Knorin, Vilgelm

(V. G. Knorin’sh; Latvian, Vilis Knorins). Born Aug. 17 (29), 1890, in Lïgatne, in present-day Cèsis Raion, Latvian SSR; died July 29,1938. Soviet statesman and party figure, publicist, doctor of historical sciences (1935). Became a member of the Communist Party in 1910. The son of a peasant. A worker and a graduate of a teachers’ seminary.

Knorin became involved in the revolutionary movement in 1905. He contributed to Social Democratic newspapers in St. Petersburg, Riga, and Liepaja. After the February Revolution of 1917 he helped to organize the Minsk soviet of workers’ and soldiers’ deputies and to set up Bolshevik organizations on the Western Front. In May 1917 he became secretary of the Minsk soviet and a member of the editorial board of the Bolshevik newspapers Zvezda and Molot. During the October Revolution of 1917 he was a member of the Military Revolutionary Committee of the Western Region and the Western Front. From 1918 to 1922 he led party and soviet work in Smolensk, Minsk, and Vil’nius. From 1922 to 1925 he was deputy director of the registration-distribution department and director of the information department of the Central Committee of the ACP (Bolshevik) and then was director of the agitation and propaganda (agitprop) department of the Moscow committee of the ACP(B). In 1926–27 he was the director of the agitprop department of the Central Committee of the party. In 1927–28 he was the secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Byelorussia.

Knorin was a delegate to the fifth through Seventh Congresses of the Comintern; he was elected a candidate member of the Comintern’s Executive Committee. From 1928 to 1935 he worked in the Executive Committee. In 1932 he became director of the Executive Committee. In 1932 he became director of the Institute of the Red Professoriat, which dealt with party history. He was a member of the editorial boards of the newspaper Pravda from 1932 to 1934 and the journal Bolshevik from 1934 to 1937. In 1935 he became deputy director of the agitprop department of the Central Committee of the ACP(B). He was a delegate to the Eighth through Seventeenth Congresses of the party; at the Fourteenth Congress he was elected a member of the Central Auditing Commission and, at the Fifteenth through Seventeenth, a member of the Central Committee of the ACP(B). He wrote several works on the history of the party and many articles of literary criticism.