Anton Kostiushko-Valiuzhanich

Born 1876 in Kazan; died Mar. 2, 1906, in Chita. Russian revolutionary. Member of the RSDLP from 1900; a Bolshevik. Son of an officer.

Kostiushko-Valiuzhanich was educated at the Pskov Cadet Corps and Pavel Military Academy. Later, he served as an officer in the Nesvizh Grenadier Regiment. Leaving military service in 1897, he enrolled in the Novaia Aleksandriia Agricultural Institute. In 1898, however, he was expelled for participation in the student revolutionary movement. In 1899 he entered the Ekaterinoslav Higher Mining School. In 1900 he began to take part in the work of the Ekaterinoslav organization of the RSDLP and became a member of its committee. In December 1901 he was arrested, and in February 1903 he was exiled to eastern Siberia for five years. There, in February and March 1904, he helped direct an armed political protest by exiles in Yakutsk. He was wounded and later sentenced to 12 years of forced labor and placed in the Irkutsk forced labor prison; he escaped on Aug. 30, 1905.

In October 1905 he became a member of the Chita committee of the RSDLP, and during the Revolution of 1905–07 he organized and directed armed workers’ detachments and worked among the soldiers of the Chita garrison. In November 1905 he was made a member of the Chita soviet and a member of the editorial staff of Zabaikal’skii rabochii, the organ of the Chita RSDLP committee. Kostiushko-Valiuzhanich was a leader of the armed uprising in Chita in December 1905 and January 1906. In January 1906 he was arrested by a punitive expedition headed by General P. K. Rennenkampf and then shot.