Roshal, Semen

Born Jan. 13 (25), 1896, in St. Petersburg; died December 1917. Figure in the Russian revolutionary movement. Member of the Communist Party from 1914. Son of a bourgeois.

Roshal’ became involved in the revolutionary movement in 1910; he was arrested and expelled from high school in 1912. In 1914 and 1915, while a student at the Psychoneurological Institute, he engaged in party activities at the Putilov Plant in Petrograd and on the Northern Front. Arrested in December 1915, Roshal’ was freed during the February Revolution of 1917. He was sent on assignment by the Central Committee of the RSDLP(B) to Kronstadt, where in March 1917 he was elected chairman of the city committee of the party and a member of the executive committee of the soviet. Roshal’ was a delegate to the Seventh (April) All-Russian Conference of the RSDLP(B). He was arrested by the bourgeois Provisional Government during the July Days in 1917 but was freed by the October Revolution.

In October (November) 1917, Roshal’ was commissar of a composite unit of soldiers and sailors during the suppression of the Kerensky-Krasnov mutiny near Petrograd. He participated in the operation to liquidate General Headquarters at Mogilev and arrest General Dukhonin. In November 1917, Roshal’ was appointed government commissar of the Rumanian Front by the Council of People’s Commissars and was one of the organizers and a member of the military revolutionary committee of the front. During the negotiations in Iaşi between members of the military revolutionary committee and the deputy commander of the Rumanian Front, General Shcherbachev, Roshal’ was arrested on December 8 (21) and shot shortly thereafter by the White Guards.