Lazo, Sergei

Born Feb. 23 (Mar. 7), 1894, in Piatry, now the village of Lazo, Orgeev Raion, Moldavian SSR; died May 1920, Murav’evo-Amurskaia station, now Lazo station, in Primor’e Krai. Hero of the Civil War of 1918–20. Member of the Communist Party from 1918.

Lazo studied at the St. Petersburg Technological Institute and then later in the faculty of physics and mathematics at Moscow University. He participated in revolutionary student groups. In July 1916 he was drafted into the army and graduated from the Aleksei Infantry School in Moscow. In December 1916, with the rank of ensign, he was assigned to the 15th Siberian Reserve Infantry Regiment in Krasnoiarsk. He was a member of the organization of left Socialist Revolutionaries who held internationalist views and carried on revolutionary work among the soldiers. In March 1917 he became a member of the regimental committee and chairman of the soldiers’ section of the soviet. In October 1917 he was a delegate to the first All-Siberian Congress of Soviets. In December 1917 he took part in suppressing a counterrevolutionary rebellion in Irkutsk and was then appointed chief of the garrison and military commandant of Irkutsk. In early 1918 he became a member of Tsentrosibir’, and in February 1918 he became troop commander for the Transbaikal Front. The White Guard bands of G. M. Semenov were crushed under Lazo’s leadership.

In the autumn of 1918 he became a member of the underground Far Eastern Oblast Committee of the RCP (Bolshevik) in Vladivostok. In the spring of 1919 he began commanding partisan detachments in Primor’e Krai. In December 1919 he became head of the Military-Revolutionary Headquarters in charge of preparing for an uprising in Primor’e Krai. On the night of Jan. 30, 1920, White Guard power in Primor’e Krai was overthrown, and Lazo was appointed a member of the Revolutionary Military Council and a member of the Far East Bureau of the Central Committee of the RCP(B). On Apr. 4–5, 1920, Japanese interventionists seized power in Vladivostok and arrested Lazo and other members of the Revolutionary Military Council. At the end of May, Lazo and his comrades A. N. Lutskii and V. M. Sibirtsev were taken out of Vladivostok by the Japanese interventionists and, after being tortured, were burned in the firebox of a steam locomotive.