Mezhlauk, Ivan Ivanovich

Born Sept. 30 (Oct. 12), 1891, in Kharkov; died Apr. 26, 1938. Soviet state and party figure. Member of the Communist Party from 1918. V. I. Mezhlauk’s brother.

Mezhlauk graduated from the University of Kharkov’s history and philology faculty in 1912 and from its law faculty in 1916 and worked as a teacher. He joined the revolutionary movement in 1911. In 1917 he was a member of the Kharkov soviet, participated in the organization of Soviets in Kharkov Province and of soldiers’ committees on the Western Front, and was a member of the revolutionary staff in Briansk. He was a commissar of justice and chairman of the revolutionary tribunal in Kharkov and then province military commissar and a member of the provincial committee of the RCP (Bolshevik) in Kazan in 1918. Mezhlauk served in 1918-20 as first chief of supply of the Red Army, a member of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Seventh and Fourth armies, and commandant of the Black Sea Fortified Region. He was director of the Petrovskii Metallurgical Plant (Enakievo) and chairman of the board of the Southern Steel Trust from 1921 to 1923. From 1923 to 1925 he was chairman of the Turkestan Cotton Committee and the Middle Asian Economic Council, a member of the Middle Asian Bureau of the Central Committee of the RCP (B), and secretary of the Central Committee of the CP(B) of Turkmenia. He was in the apparatus of the Central Committee of the ACP(B) and then secretary of the Tambov Okrug Committee of the ACP(B) from 1926 to 1929. Mezhlauk held the posts of secretary of the Council of Labor and Defense and deputy administrator of the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR from 1931 to 1936 and chairman of the All-Union Committee on Higher Schools of the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR in 1936-37. He was a delegate to the Eleventh and Fourteenth through Seventeenth Party Congresses. He was elected a member of the Commission of Soviet Control at the Seventeenth Congress and was a member of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR.