Viktor Taratuta

Taratuta, Viktor Konstantinovich 

Born April 1881 in Elizavetgrad, now Kirovograd; died May 13, 1926. Figure in the revolutionary movement in Russia. Member of the Communist Party from 1898.

Taratuta, who came from the meshchanstvo (a social class comprising various categories of townspeople), became a worker. He conducted party work in Elizavetgrad and Odessa. He was repeatedly arrested and exiled. He was a member of the RSDLP committees in Ekaterinoslav (1901), Nikolaev (1902), and Batumi and Baku (1904–05). He participated in the December Armed Uprising of 1905 in Moscow. In 1906–07 he was secretary of the Moscow committee and the Moscow oblast bureau of the RSDLP. He was a delegate to the Fourth (1906) and Fifth (1907) Party Congresses; at the Fifth Congress he was elected a candidate member of the Central Committee of the RSDLP and a member of the Bolshevik Center. He was a delegate to the Fifth (All-Russian) Conference of the RSDLP (1908). He participated in the Conference of the Enlarged Editorial Board of Proletarii in 1909. He emigrated in 1909 and worked in Bolshevik factions of the RSDLP. In 1917 he became a member of the French Socialist Party and a member of the editorial board of the party’s newspaper, Le Populaire.

In 1919, Taratuta returned to Moscow, where he engaged in high-level economic and financial work.