Ian Vasilevich Poluian

Born Oct. 9 (21), 1891, in the stanitsa (large cossack village) of Elizavetinskaia, on the Kuban’ River; died Oct. 8, 1937. Participant in the revolutionary movement in Russia. Soviet statesman and party figure. Member of the Communist Party from 1912. Son of a cossack.

Poluian was a participant in the Revolution of 1905–07 in Ekaterinodar. In 1912 he was a member of a committee of the RSDLP. Sentenced in 1915 to five years of hard labor, he was freed by the February Revolution of 1917. In the same year he served as chairman of the executive committee of the Ekaterinodar (Krasnodar) soviet and as a member of the Ekaterinodar committee of the RSDLP (Bolshevik). From 1918 to 1920 he was chairman of the Kuban’ oblast revolutionary committee and executive committee, chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the Kuban’-Black Sea Soviet Republic, chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Northern Caucasus (Eleventh) Army and then of the Ninth (Kuban’) Army, and chief of the political section of the Southwestern Front. From 1920 to 1922 he served as chairman of the Kuban’ revolutionary committee and oblast executive committee, as a member of the Kuban’-Black Sea oblast committee of the RCP (Bolshevik), and as a member of the Caucasus Bureau and Southeastern Bureau of the Central Committee of the RCP(B).

Poluian was chairman of the Tver’ (Kalinin) provincial executive committee from 1922 to 1925. From 1925 to 1929 he worked on the staff of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee. In 1929–30 he served as chairman of the Far East Krai Executive Committee. From 1931 to 1937, Poluian was chief of the energy department of the People’s Commissariat of Municipal Services of the RSFSR. He was a delegate to the Tenth Party Congress in 1921. He was a member of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and its Presidium, as well as a member of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR.