Wincenty Matuszewski

Born July 7, 1870, in Brzeziny; died Oct. 5, 1918, in Krasnoiarsk. Figure in the Polish labor movement.

The son of a peasant, Matuszewski was a tailor by trade. In 1889 he joined the Union of Polish Workers, and in 1900 he became a member of the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL), serving in its Central Bureau from 1901 to 1903. He attended the Third (1901), Fourth (1903), Fifth (1906), and Sixth (1908) Congresses of the SDKPiL and the Fifth (1907) Congress of the RSDLP. He was one of the leaders of the so-called Rozlamowcy (dissenters), who worked closely with the Bolsheviks. Arrested a number of times for his revolutionary activity, he was exiled permanently to Siberia in 1913.

After the February Bourgeois-Democratic Revolution of 1917, he was a deputy to the Irkutsk Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies. In August 1917 he went to Krasnoiarsk, where he was a member of the party committee, a deputy to the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, and executive manager of the Bolshevik newspaper Krasnoiarsk Worker. During the White Guard rebellion of January 1918 he joined the underground Committee of the RSDLP (Bolshevik). He was betrayed by a provocateur and shot.