Isaak Lalaiants

(Party pseudonyms: Izorov, Insarov, Karl, Kolumb, Nikolai Ivanovich). Born July 24 (Aug. 5), 1870, in Kizliar, in present-day Dagestan ASSR; died July 14, 1933, in Moscow. Figure in the Russian revolutionary movement.

In 1888–89, Lalaiants was a member of N. E. Fedoseev’s Marxist circle. In 1889 he was arrested and banished from Kazan. In 1892 he was conducting Social Democratic propaganda among the workers in Nizhny Novgorod when he was arrested and exiled to Samara. In 1893 he joined the Samara circle of Marxists established by V. I. Lenin. In 1895 he was banished to Ekaterinoslav (now Dnepropetrovsk), where he became one of the founders of the Union of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class. He participated in the preparation of the First Congress of the RSDLP. In the spring of 1900 he served as one of the editors of the first issue of the illegal Social Democratic newspaper Iuzhnyi rabochii (published in Ekaterinoslav). In 1900 he was arrested, and in 1902 he was exiled to Eastern Siberia, from which he later escaped. In Geneva he managed the Iskra press. In 1903, after the Second Congress of the party, he was a Bolshevik and an agent of the Central Committee of the RSDLP in Russia. In 1904 he was a member of the Odessa committee of the RSDLP; he helped organize the Southern Bureau of the Central Committee of the RSDLP. In 1905 he entered the united Central Committee as a representative of the Bolsheviks. He was a member of the military organization under the St. Petersburg Committee of the RSDLP. In November 1906 he was a delegate to the first conference of the military and fighting organizations of the RSDLP in Tammerfors [Tampere]. In December 1906 he was arrested and sentenced to six years at hard labor (which he spent in St. Petersburg, in Shlissel’burg Fortress). In 1913 he was exiled for life to Irkutsk Province.

In the autumn of 1914, broken by prison and hard labor and gravely ill, Lalaiants withdrew from party and political activity. From 1914 to 1917 he worked in Irkutsk as a statistician. In 1922 he became section chief of the Central Political Education Committee of the People’s Commissariat of Education of the RSFSR. He was a pensioner from 1929. He was the author of the memoirs At the Sources of Bolshevism (fases. 1–2, 1930–31).