Sergei Uralov

(real surname, Kisliakov). Born Oct. 1 (13), 1893, in the settlement of Miasskii Zavod, now the city of Miass, Cheliabinsk Oblast; died June 23, 1969, in Moscow. Soviet party and state figure. Member of the CPSU from 1914.

The son of a merchant, Uralov entered the Saratov Chemical and Mechanical School in 1912 and graduated in 1917. Uralov conducted party work in Saratov and Petrograd. He worked in Petrograd as a lathe operator at the Putilov and Aivaz factories and in 1916 was arrested twice for his revolutionary activities. Uralov took part in the February Revolution of 1917 in Moscow. He served as an agitator for the Moscow committee of the RSDLP(B) and subsequently as the secretary of the city organization of the RSDLP(B) in Saratov. In July 1917 he became a member of the Central Council of Factory Committees in Petrograd. During the October Armed Uprising of 1917, Uralov commanded the detachment of revolutionary soldiers that occupied the printing house in which the newspaper Pravda was first printed. He subsequently was made assistant commissar for matters of the press in Petrograd.

In 1918, Uralov became a member of the staff of the Supreme Council on the National Economy. In the summer of 1918, V. I. Lenin assigned him the task of organizing the establishment of military obstacles along the Severnaia Dvina River to prevent the interventionists from reaching Kotlas. Between 1918 and 1920, Uralov was a department head and a member of the collegium of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission (All-Russian Cheka), the chairman of the Omsk Cheka, the Cheka commissioner for Siberia, and, finally, the secretary of the All-Russian Cheka. Over a period beginning in May 1920 he held executive posts in the following bodies under the Council of People’s Commissars of the RSFSR: the Supreme Council of the National Economy, the People’s Commissariat of Agriculture, the People’s Commissariat of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection, and the People’s Commissariat of Railroad Transportation. In 1934 he became a member of the Commission of Soviet Control. Uralov served in the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945.

Between 1944 and 1953, Uralov held a position in the Ministry of Defense of the USSR. At the Sixteenth Congress of the ACP(B) in 1930 he was elected a member of the Central Control Commission of the ACP(B); at the Seventeenth Congress of the ACP(B) he was elected a member of the Commission of Soviet Control. Uralov wrote a memoir on the October Revolution of 1917. He became a personal pensioner in 1953.

Uralov was awarded the Order of Lenin, the Order of the Red Star, and various medals.