Kolesnikova, Nadezhda

Born Aug. 31 (Sept. 12), 1882, in Moscow; died there Mar. 18, 1964. Active in the revolutionary movement in Russia. Member of the Communist Party from 1904.

Kolesnikova graduated from the Moscow Pedagogical Training School and then worked as a teacher. She took part in the December armed uprising of 1905 in Moscow in the Presnia district. Kolesnikova conducted party work in Moscow and Baku from 1907 to 1916 and was a member of the Baku committee of the RSDLP. She was repeatedly subjected to repression. After the February Revolution of 1917, Kolesnikova was the secretary of the Moscow district organization of the RSDLP(Bolshevik). She returned to Baku in August 1917 together with her husband, Ia. D. Zevin, and took part in the struggle to establish Soviet power in Azerbaijan. She became people’s commissar of education of the Baku council of people’s commissars in April 1918 and chairman of the Astrakhan provincial committee of the RCP (Bolshevik) in January 1919. She subsequently worked as deputy people’s commissar of education of the Azerbaijan SSR, in the People’s Commissariat of Education of the RSFSR, as head of the agitation and propaganda department of the Moscow Provincial Committee of the RCP(B), and in the Yaroslavl Provincial Party Committee.

Kolesnikova was rector of the N. K. Krupskaia Academy of Communist Education in 1929–32 and was engaged in scholarly work in 1933–57 in the Institute of Marx, Engels, and Lenin of the Central Committee of the ACP (Bolshevik) and in the V. I. Lenin Central Museum. Kolesnikova wrote works on the history of the party and her reminiscences. She was a delegate to the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Congresses of the ACP(B). She was awarded two Orders of Lenin and various medals.