Skveri, Mikhail

Skveri, Mikhail Petrovich 

Born Nov. 8 (20), 1856, in Odessa; died there Oct. 13, 1924. Russian revolutionary. Skveri was the son of an Italian subject and a Russian peasant woman. He studied at the Odessa Realschule, leaving it in 1871 to go to work at a plant in Odessa. After becoming acquainted with E. O. Zaslavskii, he became an active participant in the South Russian Workers’ Union. He was arrested in January 1876; in 1877 a special court of the Senate sentenced him to exile in Siberia, in Tobol’sk Province.

From 1884, Skveri lived in Odessa under secret surveillance. In 1907, he took part in the organization of the All-Russian Congress of Teachers, for which he was arrested. Beginning in 1917, he was head of a department of the Odessa Public Library and contributed to Katorga i ssylka (Hard Labor and Exile) and other journals.

REFERENCE

Itenberg, B. S. Iuzhnorossiiskii soiuz rabochikh: Vozniknovenie i deia-tel’nost’. Moscow, 1974. (Contains a supplement with reminiscences of M. P. Skveri.) [23–1491–]