Nikolai Fedorovich Chuzhak

(real surname Nasimo-vich). Born 1876 in Nizhny Novgorod (now Gorky); died Sept. 3, 1937, in Leningrad. Figure in the revolutionary movement; journalist; literary critic. Member of the CPSU from 1904.

The son of a craftsman, Chuzhak joined the revolutionary movement in 1896. He emigrated in 1904 and worked in Geneva on the editorial staff of the newspaper Proletarii. He joined the military organization of the St. Petersburg committee of the RSDLP in late 1905 and edited the newspaper Kazarma. In 1906, Chuzhak was a delegate to the first conference of military and combat organizations of the RSDLP in Tammerfors.

Chuzhak was arrested in 1906 and was sent to a settlement in Irkutsk Province in 1908. After the February Revolution of 1917 he became a member of the Irkutsk unified committee of the RSDLP and editor of the journal Rabochaia Sibir’. Between 1918 and 1922 he was editor of such newspapers as Krasnoe znamia in Vladivostok, Dal’nevostochnyi put’ in Chita, and Vlast’ truda in Irkutsk; head of the press department in the Far East Bureau of the Central Committee of the RCP(B); and, during the Kolchak regime, a member of the Bolshevik underground.

Beginning in late 1922, Chuzhak worked in Moscow and belonged to LEF. He was one of the architects of the association’s basic tenets, which held that “art is life construction” and which were oriented toward what was called the “literature of fact.” Between 1926 and 1932 he was editor of publications of the All-Russian Society of Former Political Prisoners and Exiles. The author of a number of works on the history of the revolution, Chuzhak also researched Siberian literature and wrote Siberian Poets and Their Works (1916) and The Siberian Theme in Poetry (1922).