YAROSLAVSKY, YEMELYAN

YAROSLAVSKY, YEMELYAN (Gubelman ; 1878–1943), Russian communist leader, publicist, and historian. Born in Chita, Yaroslavsky joined the Russian Social-Democratic Workers' Party at its founding in 1898 and became a close collaborator of Lenin. He moved to St. Petersburg in 1903 and participated in the revolution of 1905. During the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, he was a leader of the armed uprising in Moscow and an active figure of the Communist Party. In 1923, he was made a member of the Central Committee of the Party. Yaroslavsky was one of Stalin's principal supporters. In 1921, he became one of the three secretaries of the Party Central Committee and in 1934 was made a member of the strategic Party Control Commission. He served on the Central Executive Committee of the U.S.S.R. and was a deputy to the Supreme Soviet. He was also a member of the editorial board of both the Party newspaper, Pravda, and the Party's theoretical organ, Bolshevik. Yaroslavsky acquired a notorious reputation as chairman of the League of Militant Godless, the Party organization that campaigned on behalf of atheism against all religions. He was the coauthor of an important history of the Soviet Communist Party, editor of the periodical Istoricheskiy Zhurnal ("History Journal"), and served on the editorial board of Istorik-marksist ("The Marxist Historian"), a major scholarly journal. During World War ii he was head of the Communist Party's propaganda department.

bibliography:

S. and B. Webb, Soviet Communism: A New Civilization (1944³), index; E.H. Carr, Socialism in One Country, 2 vols. (1958–59), indexes.

[William Korey]