Valerian Dovgalevskii

Born Nov. 23, 1885; died July 14, 1934. Soviet statesman and diplomat. Member of the Communist Party from 1908.

Dovgalevskii graduated from a technical institute in Toulouse, France, as an electrical engineer. Having joined the revolutionary movement in 1904, he was arrested in 1906 and sentenced in 1907 to deportation for life, but escaped abroad in 1908. Secretary of the Bolshevik group in Liege (Belgium, 1908-10) and then member of the Bolshevik group in Davos (Switzerland), Dovgalevskii was secretary of the Bolshevik organization in Toulouse from 1911 to 1914. In 1915 he joined the French Socialist Party, belonging to its left wing.

Dovgalevskii returned to Russia in July 1917 and was drafted into the army. After the October Revolution he was in the Red Army and fought on the Southern Front, in Siberia, and near Petrograd. An official of the People’s Commissariat of Communications in 1919, Dovgalevskii was appointed inspector of communications and commissar of the district engineering administration in Kiev in 1920, people’s commissar of postal and telegraph services of the RSFSR in May 1921, and deputy people’s commissar of postal and telegraph services of the USSR in 1923.

Dovgalevskii was plenipotentiary representative of the USSR in Sweden from 1924 to 1926, in Japan in 1927, and in France from 1928 to 1934. In October 1929 in London he signed the protocol reestablishing Anglo-Soviet diplomatic relations and on Nov. 29, 1932, in Paris the Franco-Soviet Nonagression Pact. Dovgalevskii was a delegate to disarmament conferences in Geneva and a member of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR. He is buried in Moscow near the Kremlin wall.