Sammer, Ivan Adamovich

Born Sept. 3 (15), 1870, in the village of Ocheretnaia, in what is now Kagarlyk Raion, Kiev Oblast; died June 25, 1921, in Kharkov. Participant in the revolutionary movement in Russia. Member of the Communist Party from 1897.

Sammer was the son of a peasant. Between 1891 and 1895 he studied in the law faculty of the University of Kiev and took part in the revolutionary movement. From 1896 he worked in the Social Democratic organizations of Poltava, Kiev, and St. Petersburg. Arrested in 1898, he was exiled to Vologda Province. In 1904 and 1905 Sammer was a member of the Kazan committee of the RSDLP. He was a delegate to the Third Congress of the RSDLP in 1905 and was elected a candidate member of the Central Committee (CC). In August 1905 he became secretary of the Russian Bureau of the CC of the RSDLP. Sammer took part in the Revolution of 1905–07 in Kazan, St. Petersburg, and Moscow. He became a member of the United CC of the RSDLP in December 1905. In November 1906 he represented the CC of the RSDLP at the All-Russian Conference of Military and Combat Organizations of the RSDLP. At the Fifth Congress of the RSDLP, he was elected in absentia a candidate member of the CC. In 1907 he was arrested, and in 1909 he was exiled once again to Vologda Province.

After the February Revolution of 1917, Sammer was secretary of the Vologda soviet and a member of the revolutionary committee. With the establishment of Soviet power in Vologda in December 1917, he became chairman of the regional economic council. In 1919 he was a member of the collegium of the People’s Commissariat of Finance and of the administrative board of the Central Union of Consumers’ Societies in Moscow. In 1920 and 1921 he was chairman of the Ukrainian Union of Consumers’ Societies, authorized representative of the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Trade in the Ukraine, a member of the Ukrainian Council of People’s Commissars, and a member of the All-Ukrainian Central Executive Committee.