Dzerzhinskaia, Sofia

(also Zofia Dzierzyhski; maiden name Muszkat). Born Nov. 22 (Dec. 4), 1882, in Warsaw; died Feb. 27, 1968, in Moscow. Prominent in the revolutionary movement in Poland and Russia. F. E. Dzerzhinskii’s wife. Member of the Communist Party from 1905.

The daughter of a government official, Dzerzhinskaia studied at the Warsaw Conservatory and participated in party work in several Polish cities. A delegate to the Sixth Congress of the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPL), Dzerzhinskaia was also a member of the Central Board of the SDKPL. Repeatedly arrested, she escaped from the place of her exile in 1912 and went abroad. She was secretary of the Bureau of Foreign Sections of the SDKPL in Kraków. After the October Revolution of 1917, Dzerzhinskaia was secretary of the emigre mutual aid funds in Switzerland; in 1918 she worked with the Soviet delegation in Bern. She returned to Soviet Russia in 1919 and worked in the People’s Commissariat of Education, in the Polish Bureau of the Central Committee of the RCP (Bolshevik), and at the Communist University of National Minorities of the West. In 1924, Dzerzhinskaia became executive secretary of the Polish Bureau of the Agitation and Propaganda Department of the Central Committee of the RCP (Bolshevik). In 1929 she became a research scholar and editor in chief at the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute, and in 1937 she assumed a post in the Executive Committee of the Comintern. From 1946 she was in retirement. Dzerzhinskaia has been awarded three Orders of Lenin and two other orders.