Skrypnik, Nikolai Alekseevich

Born Jan. 13 (25), 1872, in the village and railroad station of Iasinovataia, now a city in Donetsk Oblast; died July 7, 1933, in Kharkov. Soviet state and party figure. Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the Byelorussian SSR (1928) and Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR (1929). Member of the Communist Party from 1897.

The son of a railroad clerk, Skrypnik enrolled at the St. Petersburg Institute of Technology in 1900. Here he joined a Social-Democratic group of Rabochee Znamia; he was arrested in 1901 and exiled to Ekaterinoslav (present-day Dnepropetrovsk). From 1901 he was an Iskra agent and worked in St. Petersburg, Ekaterinburg (present-day Sverdlovsk), Tsaritsyn (present-day Volgograd), Saratov, Samara (present-day Kuibyshev), and Odessa. In 1905 he was a delegate to the Third Congress of the RSDLP. In the same year he became secretary of the St. Petersburg committee of the RSDLP and a member of the Riga committee of the RSDLP. He was sentenced in absentia to death for organizing an armed uprising.

Skrypnik subsequently conducted party work in Krasnoiarsk, the Ukraine, the Volga Region, St. Petersburg, and Moscow. In 1909 he represented the Urals party organization at a meeting of the expanded editorial board of the Bolshevik newspaper Proletarii in Paris. In 1913, in St. Petersburg, he was editor of the journal Voprosy strakhovaniia, and from 1914 he was on the editorial board of Pravda. Skrypnik was arrested 15 times, exiled seven times, and escaped from exile five times.

After the February Revolution of 1917, Skrypnik was secretary and chairman of the Central Council of Factory Trade Union Committees in Petrograd and a member of the first convocation of the Central Executive Committee. He was a delegate to the Sixth Congress of the RSDLP(B) and was elected a candidate member of the Central Committee. During the October armed uprising he was a member of the Petrograd Military Revolutionary Committee. He was a delegate to the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets and a member of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee. In December 1917, Skrypnik was named people’s secretary of labor and industry of the Ukraine. In 1918 he was a member of the board of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission and head of the section on combating counterrevolution. He was also chairman of the Soviet government of the Ukraine and people’s commissar for foreign affairs of the Ukraine, and he headed the Organization Bureau for the convocation of the First Congress of the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of the Ukraine.

From 1919 to 1921, Skrypnik was people’s commissar for state control and people’s commissar for the workers’ and peasants’ inspection of the Ukrainian SSR; at the same time, he was the head of special departments in the Red Army. From July 1921 he was people’s commissar for internal affairs, and from 1922 to 1927, people’s commissar for justice and procurator-general of the Ukrainian SSR. From 1927 to 1933 he was people’s commissar for education of the Ukrainian SSR. Beginning in February 1933, Skrypnik was deputy chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars and chairman of the State Planning Committee of the Ukrainian SSR.

Skrypnik was a delegate to the Ninth through Sixteenth Congresses of the ACP(B). At the Twelfth through Fourteenth Congresses, he was elected a candidate member of the Central Committee, and at the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Congresses, a full member of the Central Committee. Skrypnik was a delegate to the First through Sixth Congresses of the Comintern; at the Sixth Congress, he was elected to its Executive Committee. He was a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of the Ukraine and of the committee’s Politburo. Skrypnik was also a member of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR, and, from 1927, chairman of the Soviet of Nationalities of the USSR. He was a member of the-Presidium of the All-Ukrainian Central Executive Committee. Skrypnik was awarded two orders.