Sergei Mitskevich

Born Aug. 6(18), 1869, in laransk, now Kirov Oblast; died Sept. 12, 1944, in Moscow. Soviet physician; party and government figure; one of the first organizers of Soviet public health. Member of the Communist Party from 1893.

In 1893, Mitskevich graduated from the medical faculty of Moscow University. He joined the revolutionary movement in his student years. Together with A. N. Vinokurov, in 1893 he organized the first Marxist group in Moscow, which became the nucleus of the Moscow Workers’ Union. In 1894 he was arrested, and from 1897 he was in exile in Yakutia, where he worked as a district physician; he organized a hospital and leprosarium in Srednekolymsk and studied the specific diseases of the local population. From 1903 he was a physician in Moscow, from 1906 in Nizhny Novgorod, and from 1914 in Saratov.

After the October Revolution of 1917, Mitskevich was a member of the medical collegium of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs and a member of the Council of the Collegia of Physicians. In 1918 he was deputy head of the Moscow department of public education. In 1919 he was assistant supervisor of public health of the Southern and Southwestern fronts; later he worked in public education agencies. He was an organizer in 1922 and the director in 1924–34 of the Museum of the Revolution. In 1922–24 he was a member of the collegium of Istpart (Commission on Party History) of the RCP (Bolshevik). He was a delegate to the Ninth Congress of the RCP(B). In the last years of his life he was engaged in literary activity.