Kazys Giedrys

Giedrys, Kazys Juozovich 

Born Mar. 3 (15), 1891, in the village of Salos, in present-day Rokiškis Raion; died Dec. 27, 1926, in Kaunas. Lithuanian revolutionary. Member of the Communist Party from 1917. Born into the family of a sacristan.

In October 1917, Giedrys formed a fighting detachment of Lithuanians to fight the troops of General Krasnov. In 1918 he led the Lithuanian section of the RCP (Bolshevik) and later was a representative of the Provisional Worker and Peasant Government of Lithuania on the Council of People’s Commissars of the RSFSR. From September 1919 to early 1920 he led the underground regional bureau of the Communist Party of Lithuania and Byelorussia in Vilnius, which was then occupied by the White Poles. He was arrested in June 1920. After an exchange of political prisoners between Soviet Russia and bourgeois Lithuania in March 1921, he arrived in Moscow. From November 1921 through February 1923 he was a secretary of the Lithuanian section of the Central Committee of the RCP (Bolshevik). In October 1923 he engaged in underground party work in Kaunas and became a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Lithuania. He was imprisoned from 1924 to 1926 and later resumed his illegal activity. He was a delegate to the Eighth Congress of the RCP (Bolshevik) in 1919 and the First and Third Congresses of the Comintern in 1919 and 1921. After the fascist coup in Lithuania (Dec. 17, 1926), he was arrested and shot. A factory in Kaunas bears Giedrys’ name.

R. SARMAITIS