Pozern, Boris

Born July 7 (19), 1882, in Nizhny Novgorod (Gorky); died Feb. 25, 1939. Soviet and party official. Member of the Communist Party from 1902. Son of a physician.

Pozern enrolled in the faculty of medicine of Moscow University in 1900, and was subsequently expelled for participating in the revolutionary movement. He engaged in party work in Nizhny Novgorod, Samara (Kuibyshev), Moscow, and Minsk from 1903 to 1917. He was first chairman of the Minsk soviet after the February Revolution of 1917. Pozern was a delegate to the First All-Russian Congress of Soviets and a member of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee. He was elected to the St. Petersburg committee of the RSDLP (Bolshevik) in July 1917 and was a delegate to the Sixth Party Congress.

In the October days of 1917, Pozern helped organize the struggle for Soviet power in Pskov and was a member of the revolutionary committee and then commissar of the Northern Front. In 1918 he became commissar of the Petrograd Military District. He was a member of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Western Front from May to July 1919, of the Eastern Front in August, and of the Fifth Army from January to October 1920.

After the Civil War, Pozern served as chairman of the Central Board of the Wholesale Textile Trade in 1921–22, secretary of the Northwestern Bureau of the Central Committee of the RCP (Bolshevik) in 1922–23, and secretary of the Southeastern Regional Committee from 1924 to 1926. In 1926 he became rector of the Communist University and later was a commissioner of the People’s Commissariat of Education in Leningrad. From 1929 to 1933 he was secretary of the Leningrad Oblast Committee of the ACP (Bolshevik) and then chief of the oblast committee’s department of culture and propaganda. Pozern was elected a member of the Central Control Commission at the Thirteenth through Fifteenth Party Congresses and a candidate member of the Central Committee of the ACP(B) at the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Congresses.