Chudnovskii, Grigorii

Born Oct. 3 (15), 1890, in Ekaterinoslav (now Dnepropetrovsk); died Apr. 8, 1918. Participant in the October Revolution of 1917 and the Civil War of 1918–20. Joined the revolutionary movement in 1905. Member of the CPSU from August 1917.

The son of a lawyer, Chudnovskii studied law at the University of St. Petersburg. After being exiled to Siberia in 1910 for revolutionary activities, he fled the country in 1913. A centrist during World War I, Chudnovskii returned to Russia in May 1917 and joined the Mezhraiontsy. With them he was accepted into the Bolshevik party at the Sixth Congress of the RSDLP(B).

Chudnovskii served as a member of the corps committee of the Southwestern Front. In October 1917 he became a member of the All-Russian Bureau of Military Organizations of the Central Committee of the RSDLP(B), a member of the Petrograd Military Revolutionary Committee, and commissar of the military revolutionary committee in the Preobrazhenskii Regiment. He was a delegate to the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets and was elected a member of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee.

As one of the leaders in the taking of the Winter Palace, Chudnovskii arrested the ministers of the bourgeois Provisional Government and escorted them to the Peter and Paul Fortress. He was wounded while helping to crush the Kerensky-Krasnov Rebellion of 1917. Appointed extraordinary commissar of the Southwestern Front in November 1917, Chudnovskii took part in the struggle against the Central Rada. He was arrested by the Central Rada in December and sentenced to death. In the early morning of Jan. 26,1918, however, he was freed by Soviet troops in Kiev, where he was subsequently appointed commissar of civil affairs. Chudnovskii was killed during a Soviet troop retreat from the Ukraine.