Petr Kobozev

Born Aug. 13 (25), 1878, in the village of Pesochnia, in present-day Shilovo Raion, Riazan’ Oblast; died Jan. 4, 1941, in Moscow. Soviet state and party figure. Became a member of the Communist Party in 1898. The son of a railroad worker.

Kobozev graduated from the Riga Polytechnical Institute. He participated in the Revolution of 1905–07 and was a member of the Riga committee of the RSDLP, a leader of the military organization of the Social Democratic Party of the Lettish Krai, and a member of the editorial board of the Bolshevik newspaper Golos soldata. In 1915–16 Kobozev lived in exile and worked on the construction of the Murmansk railroad; later, in Orenburg, he helped found the Bolshevik organization in the city and was a member of its committee. After the February Revolution of 1917, Kobozev was commissar of the Tashkent railroad. Arriving in Petrograd in May 1917, he became a member of the city duma and the city governing board and participated in the October armed uprising in Petrograd. In November 1917 he was appointed extraordinary commissar of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and of the Council of People’s Commissars of the RSFSR in Western Siberia and Middle Asia, where he led the fight against Dutov’s uprising.

In 1918, Kobozev served as people’s commissar of transport and communications of the RSFSR, extraordinary commissar of the RSFSR government in Middle Asia, and, from May 1918, chairman of the Central Executive Committee of the Turkestan ASSR, a member of the committee of the RCP (Bolshevik) of Turkestan Krai, and then chairman of the Revolutionary Military council of the Eastern Front and a member of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic. A member of the Turkestan Commission of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and of the Council of People’s Commissars of the RSFSR in 1919, Kobezev was a member of the collegium of the People’s Commissariat of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection from November 1919. He was a member of the Far Eastern Bureau of the Central Committee of the RCP(B) and chairman of the Far Eastern Revolutionary Committee from November 1922 to October 1923. In 1923 he was appointed rector of the Survey Institute and professor and then chairman of the photo-grammetry subdepartment of the Moscow Institute of Engineers in Geodesy, Aerial Photography, and Cartography.