Samoilov, Fedor Nikitich

Samoilov, Fedor Nikitich 

Born Apr. 12 (24), 1882, in the village of Gomilenki, in what is now Ivanovo Oblast; died June 13, 1952, in the settlement of Kratovo, Ramenskoe Raion, Moscow Oblast. Participant in the revolutionary movement in Russia. Member of the Communist Party from 1903.

The son of a weaver, Samoilov was himself a worker. He was one of the leaders of the Ivanovo-Voznesensk strike of 1905, a member of a group of the Northern Committee of the RSDLP, and a member of the assembly of representatives, one of the first soviets of workers’ deputies in Russia. From 1906 to 1908 he was chairman of the textile printers’ trade union. In 1912 he was elected a deputy to the Fourth State Duma by the workers of Vladimir Province. Samoilov contributed to the newspaper Pravda and the journals Prosveshchenie and V oprosy strakho-vaniia. In 1914, along with the other Bolshevik deputies in the Duma, he was arrested and permanently exiled to Turukhansk Krai.

After the February Revolution of 1917, Samoilov was chairman of the Ivanovo-Voznesensk soviet and a member of the committee of the RSDLP(B). He was one of the leaders in the establishment of Soviet power in Vladimir Province during the days of the October Revolution of 1917. In 1918 he was secretary of the Ivanovo-Voznesensk committee of the RSDLP(B), provincial commissar of labor, and chairman of the provincial revolutionary tribunal. In 1919 he was deputy people’s commissar of labor of the Ukraine and the authorized representative of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee under the Bashkir Revolutionary Committee. He was deputy people’s commissar of labor of the Ukrainian SSR in 1920 and 1921. Samoilov became deputy head of Istpart (Commission on Party History) of the Central Committee of the RCP(B) in 1922 and head of Istpart of the Moscow oblast committee of the ACP(B) in 1928. Between 1932 and 1935 he was deputy chairman of the All-Union Society of Old Bolsheviks. In 1937 he became director of the State Museum of the Revolution. He was granted a special pension in 1941.

Samoilov was a delegate to the Twelfth and Fourteenth through Seventeenth Party Congresses. At the Eleventh Congress he was elected a candidate member of the Central Control Commission. He was a member of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee. Samoilov’s memoirs, In the Tracks of the Past, were published in 1940.

REFERENCES

Lenin, V. I. Poln. sobr. soch., 5th ed. (see Index Volume, part 2, p. 471.)
Vinogradov, L. F. Samoilov. Moscow, 1961.
Volkov, A. “Deputat rabochei kurii.” In the collection Partiia shagaet v revoliutsiiu, 2nd ed. Moscow, 1969.