Varentsova, Olga Afanasevna

Born June 26 (July 8), 1862, in Ivanovo-Voznesensk; died Mar. 22, 1950, in Moscow. Soviet party and state figure, historian, and Party worker; joined the Communist Party in 1893.

Varentsova was born into a family of a former serf who owned a small textile factory. She studied in the Ger’e Advanced Courses for Women in Moscow. In the 1880’s she belonged to Narodnik (Populist) circles formed by high school students. She became an active supporter of Iskra in 1900, and in 1901 she joined the Northern Workers’ Union, where she was a member of the Central Committee and secretary in chief. During this same period she was also a member of the Yaroslavl committee of the RSDLP. From 1903 to 1905 she worked for the party in Astrakhan, Vologda, Egor’evsk, and Yaroslavl. In 1906 and 1907 she was a member of the party’s city committee in Ivanovo-Voznesensk; in November 1906 she also became a member of the Executive Bureau of the Union Soviet, which coordinated all the Social Democratic organizations in the Ivanovo-Voznesensk industrial region. In 1912 and 1913 she was part of the “Initiators’ Group” formed by the Moscow committee of the RSDLP. She was subjected to state repression. In March 1917 she became secretary of the War Bureau of the Moscow committee of the RSDLP (Bolshevik). During the events of October 1917, she was one of three leaders of the Moscow city district responsible for fighting military school cadets. From 1919 to 1921 she was secretary of the Ivanovo-Voznesensk Provincial Committee of the RCP (Bolshevik). From 1921 to 1928 she was a member of the council of Istpart (Commission on Party History), attached to the Central Committee of the ACP (Bolshevik). She later worked in the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute; at the Eleventh Party Congress she was elected to the Central Control Commission of the RCP (B). The author of works on the history of the revolutionary movement in Russia, she was awarded the Order of Lenin.