Staryi, Grigorii

(real surname, Borisov). Born Nov. 27 (Dec. 9), 1880, in the village of Bozieny, in what is now Kotovsk Raion, Moldavian SSR; died Oct. 11,1937. Soviet state figure. Member of the Communist Party from 1918.

Staryi joined the Social Democratic movement in 1900. The son of a railroad worker, he became a worker himself. He engaged in revolutionary work in the Ukraine and in Rostov-on-Don. He participated in the armed uprising in Gorlovka in December 1905 and was subsequently arrested and exiled.

Drafted into the army in World War I (1914–18), Staryi conducted revolutionary propaganda among soldiers on the Southwestern Front. After the February Revolution of 1917, he became a member of one of the army committees. During the years 1918–21 he was one of the organizers and leaders of the partisan movement in Bessarabia; he was a member of the Bessarabian oblast committee of the RCP(B) and was sentenced to death in absentia by the Rumanian authorities. In the years 1922–24, he studied at the Ia. M. Sverdlov Communist University, served on the Odessa Province Committee of the party, and was editor of the first Moldavian newspaper, Plugarul roshu (The Red Plowman). Staryi was chairman of the Revolutionary Committee of Moldavia in 1924 and 1925 and of the Central Executive Committee of the Moldavian ASSR in 1925 and 1926. In the years 1926–28 and again in 1932–37, he was chairman of the republic’s Council of People’s Commissars. In the intervening years, 1928–32, he worked as an industrial manager in Kharkov.

Staryi was a delegate to the 17th Congress of the ACP(B) and to the Fifth Congress of the Comintern; he was also a member of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR. He was awarded the Order of Lenin.