Vera Mikhailovna Velichkina

(married name, Bonch-Bruevich). Born Sept. 8 (20), 1868, in Moscow; died there Sept. 30, 1918. Active in the revolutionary movement; writer. Member of the Communist Pary from 1903. Born into a priest’s family. Graduated from Bern University; physician. Involved in the revolutionary movement from the 1890’s.

After emigrating in 1902, Velichkina participated in the work of the League of Russian Revolutionary Social Democrats Abroad and in the Geneva group of Bolsheviks. She organized the transport of Party literature to Russia and contributed to the newspapers Iskra, Vpered, and Proletarii; she also translated the works of K. Marx and F. Engels. She was a Bolshevik representative to the political organization Krasnyi Krest in Geneva. During 1905-07, she was a member of the editorial board of the Party publishing house Vpered; she subsequently worked on the newspapers Zvezda mdPravda. After the February Revolution of 1917, she was secretary of the editorial board of the newspaper Izvestiia petrogradskogo soveta, a member of the editorial board of the journal Rabotnitsa, and a member of the bureau of the Rozhdestvensk raion committee of the RSDLP (Bolshevik). During the October Revolution, she worked in the medical and sanitation division of the Petrograd military revolutionary committee. With the establishment of Soviet power, Velichkina became one of the organizers of Soviet public health services. She was a member of the first board of the People’s Commissariat of Health. She was one of the physicians who attended V. I. Lenin.