Vasilii Emelianovich Kosorotov

Born July 24 (Aug. 5), 1871, in Beloretsk, in the present-day Bashkir ASSR; died Dec. 1, 1957, in Moscow. Figure of the revolutionary movement in Russia. Became a member of the Communist Party in 1906. The son of a worker.

Kosorotov, a worker, participated in the Revolution of 1905-07 in the Urals. Elected from Ufa Province, he was one of the four Bolshevik deputies in the third State Duma. Kosorotov took part in the meeting of the Central Committee of the RSDLP with members of the Social Democratic faction of the Duma in Terioki at the end of 1907. On Nov. 22, 1907, he spoke from the Duma tribune on behalf of the Social Democratic faction of the second Duma, declaring that the legal proceedings against them were “unjust and illegal.” For appealing to the workers to resist the punitive expeditions, Kosorotov was deprived of his parliamentary immunity and arrested after two sessions of the Duma. He subsequently did party work in Ufa, Samara, and Astrakhan and was repeatedly persecuted.

After the February Revolution of 1917, Kosorotov secured a Bolshevik majority in the Beloretsk soviet after a struggle with Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries. At the end of 1917 he became a member of the revolutionary committee in Samara, subsequently becoming deputy chairman of the provincial council of the national economy and then deputy chairman of the executive committee of the soviet there. He began to work for the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Trade in 1922; in 1924 he became a delegate to the Union of Agricultural Cooperatives in the Baltic and Scandinavian countries. Kosorotov was made deputy chairman of the All-Union Society Intourist in 1930; afterwards he returned to the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Trade. He became a personal pensioner in 1932. Kosorotov was awarded the Order of Lenin.