Petr Smorodin

Born January 1897 in the village of Borinskoe, in what is now Zadonsk Raion, Lipetsk Oblast; died Feb. 25, 1939. One of the organizers and first leaders of the Komsomol. Member of the Communist Party from 1917.

The son of peasants, Smorodin became a worker in St. Petersburg in 1911. In 1917 he helped found the Petrograd Socialist League of Working Youth. He fought in the October Armed Uprising and from 1918 to 1920 was assistant chief of a partisan detachment of the Socialist League of Working Youth on the Petrograd front. He was also a regimental commissar.

From 1920 to 1921, Smorodin was secretary of the Petrograd committee of the Russian Communist League of Youth and from 1921 to 1924 was first secretary of the league’s Central Committee. From 1924 to 1928 he studied at the Communist Academy. He was engaged in party work in Leningrad from 1928 to 1936. In August 1937 he became first secretary of the Stalingrad (present-day Volgograd) Oblast Committee of the ACP(B).

Smorodin was a delegate to the First through Sixth Congresses of the Komsomol; at the Third through Fifth Congresses he was elected to the Central Committee. He was a delegate to the Eleventh, Twelfth, Sixteenth, and Seventeenth Congresses of the ACP(B) and from 1930 was a candidate member of the Central Committee. He was a member of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee. Smorodin was awarded the Order of the Red Banner.