Oskar Ryvkin

Born Jan. 4, 1899, in St. Petersburg; died Aug. 7, 1937. An organizer of the communist youth movement in the USSR. Member of the Communist Party from March 1917.

The son of an office worker, Ryvkin was employed as an apprentice in a printing house and in a pharmacy. After the February Revolution of 1917 he joined the Red Guards. He was a leader of the Socialist League of Working Youth in Petrograd, secretary of the league’s city committee, and a member of the editorial board of the first youth magazine, Iunyi proletarii. Ryvkin took part in the October Revolution of 1917. In 1918, at the first Komsomol congress, Ryvkin was elected to its Central Committee. From November 1918 to May 1919 he was the first chairman of the Central Committee of the Komsomol, and from May 1919 to October 1919 he was first secretary of the Central Committee of the Komsomol. Ryvkin took part in the Civil War of 1918–20. He held various party posts from 1924 and studied at the Institute of the Red Professors from 1930 to 1934. From 1934 he was first secretary of the Krasnodar city committee of the ACP(B).

Ryvkin was a delegate to the first through fourth congresses of the Komsomol, to the second congress of the Communist International of Youth, and to the Ninth, Fifteenth, Sixteenth, and Seventeenth Party Congresses. He was elected to the Central Committee of the Komsomol at the first through third Komsomol congresses, and he was a member of the Bureau of the Central Committee of the Komsomol from 1918 to 1921. Ryvkin was elected to the Central Control Commission at the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Congresses of the ACP(B).