Cherviakov, Aleksandr

Born Feb. 25 (Mar. 8), 1892, in the village of Dukorki, in what is now Minsk Oblast; died June 16, 1937. Soviet state and party figure. Member of the Communist Party from May 1917.

The son of a peasant, Cherviakov graduated from an urban school and in 1909 passed the examination to become a rural school teacher. He taught in Vil’na Province. Cherviakov graduated from the Vil’na Teachers Institute in 1915 and was drafted into the army. After the February Revolution of 1917 he helped organize the Byelorussian Social Democratic Labor Party, from which the Byelorussian Section of the RCP(B) was later formed. Between 1918 and 1920 he helped establish the Byelorussian SSR and did political work in the Red Army on the Western Front. In the same period he served as commissar for Byelorussian affairs of the People’s Commissariat of Nationalities of the RSFSR and people’s commissar for education of the Byelorussian SSR.

In 1920, Cherviakov was chairman of the Minsk and Byelorussian revolutionary committees. He served as chairman of both the Central Executive Committee of the Byelorussian SSR and the Council of People’s Commissars of the Byelorussian SSR from 1920 to 1924; beginning in 1924, he was chairman of the Central Executive Committee of the Byelorussian SSR. In 1922 he was made one of the chairmen of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR. Cherviakov was a delegate to the Eleventh through Seventeenth Congresses of the ACP(B) and a member of the Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Byelorussia.