Pestkovskii, Stanislav

(in Polish, Stanisław Pestkowski). Born Dec. 3, 1882, in the village of Kiełczygłów, Kalisz Province, in what is now the Polish People’s Republic; died Nov. 15, 1937. Participant in the revolutionary movement in Russia. Member of the Communist Party from 1902. Son of a member of the dvorianstvo (nobility or gentry).

Pestkovskii joined the Union of Socialist Youth in 1901. In 1902 he became a member of the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania; he served on the party’s committees in Łódź, Częstochowa, Warsaw, and Dąbrowa and was a member of its chief board in 1905 and 1906. In 1906 he was arrested and sentenced to hard labor. Exiled to Irkutsk Province in 1911, he escaped in 1913 and emigrated abroad. From 1914 to 1917 he was a member of the London Bolshevik Section and the British Socialist Party. In June 1917 he joined the Bolshevik faction of the Petrograd Council of Trade Unions, later working in the secretariat of the Central Committee of the RSDLP(B) and attending the Sixth Congress of the RSDLP(B).

During the October Days of 1917, Pestkovskii was commissar of the central telegraph office in Petrograd. From 1917 to 1919 he was a member of the board of the People’s Commissariat of Nationalities and a deputy people’s commissar. He was deputy of the Council of People’s Commissars on the Western Front for the Creation of the Lithuanian-Byelorussian Republic. In 1919 and 1920 he was chairman of the Kirghiz Revolutionary Committee and a member of the oblast bureau of the RCP(B) of Kirghiz Krai. In 1920 and 1921 he headed the political administration of the Western Front. He became involved in party work in 1922. From 1924 to 1926 he was ambassador plenipotentiary of the USSR in Mexico. In 1926 he became deputy chairman of the Central Committee of the International Organization for Aid to Revolutionaries. He also served as secretary of the Central Committee, subsequently becoming a member of the Comintern and engaging in scholarly work. He was a delegate to the Eighth and Ninth Party Congresses.