Voskov, Semen

(real name, Samuil Petrovich). Born 1889, in the village of Zhlobino, Kremenchug District, present-day Poltava Oblast; died Mar. 14, 1920, in Taganrog. Active in the revolutionary movement in Russia. Carpenter by trade. Member of the Communist Party from March 1917.

In 1905, Voskov was a member of a workers’ combat group in Poltava. He was arrested a number of times, escaped from prison, and emigrated in 1906. In America he was one of the organizers of the Russian Workers’ Unions and helped start the weekly Russian worker’s newspaper Novyi mir in the USA. When he returned to Petrograd in 1917, he was sent by the Central Committee of the RSDLP (Bolshevik) to the Sestroretsk Munitions Plant, where he was elected chairman of the plant committee. During the October Armed Uprising he organized the distribution of arms to the Red Guard. Voskov took part in the storming of the Winter Palace and in the suppression of the Kerensky-Krasnov rebellion. In April 1918 he was commissar of food for the northern region and a member of the Petrograd Provincial Executive Committee and of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee. During the Civil War, Voskov was military commissar of several divisions and took part in the liberation of Pskov, Orel, and Kursk. He was awarded the Order of the Red Banner. He died of typhus and is buried in Leningrad in Marsovo Pole Square.