First People's Commissar for Justice, Gosplan deputy chairman, and victim of the Great Purge
On October 24-25, 1917, he was in the Smolny Institute helping direct the armed uprising; within days, at 29, he became the Soviet government's first People's Commissar for Justice.
Born into a noble family in Saratov, he joined the Bolsheviks in 1903 and took part in the 1905 revolution. After the October Revolution he was appointed the first People's Commissar for Justice in the original Sovnarkom, then served in the Supreme Economic Council (VSNKh), led economic bodies in Siberia and the Urals, chaired the Oil Syndicate (Neftesindikat) and Donugol, and became deputy chairman of Gosplan. Within the party he sat on the Central Committee from the Sixth Congress (1917) onward; in 1918 he was a 'Left Communist' opposing the Brest-Litovsk Treaty before later backing Stalin. Arrested in 1937 on false charges, he was sentenced to death and shot; rehabilitated in 1956.
Career Timeline
- 1903Joined RSDLP, Bolshevik faction
- 1907–1910Moscow city & district committees, secretary of Petersburg committee
- 1910–1913Arrested, exiled to Arkhangelsk
- 1917.10–11First People's Commissar for Justice, RSFSR
- 1918–1921VSNKh presidium member & deputy chairman, fuel supply chief
- 1921–1923Sibburo & Uralburo member, chairman of Sibprombiuro & Uraleconsovet
- 1923–1926Chairman of the Oil Syndicate (Neftesindikat)
- 1926–1929Chairman of Donugol (Donets coal)
- 1931–1933Deputy chairman of Gosplan
- 1933–1937Member, Commission of Soviet Control
Related historical events
- 1917.10–1918.01The October RevolutionFirst People's Commissar for Justice · member of the original SovnarkomAt Smolny on 24–25 October he took part in directing the insurrection, and the Second Congress of Soviets appointed him first People's Commissar for Justice, making him a member of the original Council of People's Commissars (Sovnarkom). On 3 November he signed the resignation statement demanding an all-socialist coalition government.
- 1918–1922The Civil War and Foreign InterventionDeputy chairman of the Supreme Economic Council, managing wartime logistics
- 1937–1938The Great PurgeTargetA former first commissar of justice and deputy head of Gosplan, executed in 1937.
Arrest and Execution
In June 1937, S. A. Sarkisov, the former head of Donbassugol, denounced Lomov to the Central Committee for alleged involvement in a 'counter-revolutionary Right-Trotskyist terrorist organization.' Vyacheslav Molotov wrote on the denunciation: 'For the immediate arrest of this bastard Lomov.' Lomov was arrested on 25 June (the official record says 28 August) and on 31 August his name appeared on a 'Stalinist execution list,' signed by Stalin, Molotov, Voroshilov, Zhdanov, and Kaganovich, under Category 1 (execution). On 2 September the Military Collegium of the USSR Supreme Court sentenced him to death after a trial lasting fifteen minutes, and that same day he was shot alongside Alexander Shlyapnikov and thirty others by the deputy commandant of the NKVD. His body was buried in an unmarked mass grave at Donskoye Cemetery. The informer Sarkisov was himself arrested in July 1937 and shot in Kiev the same year.
Lomov's wife Natalya was arrested in July 1937 as a 'family member of a traitor to the Motherland,' sentenced to eight years, imprisoned three times, and finally rehabilitated in 1954. Their daughter Nina, a student at the Moscow Institute of Foreign Languages, was arrested in 1939 at age 20 and sentenced to three years in a labour camp. Lomov was posthumously rehabilitated on 18 January 1956. At the 22nd Party Congress in 1961, KGB chairman Alexander Shelepin publicly revealed the circumstances of Lomov's arrest as an indictment of the legal lawlessness of the Stalin era.