Emelian Iaroslavskii

(real name, Minei Izrailevich Gubel’man). Born Feb. 19 (Mar. 3), 1878, in Chita; died Dec. 4, 1943, in Moscow. Figure in the Communist Party, historian, and journalist. Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1939). Member of the Communist Party from 1898.

The son of penal settlers, Iaroslavskii began his revolutionary activity in Social Democratic circles in Chita. In 1898 he organized the first Social Democratic circle of workers on the Trans-baikal Railroad. In 1901 he went abroad and served as a correspondent for Iskra. In 1902 he became a member of the Chita committee of the RSDLP, and in 1903 he was an underground member of the St. Petersburg committee of the RSDLP.

Iaroslavskii took part in the Revolution of 1905–07. He was a delegate to the First Conference of the RSDLP, held in Tammerfors; a member of the Moscow committee of the RSDLP; a member of the Moscow military organization of the Bolsheviks; and a delegate to the Fourth Party Congress. He engaged in party work in Ekaterinoslav and in St. Petersburg, where he edited the newspaper Kazarma, and he served as a delegate to the First Conference of the Military and Combat Organizations of the RSDLP and to the Fifth Party Congress. Iaroslavskii was arrested in 1907 and sentenced to hard labor at Gornyi Zerentui, one of the Nerchinsk hard labor camps; subsequently he became a penal settler in Eastern Siberia.

After the February Revolution of 1917, Iaroslavskii became a member of the Yakut Committee of Public Safety, and in May he was named chairman of the Yakut soviet. In July he joined the Moscow military organization of the Moscow committee of the RSDLP(B). He was a delegate to the Sixth Congress of the RSDLP(B). During the October Days of 1917, Iaroslavskii was initially a member of the Moscow Party Center for Directing the Uprising and a member of the Moscow military-revolutionary committee; later he was commissar of the Kremlin and the Moscow Military District. Iaroslavskii was an editor of the Moscow newspapers Sotsial-demokrat and Derevenskaia pravda.

In 1918, Iaroslavskii sided with the Left Communists on the question of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty. From 1919 to 1922 he was chairman of the Perm’ provincial committee and a member of the Siberian Regional Bureau of the Central Committee of the RCP(B). In 1921 he became a secretary of the party’s Central Committee. He was an elder of the Society of Exiles and Political Prisoners, and in 1931 he became chairman of the All-Union Society of Old Bolsheviks. He served on the editorial board of Pravda and of the journals Bolshevik, Istorikmarksist, and Bezbozhnik; he edited Istoricheskii zhurnal. Iaroslavskii was head of the subdepartment of the history of the ACP(B) at the Higher Party School Under the Central Committee of the ACP-(B); he was also head of a lecture group of the Central Committee.

Iaroslavskii was a delegate to the Eighth through Eighteenth Party Congresses. He was elected a candidate member of the party’s Central Committee at the Eighth and Ninth Congresses and p. member at the Tenth, Eleventh, and Eighteenth Congresses. At the Twelfth through Sixteenth Congresses he was named a member of the Central Control Commission; he served as a member of the commission’s Presidium in 1923 and 1924, as a member of the Secretariat from 1923 to 1926, and as secretary of the Party Collegium from 1924 to 1934. At the Seventeenth Party Congress he was elected a member of the Commission of Party Control of the Central Committee of the ACP(B).

Iaroslavskii was a member of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR and a deputy to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. He was awarded the Order of Lenin and in 1943 received the State Prize of the USSR. Iaroslavskii is buried in Red Square by the wall of the Kremlin.