Spunde, Aleksandr Petrovich

Born May 7 (19), 1892, in the city of Cēsis, now in the Latvian SSR; died Sept. 19, 1962, in Moscow. Soviet party figure and national-economy specialist. Member of the CPSU from 1909.

The son of a worker, Spunde graduated in 1907 from a commercial school in Riga and subsequently worked as a railroad clerk. He was arrested several times and, in 1913, was exiled to Eniseisk Province. After the February Revolution of 1917, he was chairman of the Perm’ city committee and a member of the Perm’ provincial committee and Ural’sk oblast committee of the RSDLP(B). He was a delegate to and a member of the bureau of the Bolshevik fraction of the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets. From January 1918 he was the deputy chief commissar of Gosbank (State Bank of the USSR). After the November Revolution of 1918 in Germany, he was a Soviet government emissary for conclusion of an armistice and withdrawal of the German occupation corps from the Ukraine.

From 1919 to 1922, Spunde was chairman of the Cheliabinsk, Omsk, Eniseisk, Don, and Viatka provincial committees of the RCP(B). From 1922 to 1923 he was director of the Ukrainian branch of Gosbank in Kharkov. From 1924 to 1925 he was a member of the Far East Bureau of the Central Committee of the ACP(B) and a board member of the All-Russian Union of Agricultural Cooperatives. From 1926 to 1930 he sat on the board of Gosbank, the collegium of the People’s Commissariat for Finance of the USSR, and the collegium of the People’s Commissariat for Railroad Transportation and was a member of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR and Council of Labor and Defense.

From 1931, Spunde received a personal pension. He was a delegate to the Eighth and Eleventh Congresses of the RCP(B). Spunde helped initiate the publication of the first edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia.