Badaev, Aleksei

Born Feb. 4, 1883, in the village of Iur’evo, Orel Province; died Nov. 3, 1951, in Moscow. Soviet state and Party leader. Member of the CPSU from 1904.

Badaev was born into a poor peasant family. He worked as a mechanic at the Aleksandrov Plant in St. Petersburg and at the main car workshop of the Nikolaiovsk Railroad. In St. Petersburg he carried on work in the Union of Metalworkers and in 1912 was elected a deputy to the Fourth State Duma by the workers of St. Petersburg and St. Petersburg Province. Badaev was a member of the Bolshevik faction in the Fourth State Duma and took part in conferences of the Central Committee of the RSDLP with Party workers in Kraków and Poronin (1913). He was a member of the St. Petersburg committee and the Russian Bureau of the Central Committee of the RSDLP during the years 1913–14. Upon the suggestion of V. I. Lenin, Badaev became the official publisher of Pravda. At the beginning of World War I he conducted several antiwar meetings in a number of cities. In November 1914, Badaev was arrested in the affair of the Social Democrat faction of the Duma, and he was exiled to the Turukhan Region. After returning from exile following the February Revolution of 1917, Badaev was elected from the Bolshevik list to the Petrograd city duma. He took part in the October Armed Uprising in Petrograd. Following the October Revolution, Badaev was chairman of the Petrograd board of provisions and commissar of provisions for Petrograd and the Northern Region. From 1930, Badaev was chairman of the Central Union and the Moscow Union of Consumers’ Societies; he was also deputy chairman of the Moscow city soviet. Badaev was a member of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR. During the years 1938–43 he was chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR as well as deputy chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. From 1943 he was a member of the collegium of the Ministry of the Food Industry of the USSR. At the Eleventh through the Thirteenth Congresses of the Party, Badaev was elected a candidate member of the Central Committee of the RCP (Bolshevik), and at the Fourteenth through Eighteenth Congresses he was elected a member of the Central Committee. Badaev was the author of the book Bolsheviks in the State Duma: Reminiscences (1929). He was awarded two Orders of Lenin as well as other orders and medals.