32 Facts About Yemelyan Yaroslavsky

An atheist and anti-religious polemicist, Yaroslavsky served as editor of the atheist satirical magazine Bezbozhnik and led the League of the Militant Godless organization.

Yemelyan Yaroslavsky was born on 3 March 1878, into a Jewish family as Minei Israilevich Gubelman in Chita, then the capital of Russia's Transbaikal Oblast, where his parents were political exiles.

Yemelyan Yaroslavsky joined the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party in 1898 and organized party cells on the Trans-Baikal Railroad.

Yemelyan Yaroslavsky was arrested in April 1904, and spent eight months in prison, but was released on the outbreak of 1905 Revolution.

In 1903, Yemelyan Yaroslavsky married Olga Mikhailovna Genkina, a 21-year-old student at the Women's Medical Institute in St Petersburg, from which she was expelled after being caught in possession of revolutionary literature in February 1904.

Yemelyan Yaroslavsky was arrested but released when the crowd stormed the jail.

Yemelyan Yaroslavsky was a delegate to the party conferences in Tammerfors in December 1905, Stockholm, in April 1906, and London, June 1907.

Later, Yemelyan Yaroslavsky was transferred to party organisation in Perm and Omsk.

Yemelyan Yaroslavsky was named a candidate member of the governing Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party in 1919 as a candidate member.

Yemelyan Yaroslavsky's influence peaked in March 1921, after he had backed Lenin against Trotsky in a dispute over the role of trade unions.

Yemelyan Yaroslavsky was appointed one of three secretaries of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and raised to full membership of that body.

Molotov complained to Lenin, who had Yemelyan Yaroslavsky transferred to Siberia.

On September 15,1921, Yemelyan Yaroslavsky was the prosecutor at the trial in Novonikolaevsk, now Novosibirsk, of the counter-revolutionary Lieutenant General Roman von Ungern-Sternberg.

Yemelyan Yaroslavsky held the title of Central Committee secretary until April 1922, when Josif Stalin was appointed General Secretary, with Molotov as his deputy.

Yemelyan Yaroslavsky retained his Central Committee membership until 1923 but never held a position as important as that of a party secretary.

Late in 1922, Yemelyan Yaroslavsky created a new role for himself, as the Soviet Union's foremost anti-religious propagandist.

Yemelyan Yaroslavsky performed this function for nearly two decades, until the German invasion of the USSR when Stalin turned to the Russian Orthodox church for help in the war effort.

Yemelyan Yaroslavsky's chaired the Militant League of the Godless, and edited its principle journal Bezbozhnik.

Yemelyan Yaroslavsky backed Stalin in all the factional disputes within the communist party that followed Lenin's incapacity and death.

Yemelyan Yaroslavsky appears to have been the first prominent communist to attack Trotsky personally, during a meeting of the Moscow party organisation, for which he was heckled by part of his audience.

When Trotsky addressed the Central Committee for the last time in October 1927, before his expulsion, while others barracked and insulted him, Yemelyan Yaroslavsky threw a heavy book at his head.

In December 1925, after the rift between Stalin and Zinoviev, Yemelyan Yaroslavsky was part of the team sent to Leningrad to purge Zinoviev's supporters from the regional party, and made so provocative a speech that he was shouted down by Leningrad party members.

In February 1937, when the two former party leaders Nikolai Bukharin and Alexei Rykov were arraigned before the Central Committee, prior to being arrested, put on trial and executed, Yemelyan Yaroslavsky denounced them as treasonous, and claimed that the charges against them were "totally proven".

Yemelyan Yaroslavsky was chosen as a member of the directorate of the Lenin Institute, an archive and research center established in 1923 to gather and publish the various letters, manuscripts, and writings of Lenin.

Yemelyan Yaroslavsky was a frequent writer on the history of the Bolshevik Party and an editor of one of the main historical journals of the 1920s, Istorik-Marksist.

Yemelyan Yaroslavsky wrote several plaintive letters to Stalin but got no reply, so wrote a letter confessing to being in the wrong.

Yemelyan Yaroslavsky then wrote a new biography of Stalin that magnified his role in early Bolshevik history.

In 1939, Yemelyan Yaroslavsky denounced Pokrovsky as a Trotskyite, saying that:.

Yemelyan Yaroslavsky was Chairman of the Society of Old Bolsheviks in 1931 until Stalin ordered the society's dissolution in 1935.

Yemelyan Yaroslavsky was the head of the Society of Former Political Prisoners and Penal Exiles, a fraternal benefit society which aided Old Bolsheviks and other political prisoners of the Tsarist era.

Yemelyan Yaroslavsky died on 4 December 1943 in Moscow of stomach cancer.

Yemelyan Yaroslavsky's remains were cremated and the urn with his ashes was interred to the left side of the Senate Tower in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis behind Lenin's Mausoleum.