Ganetskii, Iakub

Ganetskii, Iakub 

(also Iakov Stanislavovich Fiursten-berg; party pseudonyms, Genrikh, Kuba, Mikolai, and Mashinist). Born Mar. 15, 1879; died Nov. 26, 1937. Active in the Polish and Russian revolutionary movements; Soviet state figure. Member of the Communist Party from 1896.

Ganetskii was born in Warsaw into a bourgeois family and studied at the universities of Berlin, Heidelberg, and Zürich. He attended the Fourth (1903), Fifth (1906), and Sixth (1908) Congresses of the Social Democracts of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL). He was a member of the chief board of the SDKPiL from 1903 to 1909 and attended the Second (1903) and Fourth (1906) Congresses of the RSDLP. Ganetskii was one of the leaders of the revolutionary manifestations of Warsaw workers in 1905. At the Fifth Congress of the RSDLP in 1907 he was elected a member of the Central Committee in absentia. He was a delegate to the Fifth All-Russian Party Conference in 1908 and was a member of the Russian Bureau of the Central Committee of the Party from 1908 to 1910. He was repeatedly arrested and exiled. He was a participant at the International Socialist Congress in Basel in 1912 and at the Poronin Conference of the Bolsheviks in 1913.

In 1914, Ganetskii contributed to V. I. Lenin’s liberation from an Austrian prison. During World War I (1914-18) he was a member of the Zimmerwald Left. In 1917 he took an active part in organizing Lenin’s return from emigration and that same year became a member of the Bureau of the Central Committee of the RSDLP (Bolshevik) abroad. After the October Revolution, Ganetskii was a member of the collegium of the People’s Commissariat for Finance and commissar and director of the People’s Bank. From 1920 to 1922 he was a member of the collegium of the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Trade, a member of the collegium of the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, and the political and trade representative of the RSFSR in Latvia. From 1923 to 1929, Ganetskii was a member of the collegium of the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Trade and from 1930 to 1932, a member of the Presidium of the Supreme Council on the National Economy of the RSFSR. From 1932 to 1935, Ganetskii was director of the State Association of Music, Estrada (variety stage), and Circus. In 1935 he was appointed director of the Museum of the Revolution of the USSR. Ganetskii has written recollections of V. I. Lenin.