Vetoshkin, Mikhail Kuzmich

(party pseudonyms Orlov, Ivanov, Kuz’mich). Born Nov. 5, 1884, in the village of Usol’e, in present-day Irkutsk Oblast; died Feb. 2, 1958, in Moscow. Soviet state and party figure, historian. Member of the Communist Party beginning in 1904. Born into a worker’s family.

Vetoshkin worked in the Siberian Union of the RSDLP and was a member of Social Democratic Party committees in Krasnoiarsk, Tomsk, Chita, and Harbin. He was subjected to repressions. In 1908-12 he conducted underground Party work in Pskov Province. From 1912 to 1917 he studied at St. Petersburg University. In April 1917, Vetoshkin became a member of the Vologda and Velikii Ustiug soviets. In December 1917 he was elected a member of the Vologda Province Committee of the RSDLP (Bolshevik). From March 1918 to early 1920 he was chairman of the Executive Committee of the Vologda Province Soviet. Delegate to the Seventh (1918) and Eighth (1919) Congresses of the RCP (Bolshevik). He was elected a member of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee. In 1920, Vetoshkin was a member of the Crimean Revolutionary Committee and the Oblast Committee of the RCP (B), then chairman of the Kiev Province Revolutionary Committee and a member of the Province Committee of the Ukrainian CP (Bolshevik). In fall 1920 he was appointed to the board of the RSFSR People’s Commissariat ôf the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection. In January 1922 he became people’s commissar of justice and the people’s commissar of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection of the Ukrainian SSR. In 1925-41 he was executive secretary of the budget commission of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR. After 1944 he worked as a scholar and instructor. He became a professor in 1953 at Moscow State University. Vetoshkin is the author of works on the history of the revolutionary movement in Russia and the history of the CPSU. He was awarded the Order of Lenin.