Feliks Yakovlevich Kon
Феликс Яковлевич Кон
From Warsaw boy patriot to Comintern old revolutionary: the Pole who returned in the sealed train
“As a six-year-old boy I dreamed of becoming a rebel leader and freeing Poland from the 'Muscovites' and 'Swabians'.” — from his memoirs Za 50 Let
A Polish revolutionary who endured twenty years of tsarist prisons and Siberian exile, emerging as a gold-medal ethnographer of Siberia's indigenous peoples. He led the anti-Piłsudski split of the Polish Socialist Party into its internationalist left wing, then joined the Bolsheviks on Lenin's sealed train. He helped found the International Red Aid (MOPR), built the Soviet radio broadcasting system, and spent nearly sixty years on the front lines of revolutionary struggle, outliving the Great Purge to die of natural causes at 77.
Career timeline
- 1882Joins 'Proletariat', the first Polish socialist party
- 1884–1891Arrested, sentenced to 10 years; serves at Kara penal colony; initiates mass poisoning protest (1889)
- 1891–1904Exiled to Yakutia, Irkutsk, Minusinsk — ethnographic research awarded gold medal; meets Lenin and Krupskaya
- 1904–1907Returns to Warsaw, leads PPS left wing; pushes Piłsudski out and splits the party (1906)
- 1907–1914Exile in Austrian Galicia — directs workers' health fund in Drohobych, PPS-Left abroad organiser
- 1914–1917Swiss exile — attends Zimmerwald Conference, internationalist left activist
- 1917Returns to Russia with Lenin in the sealed train; commissar for Polish affairs in Kharkov
- 1918Joins RKP(b) with seniority backdated to 1906; serves in Ukrainian NKID and Polish Bureau
- 1920Member of Polrevkom — attempt to establish a Polish Soviet government in Białystok
- 1921Responsible Secretary of the CP(b)U Central Committee (March–December)
- 1922–1923Secretary of the Comintern Executive Committee (ICCI)
- 1925–1928Editor-in-chief of Krasnaya Zvezda (Red Star)
- 1928–1930Editor-in-chief of Rabochaya Gazeta and children's magazine Murzilka
- 1931–1933First chairman of the All-Union Radio Committee — creates Soviet radio broadcasting system
- 1933–1937Head of museum department, RSFSR Narkompros; editor of Sovetsky Muzey
- 1937–1941Editor of Nasha Strana; directs Polish-language Radio Moscow broadcasts after German invasion