Feodosiia IlInichna Drabkina

(Party pseudonyms, Natasha and Marianna). Born Jan. 5, 1883, in Rostov-onDon; died Jan. 10, 1957, in Moscow. A figure of the revolutionary movement in Russia. Member of the Communist Party from 1902.

Drabkina began conducting social democratic propaganda in 1900. In 1905 she was a member of the combat technical group of the St. Petersburg Committee of Bolsheviks, shipping ammunition to Moscow during the December armed uprising of 1905. Secretary of the Narva Raion Organization in St. Petersburg in 1906, she became a member of the finance commission of the Baku committee of the RSDLP in 1907. In 1908 she emigrated to France, then took up party work in St. Petersburg and became a member of the editorial board of the magazine Rabotnitsa. In Petrograd in early 1917, Drabkina worked in the secretariat of the Central Committee of the RSDLP (Bolshevik) and was secretary of the Seventh (April) All-Russian Conference of the RSDLP (B) and of the Sixth Congress of the RSDLP (B); she became secretary of the Petrograd Military Revolutionary Committee in October 1917.

Drabkina’s posts included chief of the provincial department of the Supreme Council of the National Economy (1918-19); work at the la. M. Sverdlov Communist University, at the Communist University of the Working People of the East, and at the Communist University in Tbilisi (1919-24); inspector of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection Commission (after 1924); and lastly director of the publishing house and secretariat of the Commission on Party History of the Central Committee of the ACP (Bolshevik), chief of the Archives of the October Socialist Revolution (now the Central State Archives of the October Revolution), and managing editor of the Committee for the History of the October Revolution and RCP (Bolshevik). She was a personal pensioner after 1938.