Pravdin, Aleksandr Georgievich

(also, Iosif Georgievich). Born 1879 in the village of Annenkovo, Kursk Province; died Sept. 3, 1938. Participant in the Russian revolutionary movement. Member of the Communist Party from 1899.

Pravdin was the son of a worker and himself a worker. He became a member of the Odessa Committee of the RSDLP in 1906 and a member of the St. Petersburg Committee of the RSDLP in 1908. He was a delegate to the Fourth Congress of the RSDLP (1906). In 1912, Pravdin was a member of the Northern Regional Bureau of the Central Committee of the RSDLP and worked on the newspaper Pravda. He was repeatedly arrested and was in exile. In 1917, he was a member of the Ufa Committee of the RSDLP (B) and a delegate to the Seventh (April) All-Russia Conference of the RSDLP (B). He was also elected a candidate member of the Central Committee.

After the October Revolution of 1917, Pravdin became deputy people’s commissar of internal affairs for the RSFSR. In 1919 and 1920 he was a representative of both the Council of Labor and Defense and the All-Russia Central Executive Committee at the Western Front and in the Urals. In 1920, Pravdin began working in rail transport and was deputy commissar of the People’s Commissariat of Railroads of the RSFSR in 1924 and 1925. From 1930 to 1933 he was in the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Trade. After 1933 he worked in party and government control organizations.

Pravdin was a delegate to the Twelfth through Fifteenth Congresses of the party, and from 1923 to 1927, a member of the Central Control Commission of the ACP(B). In 1936 he was awarded a special pension.