The Polish nobleman turned internationalist who became the first Soviet leader of Kazakhstan
In November 1917, at Smolny, he mentioned to Menzhinsky that he had studied finance at the University of London. Menzhinsky sat up and declared: 'In that case we'll make you manager of the State Bank.' Thus he became the first People's Commissar of the Soviet State Bank.
A Polish nobleman turned Bolshevik who joined the SDKPiL under Rosa Luxemburg's influence and served on its main board during the 1905 Revolution. Appointed the first People's Commissar of the State Bank after the October Revolution, he later became Stalin's deputy at Narkomnats, helping institutionalize Soviet nationality policy. In 1919 he was named first chairman of the Kirghiz (Kazakh) Revolutionary Committee, de facto the first Soviet leader of Kazakhstan, and went on to serve as the USSR's first plenipotentiary to Mexico and as a Comintern and Profintern activist. Executed in the Great Purge of 1937 and posthumously rehabilitated in 1955.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1902–06Joins SDKPiL; main board member, 1905–06
- 1906–12Four years' hard labour, then exile in Irkutsk; escapes to Kraków in 1912
- 1917.10–11Commissar of the Central Telegraph, then Commissar of the State Bank
- 1917–19Deputy People's Commissar of Nationalities (under Stalin)
- 1919–20First chairman of the Kirghiz (Kazakh) Revolutionary Committee
- 1920–21Chief of Political Administration, Western Front, Soviet-Polish War
- 1924–26First Soviet plenipotentiary to Mexico
- 1926–37Deputy chairman of MOPR; Comintern & Profintern work
Related historical events
- 1905–1907The Revolution of 1905party board member during the revolutionHe served on the SDKPiL main board during the 1905–06 revolution.
- 1917.10–1918.01The October RevolutionPeople's Commissar of Central Telegraph
- 1919–1921The Soviet-Polish WarChief of the Western Front Political AdministrationHe served as chief of the Political Administration on the Western Front during the Soviet-Polish War.
- 1937–1938The Great PurgeSoviet leader
Chairman of the Kirghiz Revkom and the Building of Kazakh Soviet Statehood
On 10 July 1919 Sovnarkom established the Revolutionary Committee for the Administration of the Kirghiz (Kazakh) Region, the Kirrevkom, and placed Pestkovsky at its head. He was the 'neutral figure' Stalin agreed to after the Kazakh delegates had blocked one another's promotion. Bringing Alash leaders such as Akhmet Baitursynov and Bakytzhan Karataev into the committee was a deliberate Moscow move: Lenin and Stalin hoped to draw the national intelligentsia, betrayed by the Whites, into Soviet construction, and Baitursynov became deputy chairman. Pestkovsky labored as mediator among these hostile colleagues, confessing his own 'helplessness' to Lenin in letters that described the Baitursynov and Tunganchin alliance co-opting allies to dominate votes. Based in Orenburg, the Kirrevkom faced the 'Great-Russian chauvinism' of local officials and had to start work in private flats for lack of premises. It nonetheless created interior, finance, education, justice and agriculture departments that sketched the skeleton of the future Kazakh autonomous republic, and by the end of 1919 employed 138 people. The Kirrevkom was dissolved on 26 August 1920 with the founding of the Kirghiz (Kazakh) Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic; Pestkovsky's fifteen-month chairmanship stands as Kazakhstan's first Soviet government.