Safonov, Aleksandr Kononovich

Born 1875 in the village of Frolovskoe, in what is now Galich Raion, Kostroma Oblast; died Sept. 27, 1919, in Moscow. Participant in the Russian revolutionary movement. Member of the Communist Party from 1904.

The son of peasants, Safonov became an industrial worker in 1888. Beginning in 1904, he conducted party work in Yaroslavl and St. Petersburg. He was arrested and exiled a number of times. In 1908 he took part in the reestablishment of the Moscow district organization of the RSDLP. In November of that year he was arrested and sentenced to hard labor, and in 1914 he was exiled to Eastern Siberia.

After the February Revolution of 1917, Safonov was one of the organizers of the Bolshevik committee and group in the Irkutsk soviet. In August 1917 he became supervisor of the Moscow Regional Soviet and a member of the Rogozhskii raion party committee. In 1919 he was a member of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Second Army on the Eastern Front and of the Twelfth Army on the Western Front. On Sept. 25, 1919, he was fatally injured by an anarchist bomb thrown into the building housing the Moscow Committee of the RCP (Bol). He is buried at Red Square.