Pyotr Ivanovich Smirnov-Svetlovsky

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1897–1940 ✕ Executed

Civil War river-flotilla commander who rose to acting People's Commissar of the Navy and was shot

Born in 1897 at Sulin in the Don Host Oblast, the son of a Cossack who worked as a zemstvo doctor, he joined the RSDLP in 1914. In 1917 he edited the newspapers of the Kronstadt Bolshevik committee under the pen name Svetlovsky, and in the October rising he was commissar and chief of staff of the combined Kronstadt sailors' detachment. In the Civil War he commanded the Volga and Dnieper military flotillas, and after graduating from the Naval Academy in 1927 he commanded a destroyer and a destroyer division. He became commander of the Black Sea Fleet in August 1937 and First Deputy People's Commissar of the Navy in December, and after Pyotr Smirnov's arrest on 30 June 1938 he acted as People's Commissar of the Navy until Frinovsky's appointment on 8 September. Arrested in March 1939, he was shot in March 1940 and rehabilitated in 1956.