Gleb Ivanovich Bokii

(party pseudonyms Kuz’ma, Diadia, and Maksim Ivanovich). Born June 21 (July 3), 1879, in Tiflis; died Nov. 15, 1937. Soviet state and party figure. Member of the Communist Party from 1900. Born into the family of a teacher.

Bokii studied at the St. Petersburg Institute of Mining and participated in the student movement. He worked in the St. Petersburg Union of the Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class. In 1904 he became a member of the St. Petersburg party committee. He participated in the 1905–07 Revolution in St. Petersburg and was repeatedly arrested. In March 1917, Bokii became a member of the Central Committee of the Russian Bureau of the RSDLP (Bolshevik), and in 1917 he was a delegate to the Seventh (April) All-Russian Conference and Sixth Congress of the RSDLP (Bolshevik). From April 1917 to March 1918 he was secretary of the Petrograd committee of the RSDLP (Bolshevik). An active participant in the October Armed Uprising in Petrograd, Bokii was a member of the Petrograd revolutionary war committee. From February to March 1918 he was a member of the Petrograd revolutionary defense committee and later chairman of the Petrograd cheka. He was a delegate to the Seventh Congress of the RCP (Bolshevik) in 1918; he belonged to the leftwing Communists. In 1919 he became chief of the special department of the Eastern Front and later chief of the special department of the Turkestan Front and a member of the Turkestan Commission of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and the RSFSR Council of People’s Commissars. From 1921 he was a member of the All-Russian Cheka and then a member of the Unified State Political Directorate (OGPU) and the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD). Bokii was a delegate to the Fifteenth, Sixteenth, and Seventeenth congresses of the ACP (Bolshevik). He was elected a candidate member and member of the second through 12th convocations of the RSFSR All-Russian Central Executive Committee and of the first and second USSR Central Executive Committees. He was awarded the Order of the Red Banner.