Vadim Podbelskii

Born November 1887 in Yakutia; died Feb. 25, 1920, in Moscow. Participant in the revolutionary movement in Russia and Soviet State figure. Member of the Communist Party from 1905.

Podbel’skii was the son of exiled revolutionaries. A member of student Social Democratic circles in Tambov, he did party work in Tambov and Moscow. He was arrested and exiled a number of times. After the February Revolution of 1917, he became a member of the Moscow Committee of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (Bolshevik) and represented the Bolsheviks in the Moscow municipal duma. He was on the editorial board of the newspaper Sotsial-demokrat and served as a delegate to the Sixth Congress of the RSDLP(B). During the October Days of 1917 he was a member of the party center and managed the work of the Moscow Military Revolutionary Committee.

After the triumph of the October Revolution, Podbel’skii served as Moscow commissar of the post and telegraph, becoming district commissar in 1918 and people’s commissar of the post and telegraph of the RSFSR in May 1918. He helped suppress counterrevolutionary rebellions in Moscow, Tambov, and Yaroslavl. In 1919 he served as special commissioner of the Central Committee of the RCP(B) and the All-Union Central Executive Committee in the Tambov sector of the Southern Front. He was a delegate to the Eighth Party Congress in 1919.

Podbel’skii is buried on Red Square at the Kremlin wall.