Praskovia Kudelli

Born Oct. 14 (26), 1859, in Ekaterinodar, now Krasnodar; died May 26, 1944, in Leningrad. Russian revolutionary figure; party publicist. Member of the Communist Party from 1903.

The daughter of a doctor, Kudelli was raised in the home of her stepfather, a colonel. She graduated from the Advanced Courses for Women in St. Petersburg. She was part of the stu-dent revolutionary movement from 1878, gravitating to the People’s Will. She began teaching in 1893 in an evening and Sunday school, where she met N. K. Krupskaia and V. I. Lenin. She maintained her friendship with the Ul’ianov family all her life. She began contributing to Iskra (The Spark) in 1901.

In 1903, Kudelli became a member of the Tver’ committee of the RSDLP and belonged to the Tula committee in 1904–05. She took part in the Revolution of 1905–07: as a delegate to the Tammerfors Party Conference in December 1905 and as a member of the St. Petersburg committee of Bolsheviks in 1906. She worked for Pravda in 1912 and was an organizer the following year of the first observance of International Women’s Day in Russia. Kudelli was on the editorial board ofRabotnitsa (Working Woman), which she prepared for publication in 1914. She was subjected to repression a number of times.

After the February Revolution of 1917, Kudelli worked for the newspaper Izvestiia and then for the newspaper Pravda. She was a delegate to the Sixth Congress of the RSDLP (Bolshevik) in 1917 and participated in the October Revolution of 1917. In 1922 she became director of the Petrograd Istpart (Commission on Party History) and editor of Krasnaia letopis* (Red Chronicle); she was also a member of the editorial boards ofRabotnitsa and Rabotnitsa i krest’ianka (Working Woman and Peasant Woman).

Kudelli was a delegate to the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Congresses of the ACP (Bolshevik). She wrote on the history of the party. She was awarded the Order of Lenin.