Education administrator who was RSFSR People’s Commissar of Education after the Great Purge and died in custody in the Leningrad affair
Born in 1897 into a peasant family in Nikolayevsk, Samara Governorate, he finished gymnasium and joined the RCP(b) in 1918. After heading the Samara provincial education department and the Commissariat of Education’s Main Administration of Socialist Education and directing engineering institutes in Gorky and Leningrad, he chaired the Leningrad regional executive committee in September–October 1937. As RSFSR People’s Commissar of Education from October 1937 to February 1940 he pushed free distribution of textbooks and uniform school curricula. In the Great Patriotic War he headed the political administration of the Leningrad Front and became a major general in 1942, but in 1949 he was expelled from the party and arrested in the Leningrad affair, and he died in the Butyrka prison hospital in 1950; the case was closed for lack of a crime in 1954.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1926–1929Head of the Main Administration of Socialist Education, RSFSR People’s Commissariat of Education
- 1929–1931Head of the Nizhny Novgorod territorial education department
- 1933.03–1935.06.22Director of the Gorky Mechanical Engineering Institute
- 1935.06.22–1936.06.19Director of the Leningrad Industrial Institute
- 1937.09.02–1937.10.26Chairman of the Leningrad regional executive committee
- 1937.10.26–1940.02.28People’s Commissar of Education of the RSFSR
- 1941–1944Head of the political administration of the Leningrad Front