Ivan Skvortsov-Stepanov

(real surname Skvortsov; pen name I. Stepanov). Born Feb. 24 (Mar. 8), 1870, in Bogorodsk, now Noginsk, Moscow Oblast; died Oct. 8, 1928, in Sochi. Soviet state and party figure, historian, and economist. Member of the Communist Party from 1896.

The son of a factory office worker, Skvortsov-Stepanov graduated from the Moscow Teachers’ Institute in 1890 and subsequently worked as a teacher in Moscow. In 1891 he joined the revolutionary movement. He was arrested and exiled several times. In 1905 he became a member of the literary lecture group of the Moscow committee of the RSDLP. In 1906 he was a delegate to the Fourth Congress of the RSDLP from the Moscow party organization. In 1907 and 1911 he was a Bolshevik candidate in the elections to the State Duma. From 1914 to 1917 he conducted party work in Moscow.

After the February Revolution of 1917, Skvortsov-Stepanov was editor of the newspaper lzvestiia of the Moscow soviet, a member of the editorial board of the newspaper Sotsial-Demo-krat, a member of the Moscow committee of the RSDLP(B), and chairman of the Bolshevik faction of the Moscow City Duma. During the days of the October Revolution of 1917, he was a member of the Moscow Military Revolutionary Committee. He entered the first Soviet government as people’s commissar for finance.

From 1919 to 1925 Skvortsov-Stepanov was deputy chairman of the All-Russian Council of Workers’ Cooperatives, a board member of the Central Cooperative Alliance, and deputy chairman of the editorial board of the State Publishing House. From 1925 to 1927 he was editor in chief of the newspaper lzvestiia TsIK SSSR i VTsIK; from 1927 he was deputy editor in chief of Pravda. Beginning in 1926 he simultaneously served as director of the Lenin Institute of the Central Committee of the ACP(B). From 1926 to 1928 Skvortsov-Stepanov was editor in chief of the newspaper Leningradskaia Pravda and actively opposed Trotskyism and the New Opposition. He was a member of the Presidium of the Communist Academy and a member of the Chief Editorial Board of the first edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia.

Skvortsov-Stepanov was a delegate to the Tenth through Fifteenth Party Congresses; at the Tenth through Thirteenth Congresses he was elected a member of the Central Auditing Commission of the RCP(B), and at the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Congresses a member of the Central Committee of the ACP(B). He was a member of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and the Central Executive Committee of the USSR.

Skvortsov-Stepanov wrote several works on the history of the revolutionary movement, political economy, and the theory of scientific atheism. He was the translator and editor of a Russian edition of K. Marx’s Das Kapital (vols. 1-3, 1920). His book The Electrification of the RSFSR and the Transitional Phase of World Economy (1922) was praised by V. I. Lenin (Poln. sobr. soch., 5th ed., vol. 45, p. 51). Skvortsov-Stepanov is buried in Red Square at the Kremlin Wall.