Petr Nikiforov

Born Sept. 30 (Oct. 12), 1882, in the village of Oek, now Irkutsk Raion, Irkutsk Oblast; died Jan. 6, 1974, in Moscow. Participant in the revolutionary movement in Russia; Soviet statesman. Member of the Communist Party from 1904. Son of a worker.

Nikiforov was a worker from 1894. He joined the revolutionary movement in 1901. Drafted into the navy in 1904, he worked in the St. Petersburg military organization of the RSDLP and fought in the sailors’ and soldiers’ uprising in Kronstadt in 1905; he subsequently worked underground in many cities of Russia. A leader of the military organization of the RSDLP in Irkutsk in 1908, Nikiforov was arrested in 1910 and sentenced to death, but the sentence was commuted to 20 years at hard labor.

After the February Revolution of 1917, Nikiforov was a member of the Irkutsk soviet, deputy chairman of the Vladivostok soviet, and a member of the Far East Krai bureau of the RSDLP (Bolshevik). He was in White Guard prisons from 1918 to 1920. From 1920 to 1922, Nikiforov served as chairman of the Far East Krai committee, a member of the Far East bureau of the Central Committee of the RCP (Bolshevik), and chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Far East Republic. He was a plenipotentiary representative of the USSR in Mongolia from 1925 to 1927; he then held responsible positions on the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR and was deputy people’s commissar of supply of the RSFSR. He engaged in party work during the Great Patriotic War (1941–45). He wrote memoirs about the Civil War of 1918–20. Nikiforov was awarded the Order of Lenin, the Order of the October Revolution, the Order of the Badge of Honor, and various medals.