Nikolai Afanasevich Kubiak

Born July 29 (Aug. 10), 1881, in Meshchovsk, Kaluga Province; died Nov. 27, 1937. Participant in the revolutionary movement in Russia. Soviet statesman and party leader. Member of the Communist Party from 1898. Son of a worker.

Kubiak began his revolutionary activity as a worker at the Briansk Steam Locomotive Plant. In 1902, Kubiak became a member of the Briansk committee of the RSDLP and took part in the Revolution of 1905–07. He was a delegate to the Fifth Congress of the RSDLP (1907). He spent the years from 1908 through 1915 in prison and exile. Kubiak was an active participant in the October Revolution of 1917, a deputy to the Petrograd soviet, chairman of the Sestroretsk zemstvo (district assembly) board, and chairman of the Sestroretsk raion committee of the RSDLP (Bolshevik). He was a delegate to the Sixth Congress of the RSDLP (B) in 1917. In 1918–20, Kubiak served as chairman of the Petrograd provincial committee of the RCP (B) and as deputy chairman of the Petrograd provincial executive committee. He was also a member of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Petrograd Front.

In 1920, Kubiak became chairman of the central committee of the Trade Union of the All-Russian Industrial Union of Workers of the Land and Forests, as well as a responsible official of the Central Committee of the RCP (B). In 1920 he joined the “workers’ opposition” but later abandoned it. In 1922–26 he served as secretary of the Far Eastern Bureau of the Central Committee of the ACP (B). In 1927 he was secretary of the Central Committee of the ACP (B). In 1928, Kubiak became people’s commissar of agriculture of the RSFSR and in 1931, chairman of the Ivanovo oblast executive committee. From 1934 to 1937 he served as chairman of the All-Union Council on Municipal Service under the jurisdiction of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR.

Kubiak was a delegate to the Eighth, Ninth, and Eleventh through Seventeenth Party Congresses; at the Twelfth through Sixteenth Congresses he was elected a member of the Central Committee of the ACP (B), and at the Seventeenth Congress he was elected a candidate member of the Central Committee of the ACP (B). Kubiak was a member of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee.