Nikolai Glebov-Avilov

(party pseudonyms, Gleb and N. Glebov; real surname, Avilov). Born Oct. 11 (23), 1887; died July 13, 1942. Soviet governmental and party figure. Born in Kaluga into the family of a shoemaker and working-class printer. Member of the CPSU from 1904.

Glebov-Avilov did party work in Kaluga, Moscow, St. Petersburg, and in the Urals. He was arrested on several occasions. During 1913-14 he worked on Pravda and participated with party workers in the Poronin meeting of the Central Committee of the RSDLP (Bolshevik) in 1913. After the February Revolution of 1917, Glebov-Avilov became a member of the Executive Commission of the Petrograd Committee of the RSDLP (Bolshevik), worked in the Petrograd Bureau of the trade unions, and from June 1917 was a member of the Executive Committee of the All-Union Central Trade-Union Council. At the Seventh (April) Conference of the RSDLP (Bolshevik) in 1917 he was elected a candidate member of the Central Committee of the party. After the October Revolution he was people’s commissar for post and telegraph in the first Soviet government. In May 1918 he became commissar of the Black Sea Fleet. He was also a member of the Presidium and secretary of the All-Union Central Trade-Union Council, and he was people’s commissar of labor in the Ukraine. From 1922 he engaged in party work in Petrograd. Glebov-Avilov adhered to the “new opposition” (1925), but after the Fifteenth Congress of the party (1927) he acknowledged his mistakes. From 1928 he was chief of construction and later director of the Rostsel’mash Factory. Glebov-Avilov was a delegate to the Sixth, Eighth through Tenth, Twelfth through Fourteenth, Sixteenth, and Seventeenth Congresses of the party. At the Thirteenth Congress he was elected a candidate member of the Central Committee of the party.