Vladimir Ivanovich Nevskii

(pseudonym of Feodosii Ivanovich Krivobokov). Born May 2 (14), 1876, in Rostov-on-Don; died May 26, 1937. Soviet statesman and party official; historian. Member of the Communist Party from 1897. Son of a merchant.

Nevskii joined the revolutionary movement in 1895. He was one of the organizers of a Social Democratic circle in Rostov in 1897; he then studied at the natural science faculty of Moscow University. He was expelled in 1899 for revolutionary activity. Nevskii worked in Moscow in 1900 and was exiled in 1901 to Voronezh, where he helped found the Iskra Mutual Aid Struggle Fund organization. In 1904 he went to Geneva, where he met V. I. Lenin. Nevskii was an agent in Russia of the Bureau of Committees of the Majority in 1905 and a delegate to the First Conference of the RSDLP in Tammerfors in December of that year. Between 1906 and 1908 he was a member of the executive commission of the St. Petersburg committee of the RSDLP and a delegate to the Fourth (Unity) Congress of the RSDLP. From 1910, Nevskii worked in Rostov and Kharkov, where he graduated from the university in 1911; he contributed to Zvezda and Pravda. He was co-opted as a candidate member of the Central Committee of the RSDLP in 1913. That same year he participated in the Poronin Conference of the Central Committee of the RSDLP involving party workers; he also engaged in party work in Perm’ and Ekaterinburg. In 1917, Nevskii was one of the leaders of the military organization of the St. Petersburg committee and the Central Committee of the RSDLP (Bolshevik); a member of the editorial board of Soldatskaia pravda, Soldat, Derevenskaia bednota, and other newspapers; and a member of the Revolutionary Military Committee.

After the October Revolution of 1917, Nevskii became people’s commissar of transportation. In 1919–20, he was a member of the Presidium and vice-chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and concurrently chief of the department of the Central Committee of the RCP (Bolshevik) for work in the countryside. For a while he belonged to the Workers’ Opposition. He was rector of the Ia. M. Sverdlov Communist University in 1921. In 1922 he was appointed deputy chief of Istpart (Commission on Party History) of the Central Committee of the RCP (B). He became director of the V. I. Lenin Library in 1924. Nevskii was a delegate to the Eighth, Ninth, and Twelfth Party Congresses. He was a member of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and the Central Executive Committee of the USSR. He was the author of many works on the history of the party and of the revolutionary movement in Russia.