Iakovlev, Iakov

(real surname, Epshtein). Born June 21, 1896, in Grodno; died July 29, 1938. Soviet state and party figure. Member of the Communist Party from 1913.

The son of a teacher, Iakovlev studied at the Petrograd Polytechnic Institute. In 1917 he conducted party work in Petrograd before serving as secretary of the Ekaterinoslav committee of the RSDLP(B) and as a member of the presidium of the Ekaterinoslav soviet. Iakovlev was a delegate to the Sixth Party Congress and to the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets. Between 1918 and 1920 he served as a member of the Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of the Ukraine, chairman of the Kharkov revolutionary committee, chairman of the Kiev provincial party committee, chief of the political department of the Fourteenth Army, a member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of the Ukraine, and chairman of the Kharkov provincial committee.

Beginning in 1921, Iakovlev held high party posts in Moscow. He was appointed deputy people’s commissar of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection in 1926. Between 1929 and 1934 he first held the posts of people’s commissar of agriculture of the USSR and chairman of the All-Union Council of Agricultural Collectives (Kolkhoztsentr) and then served as an official in the apparatus of the Central Committee of the ACP(B).

Iakovlev was a delegate to the Eighth through Seventeenth Party Congresses. He was elected a member of the Central Control Commission of the ACP(B) at the Thirteenth through Fifteenth Congresses and a member of the party’s Central Committee at the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Congresses. Iakovlev was a member of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR.