Revolutionary-turned-banker who led Gosbank through collectivization
In 1919 he led armed detachments through the villages of Belarus, forcibly seizing grain from the peasantry. Eighteen years later the system he helped build shot him as a 'wrecker.'
Born to a Jewish merchant family in Siberia, he joined the Socialist Revolutionary Party in 1904 and switched to the Bolsheviks in July 1917. During the October Revolution he served as head of the Minsk garrison and on the Military Revolutionary Committee of the Western Front; during the Civil War he was food commissar in Belarus and Lithuania-Belarus, becoming one of the organizers of forced grain requisitioning expeditions. From 1930 to 1934 he chaired the USSR State Bank while serving simultaneously as Deputy People's Commissar of Finance, overseeing the credit reform of 1930–1932 that accompanied collectivization. He then led the People's Commissariat of Grain and Livestock Sovkhozes from 1934 until his arrest during the Great Terror; he was shot in November 1937.
Career Timeline
- 1917–1918Minsk garrison chief, Western Front MRC, chairman of Western Oblast Sovnarkom
- 1919–1920Food commissar of Belarus and Lithuania-Belarus, chair of Western Front special food commission
- 1920–1923Deputy food commissar of Ukraine, chair of Siberian food committee
- 1923–1924People's Commissar of Food of RSFSR, Deputy Commissar of Food of USSR
- 1924–1929Board member of Sakharotrest, Prombank, Zernotrest; collegium member of Workers' and Peasants' Inspectorate
- 1929–1930Deputy People's Commissar of Agriculture of the USSR
- 1930–1934Gosbank Chairman and Deputy Finance Commissar, directing the credit reform
- 1934–1937People's Commissar of Grain and Livestock Sovkhozes
Related historical events
- 1921–1928The New Economic Policy (NEP)People's Commissar of Food
- 1928–1937The Five-Year Plans and the Soviet TransformationPeople's Commissar of State Farms
- 1937–1938The Great PurgeEconomic official targetedA former State Bank chairman and commissar for state farms, he was arrested and executed in 1937.