Vasilii Starkov

Starkov, Vasilii Vasil’Evich

 

Born Nov. 13 (25), 1869, in the village of Kamennaia Sarma, in what is now Ershov Raion, Saratov Oblast; died Apr. 26, 1925, in Berlin. Participant in the Russian revolutionary movement.

The son of an office worker, Starkov began his studies at the St. Petersburg Technological Institute in 1889 and graduated in 1894. In 1890 he joined a Marxist circle of technology students. In 1893 he met V.I.Lenin.

Starkov helped found the St. Petersburg League of Struggle For the Emancipation of the Working Class and was a member of the league’s Central Group. He was arrested in 1895 and exiled to Minusinsk District in 1897. Beginning in 1900, he worked in Krasnoiarsk, Omsk, Kirzhach, and Briansk. In 1904 he was put in charge of an electric power plant in Baku.

During the reactionary years of 1907–10, Starkov withdrew from the party activity but maintained ties with the Bolsheviks. In 1907 he was made director of an electric power plant in Moscow. In 1920 he worked in the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Trade and in 1921 was made deputy trade representative of the USSR in Germany.

REFERENCES

Lenin, V. I. Poln. sobr. soch., 5th ed. (See Index volume, part 2, p. 475.)
Kutyrev, P. T., A. Alekseev, and A. Chulkov. V. Starkov. Saratov, 1972.
Kutsentov, D. G. Deiateli Peterburgskogo “Soiuza bor’by za osvobozhdenie rabochego klassa.” Moscow, 1962.