Konstantin Mekhonoshin

Mekhonoshin, Konstantin Aleksandrovich

 

Born Oct. 30 (Nov. 11), 1889, in the settlement of Zavod-Aleksandrovskii (now the city of Aleksandrovsk, Perm’ Oblast); died May 7, 1938. Soviet military figure. Member of the Communist Party (1913).

Mekhonoshin was a student at the University of St. Petersburg from 1909 to 1914 and was twice arrested and exiled for revolutionary activity. He joined the army in 1915 as a private. After the February Revolution of 1917, Mekhonoshin was a member of a regimental committee, the Petrograd Soviet, and the Petrograd Committee of the Bolsheviks; from April he was a member of the Military Organization, and from July a member of the All-Russian Bureau of Front and Rear Military Organizations of the Central Committee of the RSDLP (Bolshevik). In July 1917 he was arrested by the Provisional Government and was incarcerated in Kresty Prison in Petrograd. He was released in October.

Mekhonoshin was a member of the Petrograd Military Revolutionary Committee during the preparation and execution of the October armed uprising and a member of the second All-Russian Central Executive Committee. He became deputy people’s commissar for military affairs on Nov. 20 (Dec. 3), 1917. Mekhonoshin served on the collegium of the People’s Commissariat on Military Affairs from December 1917 to September 1918. He served on the collegium dealing with the formation and organization of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army on Jan. 21 (Feb. 3), 1918, on the Supreme War Council in March 1918, on the Revolutionary Military Council (RMC) of the Eastern Front in June 1918, on the RMC of the Republic in September 1918 (until July 1919), and on the RMC of the Southern Front in October 1918.

In 1919, Mekhonoshin was chairman of the RMC of the Caspian-Caucasian Front (from February), of the Eleventh Detached Army (from March), and of the Eleventh Army of the Southeastern Front (from December). In 1920 he was chairman of the RMC of the Third Army of the Western Front. Between 1921 and 1934, Mekhonoshin was deputy chief and chief of universal military training, a military attaché in Poland, a member of the collegium of the People’s Commissariat of Communications, and then director of the All-Union Scientific Research Institute of Oceanography and Naval Management.