Klavdiia Ivanovna Kirsanova

Born Mar. 16, 1887, in Kulebaki, in present-day Gorky Oblast; died Oct. 10, 1947, in Moscow. Soviet party figure. Became a member of the Communist Party in 1904.

Kirsanova’s father was a clerical worker at a plant in Kulebaki. She was expelled from a Gymnasium for her participation in the revolutionary movement. During the Revolution of 1905–07 she engaged in party work in the Perm’ organization of the RSDLP. Persecuted by the authorities, she served four years at hard labor. She married Em. laroslavskii while in exile in Yakutiia. After the October Revolution of 1917, Kirsanova was chairman of the soviet in Nadezhdinsk (present-day Serov), chairman of the military council of the Verkhniaia Tura District, and a member of the military collegium of the Third Army of the Eastern Front. She was secretary of the Khamovniki Raion Committee of the RCP (Bolshevik) in Moscow in 1918. She was a delegate to the Eighth Congress of the RCP(B). From the fall of 1919, Kirsanova was director of the political department of the Perm’ Province Military Commissariat, becoming secretary of the Omsk city party committee in September 1920. From 1922 to 1924 she was deputy rector of the Ia. M. Sverdlov Communist University in Moscow.

In 1938, Kirsanova headed the Department of Higher Educational Institutions of the All-Union Committee on Higher Schools under the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR. She was a lecturer at the agitation and propaganda department of the Central Committee of the ACP (Bolshevik) from 1941. Beginning in 1945, Kirsanova worked in the International Democratic Women’s Federation and was a member of the Presidium of the Antifascist Committee of Soviet Women. She was awarded the Order of Lenin and the Order of the Red Star.