Semen Pafnutevich Sereda

Born Feb. 1, 1871, in the village of Svetlovo, Mena District, Chernigov Province; died May 21, 1933, in Moscow. Soviet state and party figure. Member of the Communist Party from 1903.

Sereda was the son of a railroad official. He began his revolutionary activity in the 1880’s in Smolensk, working as a zemstvo statistician from 1896 and conducting party work in Orel, Kaluga, Smolensk, and Riazan’. After the February Bourgeois-Democratic Revolution of 1917, he joined the executive committee of the Riazan’ soviet and the United Committee of the RSDLP. During the days of the October Revolution of 1917 he was a member of the provincial and city committees of the RSDLP(B) and the provincial revolutionary military committee.

Sereda was people’s commissar of agriculture of the RSFSR from 1918 to 1921. when he joined the Presidium of the Supreme Council on the National Economy and the State Planning Committee. From 1922 to 1927 he was deputy chairman of the Supreme Council on the National Economy of the RSFSR, chairman of the Council on Industrial Economics, and director of the Industrial Planning Committee of the Supreme Council on the National Economy of the USSR. Deputy director and subsequently director of the Central Statistical Board of the RSFSR during the years 1927–30, Sereda served as deputy chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars and the State Planning Committee of the RSFSR from 1930. He was a delegate to the Eighth, Fifteenth, and Sixteenth Party Congresses and also a member of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee.