Fedor Grigorevich Chuchin

Born Feb. 5 (17), 1883, in the village of Zaimishche, Kirillov District, Novgorod Province; died Jan. 15, 1942, in Moscow. Participant in the Russian revolutionary movement. Member of the Communist Party from 1904.

The son of a peasant, Chuchin graduated from the teachers’ seminary in Cherepovets in 1904. He took part in the Revolution of 1905–07 and was a member of the Moscow okrug committee and the St. Petersburg committee of the RSDLP. He was arrested and exiled several times. After the February Revolution of 1917, Chuchin became a member of the Tomsk soviet. During the October Revolution of 1917 he was commissar of the An-zhero-Sudzhensk mines and a member of the Siberian oblast bureau of the RSDLP(B). He was a member of the Central Executive Committee of Siberian Soviets in 1918 and 1919 and a member of the provincial committee and chairman of the district committee of the RCP(B) in Cherepovets in 1919 and 1920.

From 1921 to 1924, Chuchin was chairman of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for the Liquidation of Illiteracy and chairman of the commission of experts of the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Trade. In 1921 he was named commissioner of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee for matters concerned with philately and bonds and commissioner of the Central Committee of the Central Commission for Famine Relief for matters pertaining to stamp donations. He was the founder and editor of the journal Sovetskaia filateliia; under his editorship the first Soviet catalogues of postage stamps were issued. Chuchin was a delegate to the Ninth Congress of the RCP(B) in 1920. He took up pedagogical and scholarly work in Moscow in 1924. Chuchin was granted a personal pension in 1931.