Fridrikh Lengnik
Lengnik, Fridrikh Vil’gel’movich
(party pseudonyms: Zarin, Kurts, Vasil’ev, “Kol”). Born Jan. 12 (24), 1873, in Grobina, in present-day Liepaja Raion, Latvian SSR; died Nov. 29, 1936, in Moscow. Soviet party and state figure. Became a member of the Communist Party in 1893. The son of a teacher.
Lengnik graduated from the St. Petersburg Technological Institute in 1896. In the fall of 1896 he was arrested in the case of the St. Petersburg Union of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class and exiled in 1898 to Enisei Province. In 1899, Lengnik was among the 17 exiled Social Democrats who signed V. I. Lenin’s A Protest by Russian Social Democrats, which was directed against the Credo of the Economists. Upon his return from exile in 1901, he was engaged in party work in Ekaterinoslav (Dnepropetrovsk), Samara (Kuibyshev), and Kiev and was an Iskra agent and a member of the Organization Committee for convoking the Second Congress of the RSDLP. At the Second Congress of the party (1903) he was elected in absentia a member of the Central Committee and a member of the Party Council from the Central Committee of the RSDLP. A member of the Northern Bureau of the Central Committee in Moscow in 1904, Lengnik engaged from 1905 to 1917 in party work in Tallinn, Ekaterinoslav, Moscow, Samara, and St. Petersburg.
A participant in the October Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd, Lengnik was a member of the collegium of the People’s Commissariat for Education, the collegium of the Supreme Council on the National Economy, and the collegium of the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Trade. In 1923 he was a member of the collegium of the People’s Commissariat for the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection of the USSR, and in 1928–29 he headed the Committee on Standardization. A delegate to the Thirteenth through Seventeenth Congresses of the party, he was elected to the Central Control Commission of the ACP (Bolshevik) at the Twelfth through Fifteenth Congresses. Lengnik wrote memoirs about Lenin and several scientific and technical articles on standardization and inventions.