The Left SR figurehead chairman of the MRC, lending a non-Bolshevik face to the Bolshevik insurrection while Trotsky directed operations
A feldsher at the Petrograd military hospital who turned to SR agitation among soldiers, Pavel Lazimir rose after the February Revolution to chair the soldiers' section of the Petrograd Soviet. In October 1917 the Bolsheviks installed him, a Left SR, as chairman of the newly created Military Revolutionary Committee to give the body a non-Bolshevik front; the real direction came from Trotsky, while Lazimir himself drafted the MRC's founding statute. He joined the Bolsheviks in 1918 and served on the Revolutionary Military Council of the Southern Front, organizing supply and sanitation, before dying of typhus in 1920 at twenty-nine.
Career Timeline
- ~1911–1917Feldsher at Petrograd military hospital; SR agitation among soldiers
- 1917.3–10Executive Committee member, Petrograd Soviet; chair of soldiers' section; deputy chair of military department
- 1917.10First chairman of Petrograd MRC; drafted the MRC statute
- 1917.11–1918Collegium member, NKVD and Narkomvoen
- 1918–1920Member, RVS Southern Front; directed supply and sanitation