Fedor Syromolotov

Born May 1, 1877, in Zlatoust; died Apr. 20, 1949, in Moscow. Participant in the revolutionary movement in Russia. Member of the Communist Party from 1897.

Syromolotov, the son of a worker, worked as a mining technician. He joined the revolutionary movement in 1893. Syromolotov helped organize the Urals Social Democratic Group in Ekaterinburg (present-day Sverdlovsk) in 1897 and the Central Urals committee of the RSDLP in 1903. He took part in the Revolution of 1905–07 in Ekaterinburg and Samara (present-day Kuibyshev). Later he conducted party work in the Ukraine, St. Petersburg, and the Urals. From 1912 to 1914 he worked on the newspapers Zvezda and Pravda and the journals Prosveshchenie (Enlightenment) and Voprosy strakhovaniia (Problems of Insurance). He was arrested several times.

After the February Revolution of 1917, Syromolotov was secretary of the Troitsk committee of the RSDLP(B). In Ekaterinburg he later joined the Urals oblast committee of the party and the Urals oblast soviet. From 1918 to 1922 he was a member of the collegium of the People’s Commissariat of Finance, commissar of finance of the Urals, and chairman of the sovnarkhoz (council of the economy) of the Urals. He was also a member of the Presidium of the All-Union Supreme Council on the National Economy, chairman of the Mining Council, and a member of the Lesser Council of People’s Commissars of the RSFSR. Beginning in 1922, he was engaged in administrative work in economics. Syromolotov was a member of the All-Union Central Executive Committee.