Tovstukha, Ivan Pavlovich

Born Feb. 10 (22), 1889, in Berezna, in what is now Chernigov Oblast; died Aug. 9, 1935, in Moscow. Soviet party figure and scholar. Member of the Communist Party from 1913.

Tovstukha was the son of an assistant shopkeeper. He became involved in the revolutionary movement in 1905, was arrested in 1909, and was exiled to Irkutsk Province in 1911. In 1912 he fled abroad. He lived in Austria and France, where he joined the French Socialist Party and worked in the Parisian section of the Bolsheviks. After the February Revolution of 1917, Tovstukha returned to Russia. From November 1917 to March 1918 he worked at the Central Headquarters of the Red Guard in Moscow and later became secretary and a member of the board of the People’s Commissariat of Nationalities. From 1921 to 1924 and from 1926 to 1930 he worked in the administration of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. From 1924 to 1926, Tovstukha was assistant director of the V. I. Lenin Institute of the Central Committee of the ACP(B), and in 1931 he became deputy director of the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

Tovstukha took part in preparing and publishing the works of V. I. Lenin and the collection The ACP(B) in the Resolutions of the Congresses, Conferences, and Plenums of the Central Committee. He was a delegate to the Fifteenth through Seventeenth Congresses of the ACP(B), and at the Seventeenth Congress he was elected a candidate member of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR. Tovstukha is buried on Red Square at the Kremlin Wall.