Kishkin, Nikolai Mikhailovich

Kishkin, Nikolai Mikhailovich 

Born Nov. 29 (Dec. 11), 1864, in Moscow; died there Mar. 16, 1930. Russian politician, one of the leaders of the Constitutional Democrat (Cadet) Party and a member of its central committee. By profession he was a doctor and physical therapist.

During World War I, Kishkin was deputy chief representative of the All-Russian Union of Cities. After the February Revolution in 1917 he was a commissar in the bourgeois Provisional Government in Moscow and on Sept. 25 (Oct. 8), 1917, became minister of public charities in the Kerensky government. On October 25 (November 7) he was given special powers by the Provisional Government to “establish order” in Petrograd. On that day he was arrested in the Winter Palace along with the other members of the Provisional Government but was soon freed. During the first years of Soviet power he worked at various medical institutions. In 1919 he was sentenced for his involvement with the counterrevolutionary Tactical Center but was freed in view of his admission of guilt. In 1921 he was one of the directors of the All-Russian Committee to Aid the Starving (the victims of famine in the Volga region). Arrested for anti-Soviet activity, he was again freed through an amnesty. Beginning in 1923 he worked for the People’s Commissariat of Health of the RSFSR.