Meskupas, Icikas

Meskupas, Icikas

 

(party pseudonym, Adomas). Born 1907 in Ukmerge, now Lithuanian SSR; died Mar. 13, 1942, in the village of Smailai, Birzai Raion, Lithuanian SSR. Member of the revolutionary movement in Lithuania; an organizer of the partisan movement in the Great Patriotic War (1941–45). Son of an artisan.

As a high school student, Meskupas joined the Lithuanian Komsomol in 1924 and became a member and then a secretary of the Ukmerge subregional committee of the Lithuanian Komsomol in 1925–26 and a secretary of the Kaunas revolutionary committee of the Lithuanian Komsomol in 1927. He was arrested and, while in prison, was admitted into the Communist Party of Lithuania (CPL) in 1929. From 1931 to 1933, Meskupas worked in Germany, organizing the publication of party literature and its shipment to Lithuania. He became a member of the Central Committee of the Lithuanian Komsomol in 1931; he was arrested by the Hitlerites in 1933 and sent to Lithuania.

Meskupas became secretary of the Central Committee of the Lithuanian Komsomol in 1934, secretary of the CPL in 1935, and a member of the Politburo and of the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the CPL in 1938. He was a delegate to the Seventh Congress of the Comintern (1935) and to the Sixth Congress of the Communist Youth International (1935). After the overthrow of the bourgeois regime in June 1940, he was deputy to the National Seim and then to the Supreme Soviet of the Lithuanian SSR. In 1940–41 he was second secretary of the Central Committee of the CPL (Bolshevik). In March 1942, during the fascist German occupation, Meskupas was chief of the operational group of the Central Committee of the Lithuanian CP(B) in charge of organizing a center for underground party work. He died in combat. He was a deputy to the first convocation of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. Meskupas was awarded the Order of the Patriotic War First Class (posthumously).

REFERENCE

Staras, P. “Vrag proschitalsia.” In the collection Geroipodpol’ia, 4th ed. Moscow, 1972.