1. Ivan Pavlovich Tovstukha was a Soviet politician, Communist Party functionary, and personal secretary of Joseph Stalin and the author of the first official biography of Stalin.
15 Facts About Ivan Tovstukha
1. 2.
Ivan Tovstukha was born in the family of a clerk, on 10 February, 1889, in Berezna, Chernigov region of Ukraine.
3.
Ivan Tovstukha's exile started in 1911 in Irkutsk province, where Tovstukha carried revolutionary propaganda among locals and exiles, and was involved in raising money for the publication of the newspaper Pravda.
4.
Ivan Tovstukha returned to Russia in 1917, after the February Revolution, and from November 1917 to March 1918, worked with the Central Staff of the Red Guards.
5.
When Stalin was appointed General Secretary of the Central Committee, Ivan Tovstukha was transferred to the Central Committee as Stalin's secretary, the first to hold that position.
6.
In 1924, Ivan Tovstukha was replaced as Stalin's chief secretary by Lev Mekhlis, and appointed was assistant director of the Lenin Institute.
7.
In 1927, Ivan Tovstukha wrote the biographical entry on Stalin in a special edition of the Granat Encyclopedia, to mark the tenth anniversary of the revolution.
8.
In 1930, Boris Bazhanov, who had defected to the west after working in Stalin's personal secretariat, published a memoir in which he implied Ivan Tovstukha was a more significant figure than his job titles suggest.
9.
Ivan Tovstukha began removing from the archives all documents concerning Stalin, particularly his pre-revolutionary career, ostensibly in order to write a full biography.
10.
Ivan Tovstukha collected the documents to make sure they were never published.
11.
Ivan Tovstukha allegedly enlisted a graphologist to help him identify the handwriting of delegates who had made alterations.
12.
Ivan Tovstukha learnt to know his way about the archive better than anyone.
13.
Ivan Tovstukha was able to supply Stalin with material about Trotsky or any other enemy.
14.
Ivan Tovstukha worked on assembling and editing the collected works of Lenin.
15.
Ivan Tovstukha died of tuberculosis on August 9,1935, in Moscow.