Viktor Tikhomirnov

Born Nov. 24 (Dec. 6), 1889, in Kazan; died there Mar. 31, 1919. Participant in the Russian revolutionary movement. Member of the Communist Party from 1905.

The son of a merchant, Tikhomirnov joined the revolutionary movement while a student at the Kazan Realschule and carried on party work in Kazan, Moscow, and Petrograd and in Finland. In 1912 he helped organize and was a contributor to the newspaper Pravda. He was repeatedly arrested and exiled, and he lived abroad for a time.

Tikhomirnov took part in the February Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd and was sent to Kazan in March to restore the party organization there. He was a member of the Kazan committee of the RSDLP(B) and a delegate to the party’s Sixth Congress. During the events of October 1917, he worked for the military bureau of the Moscow committee of the RSDLP(B) and then as secretary of the Bolshevik faction in the Moscow soviet. In 1918, Tikhomirnov was a member of the collegium of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) and helped organize the Soviet militia. He was sent to work in Kazan in January 1919.