The worker-Bolshevik who built the Komsomol's mass base and made 'study' its watchword
At the Fifth Komsomol Congress in 1922, when a delegate proposed that Smorodin be promoted nationwide as "the leader of working youth," he shot back from the podium: "What the hell are you making an icon out of me for?"
Born into a peasant family, he became an apprentice at a surgical instruments factory in Petrograd at fourteen, joined the Bolsheviks in May 1917, and took part in the October armed uprising. He led the creation of the Petrograd Socialist Union of Working Youth (SSRM) and served as First Secretary of the Komsomol Central Committee from 1921 to 1924, consolidating the youth organization's mass base during the NEP and making 'study' its central task. He later served as a regional party secretary in Leningrad and Stalingrad and participated in the Great Purge as an NKVD troika member, but was himself arrested as an 'enemy of the people' in 1938, shot in 1939, and posthumously rehabilitated in 1954.
Career Timeline
- 1911–1917Apprentice and worker, Petrograd surgical instruments factory
- 1917Co-founder, Petrograd Socialist Union of Working Youth (SSRM)
- 1920–1921Secretary, Petrograd Komsomol City Committee
- 1921–1924First Secretary, Komsomol (RKSM) Central Committee
- 1928–1937Secretary, Vasileostrovsky, Vyborg, and Moscow district committees, Leningrad
- 1937Second Secretary, Leningrad Regional Party Committee
- 1937–1938First Secretary, Stalingrad Regional Party Committee
- 1938First Secretary, Stalingrad City Party Committee