvei

Born Nov. 29 (Dec. 11), 1873, in the village of Rybtsy, in present-day Poltava Raion, Poltava Oblast; died Dec. 9, 1959, in Moscow. A revolutionary, he participated in the establishment of Soviet power in Russia. Became member of the Communist Party in 1904.

Muranov, the son of a peasant, became a worker in Kharkov in 1900. In 1907 he became a member of the railroad district committee of the RSDLP in Kharkov and in 1912 a member of the city committee of Bolsheviks and a deputy to the Fourth Duma from the Kharkov workers’ curia. Muranov combined his Duma activity with illegal work in St. Petersburg, Kharkov, Ivanovo-Voznesensk, and Viatka (present-day Kirov); he wrote for the newspaper Pravda. He was arrested in 1914 with the other members of the Bolshevik fraction to the Fourth State Duma and was exiled to Turukhansk Krai in 1915. After the February Revolution of 1917, he was a member of the editorial board of Pravda and a delegate to the Seventh (April) Conference and the Sixth Congress of the RSDLP(B), where he was elected a member of the Central Committee. He was an instruktor (special agent) of the party Central Committee from 1917 to 1923. From 1922 to 1934 Muranov was a member of the Central Control Commission, and in 1923 he also became a member of the Supreme Court of the USSR. He worked in the All-Russian Central Executive Committee from 1934 to 1937. In 1939 he retired and was awarded a special pension.

Muranov was a delegate to the Eighth through Tenth, to the Thirteenth, and to the Fifteenth through Seventeenth Party Congresses. He was elected to the Central Committee at the Eighth Congress and a candidate member of the Central Committee of the RCP(B) at the Ninth Congress. He was a member of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee from 1918. Muranov was awarded two Orders of Lenin.