Sviderskii, Aleksei Ivanovich

Born Mar. 8 (20), 1878, in Novgorod-Severskii District, now Novgorod-Severskii Raion, Chernigov Oblast; died May 10, 1933, in Riga. Soviet state and party figure. Member of the Communist Party from 1899.

The son of an official of a zemstvo (institution of local self-government), Sviderskii enrolled at the University of St. Petersburg in 1897, where he took part in the student movement. Arrested in 1899, he was exiled to Ufa Province. In 1905 he went underground, doing party work subsequently in St. Petersburg, Samara (now Kuibyshev), Tula, Kiev, Riga, and Ufa. In 1905 and 1906 he contributed to various Bolshevik newspapers, such as Volna and Vpered.

After the February Revolution of 1917, Sviderskii was editor of the Bolshevik newspaper Vpered in Ufa and, from June 1917, chairman of the Ufa soviet. He was a delegate to the Seventh (April) All-Russian Conference of the RSDLP(B) and to the Sixth Congress of the RSDLP(B). He was a leader in the struggle to establish Soviet power in Ufa.

From 1918 to 1922, Sviderskii was on the board of the People’s Commissariat of Food. From 1922 to 1928 he was on the board of the People’s Commissariat of Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection, deputy people’s commissar of agriculture of the RSFSR, and, at the same time, rector of the K. A. Timiriazev Agricultural Academy. In 1928 and 1929 he was on the board of the People’s Commissariat of Public Education of the RSFSR and the head of the Chief Administration for Art. From September 1929 he was the plenipotentiary of the USSR in Latvia. He was a member of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and the Central Executive Committee. Sviderskii was buried on Red Square at the Kremlin Wall.