Krasikov, Petr

Born Oct. 5 (17), 1870, in Krasnoiarsk; died Aug. 20, 1939, in Zheleznovodsk. Soviet statesman and party figure. Became a member of the Communist Party in 1892. The son of a teacher.

In 1892 in Switzerland, Krasikov established contact with the Emancipation of Labor group. For participating in the revolutionary movement, he was expelled from St. Petersburg University in 1893 (he passed the law department exams in 1908); he was arrested and in 1894 exiled to Krasnoiarsk, where he got to know V. I. Lenin in 1897. In 1900 he went to Pskov as an agent for Iskra. In 1902 he represented the Russian organization of Iskra in the Organizational Committee for the convening of the Second Congress of the party. He was a delegate to the Second Congress of the RSDLP (1903) and vice-chairman of the congress; he was a “solid Iskra man.” In 1904 he was a member of the Northern Bureau of the party’s Central Committee and a participant in the Conference of the 22 Bolsheviks in Geneva (1904); he was a delegate from the Bolsheviks to the Amsterdam Congress of the Second International. He was a delegate to the Third Congress of the RSDLP (1905). During the Revolution of 1905–07, he was a member of the St. Petersburg Committee of the party and a member of the executive committee of the St. Petersburg Soviet. In 1908 he began working in St. Petersburg as an attorney at law. In 1912–14 he contributed to Pravda. In February 1917 he became a member of the executive committee of the Petrograd Soviet. He was a delegate to the Sixth Congress of the RSDLP (Bolshevik).

After the October Revolution of 1917, Krasikov was chairman of the investigative commission under the Petrograd Military Revolutionary Committee assigned to combat counter-revolution and profiteering. With the establishment of Soviet power, he became a member of the collegium of the Peoples’ Commissariat of Justice and chairman of the tribunal of cassation under the All-Russian Central Executive Committee. He participated in drawing up the first Soviet law codes, both civil and criminal. He managed the department of religion under the People’s Commissariat of Justice, which was carrying out the separation of church and state; until 1938 he was chairman of the commission on religion under the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and then under the Central Executive Committee of the USSR; he was editor of the magazines Revoliutsiia i tserkov’ (Revolution and the Church), Voinstvuiushchii Ateizm (Militant Atheism), and Gazeta vremennogo rabochego i krest’ianskogo pravitel’stva (Newspaper of the Provisional Workers’ and Peasants’ Government). In 1921 he became a member of the Narrow Council of People’s Commissars; he was deputy people’s commissar of justice. In 1924 he became procurator of the Supreme Court of the USSR. From 1933 to 1938 he was vice-chairman of the Supreme Court of the USSR. He was a delegate to the Eighth and to the Thirteenth through Seventeenth Congresses of the party and was elected a member of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and the Central Executive Committee of the USSR. He was a member of the Commission on the Compilation of the Constitution of the USSR (1936) and wrote atheist books and publicistic articles.