The Menshevik Labour Minister sent to calm the crowds during the April Crisis
On 20 April 1917, as 15,000 armed soldiers and sailors gathered before the Mariinsky Palace outraged by Milyukov's note, Skobelev and Gots were sent to address them: their speeches were unavailing.
A son of Baku's wealthy Molokan merchant class, he studied at the Vienna Polytechnic and helped edit Trotsky's Vienna Pravda. After the February Revolution he became deputy chairman of the Petrograd Soviet; during the April Crisis he was sent with Abram Gots to calm the armed crowds outside the Mariinsky Palace, and on 5 May 1917 he entered the first coalition government as Minister of Labour. He opposed the October Revolution but later reconciled, joining the Bolshevik Party in 1922 and working in the Soviet foreign trade system until his execution during the Great Purge in 1938.
Career Timeline
- 1903Joined RSDLP; led Baku oil workers' strike
- 1906–1912Exile in Vienna; edited Trotsky's Pravda; graduated Vienna Polytechnic (1912)
- 1912–1917Deputy, Fourth Duma (Russian population of Transcaucasia); Menshevik faction
- 1917.2–5Deputy chairman, Petrograd Soviet Executive Committee
- 1917.5–9Minister of Labour, Provisional Government; Deputy Chairman, VTsIK (from June)
- 1919–1920Resided in Baku; covert food-supply operations for the Red Army
- 1920–1925Exile in France and Britain; unofficial Soviet trade representative
- 1925–1937Served in the People's Commissariat of Foreign Trade, Gosplan, and the All-Union Radio Committee