Sergei Osipovich Pritytskii

Born Jan. 19 (Feb. 1), 1913, in the village of Garkavichi, Sokolka District, Grodno Province, now in the Polish People’s Republic; died June 13, 1971, in Minsk. Soviet statesman and party official. Member of the CPSU from 1932 (member of the Communist Party of Western Byelorussia; member of the ACP [Bolshevik] from 1941). Graduate (1948) of the Higher Party School of the Central Committee of the ACP(B). Son of a peasant.

Pritytskii worked as a farmhand from the age of 12. He engaged in underground Komsomol work in Western Byelorussia from 1932 to 1936. He was arrested in 1936 by the Polish bourgeois authorities and sentenced to death, but the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. He was vice-chairman of the Biatystok oblast executive committee from 1939 to 1941.

In the Great Patriotic War (1941–45), Pritytskii was a political officer in the Soviet Army and then served in the Central Staff Headquarters of the Partisan Movement and as second secretary of the Byelorussian Komsomol. In 1944–45, he was chief of the Polish Staff Headquarters of the Partisan Movement. He served as second and then first secretary of the Grodno oblast committee of the Communist Party of Byelorussia from 1948 to 1951 and as an official in the apparatus of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Byelorussia from 1951 to 1953. Pritytskii was first secretary of the Baranovichi (1953–54), Molodechno (1954–60), and Minsk (1960–62) oblast committees of the Communist Party of Byelorussia. From 1962 to 1965 he served as chairman of the Committee of Party and State Control of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Byelorussia and chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Byelorussian SSR and concurrently from 1962 to 1968 as secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Byelorussia.

Pritytskii became chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Byelorussian SSR in January 1968 and was vice-chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR from 1968 to 1971. At the Twenty-second through Twenty-fourth Congresses of the CPSU he was elected a member of the Central Committee. He was a member of the Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Byelorussia and a deputy to the first through eighth convocations of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. He was awarded four Orders of Lenin, two others orders, and various medals.