Nikolai Alekseev

Born Nov. 4 (16), 1873, in Shostka, Chernigov Province; died May 5, 1972, in Moscow. Participant in the revolutionary movement in Russia. Born into the family of a civil servant. Member of the CPSU from 1897. Hero of Socialist Labor (1963).

As a student at the Military-Medical Academy in St. Petersburg, Alekseev conducted propaganda among workers from the end of 1896. In January 1898, he was arrested in connection with the St. Petersburg Union of Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class. At the end of 1899 he escaped from exile and fled abroad. He lived in London from 1900 to 1905 and was secretary of the Third Congress of the RSDLP in 1905. Between 1911 and 1915 he worked as a doctor in Eastern Siberia. In 1915 he was mobilized and served as a military doctor with the 12th Reserve Siberian Infantry Regiment. After the February Revolution in 1917, Alekseev became a member of the Irkutsk soviet of soldiers’ deputies and of the committee of the Irkutsk united social democratic organization; after the organization split, he was the first Bolshevik chairman of the executive committee of the soviet of soldiers’ deputies. Alekseev participated in the Civil War of 1918–19 against Kolchak’s forces. He was chairman of the Kirensk revolutionary committee. From 1922 he worked in Moscow in the Central Administration for Political Education and in Comintern; subsequently, he engaged in scientific-instructional work. He was a delegate to the Twenty-second Congress of the CPSU (1961). Alekseev was awarded two Orders of Lenin, two other orders, and a number of medals.