Semen Kanatchikov

Born Apr. 13, 1879, in the village of Gusevo, Moscow Province; died Oct. 19, 1940. Soviet party figure. Became a member of the Communist Party in 1898. The son of a peasant.

In 1895, Kanatchikov began to work in Moscow factories and became involved in the work of the St. Petersburg League of Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class. He was persecuted by the authorities. Kanatchikov conducted party work in Saratov from 1900 to 1902 and was a member of the committee of the RSDLP. He became a member of the Moscow party committee in 1905 and then a member of the St. Petersburg party committee. Kanatchikov worked in Ekaterinburg (Sverdlovsk) and Nizhnii Tagil in 1906 and was a delegate to the Fourth (Unification) Congress of the RSDLP in the same year. He was again a member of the Moscow party committee in 1907. Kanatchikov worked in the St. Petersburg trade union movement from 1908 to 1910 and was in prison and in exile in Irkutsk Province from 1910 to 1916. In 1917 he was a member of the Novonikolaevsk (Novosibirsk) and Tomsk committees of the RSDLP (Bolshevik) and a member of the Novonikolaevsk soviet.

In 1918, Kanatchikov was chairman of the Tomsk military revolutionary staff and deputy chairman of the provincial executive committee and then became a member of the Perm’ provincial executive committee and head of the provincial department of public education. In Moscow in 1919 he was a member of the board of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs, a member of the lesser Council of People’s Commissars, and one of the organizers of the Ia. M. Sverdlov Communist University. In 1920 he became a member of the Siberian Revolutionary Committee, head of the Siberian department of public education, and chairman of the regional committee of the RCP(Bolshevik) of the Tatar ASSR. Kanatchikov became rector of the Communist University in Petrograd in 1921. He became head of the department of the press of the Central Committee of the RCP(B) in 1924 and head of a department of Istpart (Commission on Party History) of the Central Committee of the ACP (Bolshevik) in 1925–26. Kanatchikov was the correspondent of the Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union (TASS) in Czechoslovakia from 1926 to 1928. He embarked upon literary work in 1928: he was editor of the journal Krasnaia Afov’(Red Virgin Soil), and editor in chief of Literaturnaia gazeta (Literary Newspaper). He was a delegate to the Fourteenth Congress of the ACP(B) in 1925.