Maksimilian Savelev

Born Feb. 7 (19), 1884, in Nizhny Novgorod, now Gorky; died May 15, 1939, in Moscow. Soviet party figure and journalist. Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1932). Member of the Communist Party from 1903.

Of gentry origin, Savel’ev studied at the universities of Moscow and Leipzig. He engaged in party work in Nizhny Novgorod, Ekaterinoslav (now Dnepropetrovsk), Moscow, St. Petersburg, and other cities and was repeatedly arrested. In the years 1907–10 he was an émigré in Germany, where he joined the Bolshevik organization abroad and the German Social Democratic Party. Savel’ev returned to St. Petersburg in 1910. There he became editor of the Bolshevik journal Prosveshchenie and a member of the editorial board of Pravda. In 1913 he worked in Voronezh, Kharkov, and Saratov. After the February Revolution of 1917, Savel’ev was a member of the Kiev party committee and, later, secretary of the Kiev soviet. He was also a member of the Narva district committee of the RSDLP(B) in Petrograd and a delegate to the Seventh (April) All-Russian Conference and to the Sixth Congress of the RSDLP(B). In September 1917 he became head of the editorial board of the central organ of the RSDLP(B), the newspaper Rabochii put’ (Pravda from October 27).

Savel’ev was one of the organizers of the Supreme Council on the National Economy and a member of the council’s presidium. He was a member of the editorial board of the newspaper Ekonomicheskaia zhizri in 1918 and editor of the newspaper Kommunist, the central organ of the Ukrainian Communist Party (B), in 1919. In 1920 he served as secretary of the Turkestan Krai Committee of the RCP(B). In 1921 and 1922 he was a member of the Supreme Council on the National Economy and editor of the journal Narodnoe khoziaistvo, and from 1922 to 1928 he was editor of Torgovo-promyshlennaia gazeta. Savel’ev was chairman of the Publishing House of Industrial Literature m 1926 and 1927.

From 1921 to 1931, Savel’ev was deputy head of the Commission on the History of the October Revolution and of the RCP(B) under the Central Committee of the ACP(B) and editor of the journal Proletarskaia revoliutsiia. From 1928 to 1930 he also held the posts of director of the V. I. Lenin Institute and editor of Izvestiia TsIK. In 1930 he became editor of Pravda. In 1931 he became deputy chairman, and in 1932 chairman of the Presidium of the Communist Academy. From 1936 to 1939 he was deputy director of the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute under the Central Committee of the ACP(B). Savel’ev was a delegate to the Seventh and Fifteenth through Seventeenth Party Congresses. From 1930 to 1934 he was a candidate member of the Central Committee of the ACP(B). Savel’ev is the author of works on economics and party history and of memoirs.