Pavel Postyshev

(party pseudonym Ermak). Born Sept. 6 (18), 1887, in Ivanovo-Voznesensk; died Feb. 26, 1939. Soviet party figure. Member of the Communist Party from 1904.

The son of a weaver, Postyshev joined the revolutionary movement in 1901. He was a deputy of the Ivanovo-Voznesensk soviet of workers’ deputies in 1905, a member of the Ivanovo city committee in 1906, and a member of the bureau of the Okrug Committee of the RSDLP in 1907 and 1908. He was arrested and sentenced to hard labor in 1908, and in 1912 he was permanently exiled to Irkutsk Province.

Postyshev was a member of the Irkutsk bureau of the RSDLP and headed the metalworkers’ trade union between 1914 and 1917. In March 1917 he became a deputy of the Irkutsk soviet. In August 1917 he was deputy chairman of the Irkutsk soviet and chairman of the central bureau of the Council of Trade Unions. From December 1917 he was a member of the Irkutsk revolutionary military committee and an organizer of Red Guard units. In 1918, Postyshev was chairman of the revolutionary tribunal, a member of the Central Executive Committee of Soviets in Siberia, and the committee’s representative at the Far East Council of People’s Commissars in Khabarovsk.

During the Civil War (1918–20), Postyshev conducted underground work in the Far East and led partisan detachments in the Amur Region. In 1920 he was a commissioner of the Central Committee of the RCP(B) in Khabarovsk Raion and a candidate member of the Far East Bureau of the Central Committee of the RCP(B). In 1921 and 1922 he was a commissioner of the Far East Republic (FER) in Baikal Oblast, a member of the Military Council of the Eastern Front of the FER, oblast commissar of justice of the FER in Verkhneudinsk, and chairman of the Executive Committee of Baikal Province.

From 1923, Postyshev held party posts in the Ukraine. In 1924 and 1925 he served first as secretary of the Kiev Province Committee and subsequently as secretary of the Okrug Committee of the CP(B) of the Ukraine. From 1926 to 1930 he was secretary of the Kharkov Okrug and city committees of the CP(B) of the Ukraine. In 1925 he was both a member of the Central Committee and a candidate member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the CP(B) of the Ukraine. During the years 1926–30, Postyshev was a member of the Politburo and Orgburo (Organizational Bureau) and secretary of the Central Committee of the CP(B) of the Ukraine.

Postyshev was secretary of the Central Committee of the ACP(B) and a member of the Orgburo of the Central Committee between 1930 and 1933. During the period 1933–37, he was concurrently secretary of the Central Committee, a member of the Politburo and the Orgburo of the Central Committee of the CP(B) of the Ukraine, and, from 1934, secretary of the Kiev Oblast Committee of the CP(B) of the Ukraine. He served as secretary of the Kuibyshev Krai Committee of the ACP(B) in 1937 and 1938.

Postyshev was a delegate to the Eleventh and Thirteenth through Seventeenth Congresses of the ACP(B). He was elected a candidate member of the Central Committee at the Fourteenth Congress and a member of the Central Committee of the ACP(B) at the Fifteenth through Seventeenth Congresses. Between 1934 and 1938 he was a candidate member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the ACP(B). He was a member of the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR. Postyshev was awarded the Order of Lenin and the Order of the Red Banner.