Petr Smidovich

Born May 7 (19), 1874, in Rogachev, in what is now Gomel’ Oblast; died Apr. 16, 1935, in Moscow. Soviet state and party figure. Member of the Communist Party from 1898.

The son of a member of the dvorianstvo (nobility or gentry), Smidovich studied at Moscow University, but in 1894 he was expelled for taking part in the activities of illegal student circles and exiled to Tula. In 1895 he went abroad. He graduated from a higher electrotechnical school in Paris and worked in factories in Belgium, where he was a member of the Belgian Labor Party. Beginning in 1898, Smidovich carried on his work in St. Petersburg. In 1900 he was arrested and expelled from the country. In 1902 he became an Iskra agent, working from 1903 inside Russia, where he helped organize an underground printing press for the newspaper in Uman’ (1903). Smidovich was a member of the Central Urals committee (1903) of the RSDLP, the Northern committee (1904), and the Baku and Tula committees (1905). He took part in the armed uprising in Moscow in December 1905. During the years 1906–08 he was a member of the Moscow district and city committees of the RSDLP. In 1908 he was arrested and exiled to Vologda Province.

Smidovich resumed party work in Kaluga and Moscow in 1910. After the February Revolution of 1917, he became a member of the Moscow committee of the RSDLP(B) and a member of the presidium of the executive committee of the Moscow soviet. He was a delegate to the Seventh (April) Conference and Sixth Congress of the RSDLP(B). During the October Revolution of 1917, he was a member of the Moscow Military Revolutionary Committee and, later, a member of the Presidium of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and Supreme Council on the National Economy. In 1918 he became chairman of the Moscow soviet, and in 1919 chairman of the council of the economy of Moscow Province.

Smidovich was a member of the Soviet delegation in peace negotiations with bourgeois Poland in 1920. He took part in putting down the Antonov revolt and the Kronstadt Anti-Soviet Rebellion of 1921. Smidovich was a member of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and of the presidiums of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and the Central Executive Committee of the USSR. He served as chairman of the Committee for Assistance to the Nationalities of the Outlying Northern Regions of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR. A delegate to the Eighth and Tenth through Seventeenth Party Congresses, he was elected at the Tenth Congress a member of the Central Control Commission. Smidovich was awarded the Order of Lenin. He is buried on Red Square at the Kremlin Wall.