Vladimir Polonskii

Born June 17, 1893; died Oct. 30, 1937. Soviet party and trade union figure. Member of the Communist Party from 1912.

Polonskii was born in an urban lower class family in Tobol’sk. He became a sailor in 1908. He later worked as a laborer, and in 1912 he became an electrician in St. Petersburg. He conducted party work in trade unions and was a member in 1913 of the Central Board of the St. Petersburg Union of Metalworkers. Arrested in 1914, Polonskii was exiled to Tobol’sk Province the following year. In March 1917 he became secretary of the Central Board of the Moscow Union of Metalworkers. He took part in the October fighting in Moscow.

Between 1918 and 1920, Polonskii was commissar of a division on the Western and Southern fronts, military commissar of the Southeastern Railroad, and chairman of the southern bureau of the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions (ACCTU). Between 1920 and 1924 he was chairman of the Orgburo (Organizational Bureau), secretary of the central committee of the Miners’ Union, chairman of the Nizhny Novgorod Province Trade Union Council, and a member of the bureau of the province committee of the RCP(B). In 1925, Polonskii became secretary of the Rogozhsko-Simonovskii raion committee and a member of the bureau of the Moscow committee of the ACP(B). In 1928 he was second secretary of the Moscow committee. In 1930 and from 1935 to 1937 he was secretary of ACCTU.

From 1930 to 1933, Polonskii was first secretary of the Central Committee (CC) of the Communist Party of Azerbaijan and served concurrently as secretary of the Transcaucasian Krai Committee of the ACP(B). In January 1933 he became chief of the organizational department of the CC of the ACP(B) and in August of that year he became director of the Political Directorate and deputy people’s commissar of railroad transport. In 1937 he became USSR deputy people’s commissar of communications.

Polonskii was a delegate to the Eleventh through Seventeenth Party Congresses; at the Fifteenth through Seventeenth Congresses he was elected a candidate member of the CC of the ACP(B). He was a member of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR. Polonskii was awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labor.