Boris Zakharovich Shumiatskii

Born Nov. 4 (16), 1886, in Verkhneudinsk (now Ulan-Ude); died July 29,1938. Soviet and party figure. Member of the Communist Party from 1903.

The son of an artisan, Shumiatskii became a worker in Chita in 1899. Between 1905 and 1907 he helped lead armed uprisings in Krasnoiarsk and Vladivostok. In 1917 he served as deputy chairman of the Krasnoiarsk soviet and representative of the Central Committee of the RSDLP(B) in Siberia. Shumiatskii was a delegate to the Sixth Party Congress, a member of the Bureau of the Military Organization of the Central Committee of the RSDLP(B), and chairman of the Central Executive Committee of Siberian Soviets.

In 1919 and 1920, Shumiatskii served as a deputy chairman of the Siberian Revolutionary Committee and was a member of the Siberian Bureau of the Central Committee of the RCP(B). In 1920 he served on the Far Eastern Bureau of the Central Committee of the RCP(B) and was chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Far Eastern Republic. From Jan. 5, 1921, to Sept. 6, 1922, he was a member of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Fifth Army. From 1923 to 1925 he was the plenipotentiary of the USSR in Iran.

In 1926, Shumiatskii was named a member of the bureau of the Leningrad provincial committee of the ACP(B); he subsequently was appointed rector of the Communist University for Workers of the East and became a member of the Middle Asian Bureau of the Central Committee of the ACP(B). In 1930 he was named chairman of Soiuzkino; in 1933 he became head of the Central Board of the Motion-picture Industry and deputy chairman of the Committee for the Arts under the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR.

Shumiatskii was a delegate to the Sixteenth Congress of the ACP(B) and to the Third Congress of the Comintern.