Pramnek, Eduard

(Eduards Prāmnieks). Born Dec. 31, 1899, in the volost (small rural district) of Jaunrauna, now in Cēsis Raion, Latvian SSR; died July 29, 1938. Soviet party figure and statesman. Member of the Communist Party from 1917. Son of a farmhand.

Pramnek began working in 1913 as a stonemason and conducted revolutionary work among young workers in Rauna Volost. From 1919 to 1921 he served in the Red Army and engaged in political work in Latvian rifle regiments. He fought on the Western and Southern fronts and participated in the suppression of the Kronstadt counterrevolutionary revolt of 1921. From 1921 to 1924 he studied at the Communist University of the Peoples of the West and then at the Ia. M. Sverdlov Communist University. He took up party work in Nizhny Novgorod (present-day Gorky) in 1924. Pramnek was secretary of the Viatka provincial and okrug committees of the party in 1929, second secretary of the Gorky krai and oblast committees of the ACP (Bolshevik) from 1930 to 1934 and their first secretary from 1934 to 1937, and secretary of the Donetsk oblast committee of the CP (Bolshevik) of the Ukraine and a member of the Politburo of the Central Committee from 1937.

Pramnek was a delegate to the Fourteenth through Seventeenth Congresses of the ACP(B) and was elected a candidate member of the Central Committee at the Seventeenth Congress. He was a member of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR. Pramnek was a deputy to the first convocation of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR.