Vladimir Zagorskii
Zagorskii, Vladimir Mikhailovich
(pseudonym of V. M. Lubotskii; party name, Denis). Born Jan. 3 (15), 1883, in Nizhny Novgorod (now Gorky); died Sept. 25, 1919, in Moscow. Participant in the Russian revolutionary movement and prominent figure in the party. Member of the Communist Party from 1905.
Zagorskii was active in the revolutionary movement from his secondary school days. In 1902 he was arrested in Nizhny Novgorod for participating in a May Day demonstration and exiled to Enisei Province but escaped to Geneva in 1904. He worked for the party in Moscow beginning in January 1905 and took part in the December armed uprising there. He emigrated in 1908. He worked for the party in Saratov in 1910, after which he was in Leipzig on assignment from the Bolshevik Center. During World War I he was interned by the German government. After the October Revolution of 1917 and the signing of the Peace Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, he was appointed first secretary of the Soviet embassy in Germany, the first foreign embassy of the Soviet government; he was transferred directly from the concentration camp to Berlin. He raised the Soviet flag over the former tsarist embassy and served as the diplomatic representative until the ambassador arrived. After returning to Moscow in July 1918 he was elected secretary of the Moscow Committee of the RCP (Bolshevik) and was a delegate to the Eighth Congress of the party. Killed on Sept. 25, 1919, by a bomb thrown by Left Socialist Revolutionaries at the building of the Moscow committee of the RCP (Bolshevik) in Leont’evskii Lane, he was buried in Red Square in Moscow. The town of Sergiev in Moscow Oblast was re-named Zagorsk in his honor in 1930.