Zemliachka, Rozaliia Samoilovna

(also Samoilova; born Zalkind; party pseudonyms, Demon and Osipov). Born Mar. 20 (Apr. 1), 1876, in Kiev; died Jan. 21, 1947, in Moscow. Soviet state and party figure. Became a member of the Communist Party in 1896.

Zemliachka worked as an Iskra agent in Odessa and Ekaterinoslav from 1901. A delegate to the Second Congress of the RSDLP in 1903, she was elected to the Central Committee of the party the same year. In 1904 she was a member of the Bureau of Committees of the Majority and in 1905 a delegate to the Third Congress of the RSDLP. After being elected secretary of the Moscow committee of the RSDLP in 1905, Zemliachka was a party organizer of the Rogozhsko-Simonovskii Raion, worked in the party military organization, and was arrested several times. Secretary of the Baku party organization in 1909, she then went into emigration. She was a member of the Moscow Bureau of the Central Committee of the RSDLP in 1915 and 1916. In February 1917, Zemliachka became secretary of the first legal Moscow committee of the RSDLP (Bolshevik) and a delegate to the Seventh (April) All-Russian Conference and the Sixth Congress of the RSDLP (B). She led the armed struggle of the workers of the Rogozhsko-Simonovskii Raion in the October days. Having served as chief of the political department of the Eighth and Thirteenth armies in 1918, Zemliachka became secretary of the Crimean oblast committee of the RCP (Bolshevik) in November 1920, after the liberation of the Crimea.

In 1922 and 1923, Zemliachka served as secretary of the ZamoskvorecrTe raion party committee in Moscow. She was a member of the Southeastern Bureau of the Central Committee of the RCP(B) and then secretary of the Motovilikha Raion Committee of the RCP(B) in the Urals (in 1924 and 1925), a member of the collegium of the People’s Commissariat of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection (from 1926 to 1931), and a member of the collegium of the People’s Commissariat of Railways (in 1932 and 1933).

A delegate to the Eighth and to the Eleventh through Eighteenth Congresses of the party, Zemliachka was elected to the Central Control Commission at the Thirteenth Congress of the RCP(B) in 1924 through the Sixteenth Congress of the ACP (Bolshevik) in 1930 and to the Commission of Soviet Control at the Seventeenth Congress of the ACP (Bolshevik) in 1934. She worked as vice-chairman and chairman of the Soviet Control Committee and was elected to the Central Committee of the ACP (B) at the Eighteenth Congress of the ACP (B) in 1939. From 1939 to 1943, Zemliachka was vice-chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR and then vice-chairman of the Party Control Committee of the Central Committee of the ACP (B). A deputy to the first and second convocations of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, Zemliachka was awarded two Orders of Lenin and the Order of the Red Banner. She wrote reminiscences about V.I . Lenin (see the collection Vospominaniia o V. I. Lenine, vol. 2, 1969, pp. 82–86). She is buried on Red Square at the Kremlin Wall.