Olga Vladimirovna Pilatskaya (Russian: Ольга Владимировна Пилацкая; 1884–1937) was a Russian Revolutionary and Bolshevik Party activist. She joined the party during the Russian Revolution of 1905 and went on to participate in the October Revolution as a member of the party's Moscow district committee. She filled a number of roles in Moscow until the end of the Russian Civil War, upon which she was transferred to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. She became a leading figure within the Communist Party of Ukraine, joining its Central Committee and taking a number of roles within the All-Ukrainian Central Executive Committee. She was stripped of all her positions after her arrest and execution during the Great Purge.
Olga Pilatskaya | |
|---|---|
Ольга Пилацкая | |
 | |
| Member of Presidium of the All-Ukrainian Central Executive Committee | |
| In office 29 November 1927 – 27 May 1937 | |
| President | Grigory Petrovsky |
| Member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine | |
| In office 29 November 1927 – 27 January 1938 | |
| Personal details | |
| Born | 30 July 1884 Moscow, Russian Empire |
| Died | 22 December 1937 (aged 53) Soviet Union |
| Cause of death | Execution by shooting |
| Nationality | Russian |
| Political party | Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (1904–1918) Russian Communist Party (1918–1922) Ukrainian Communist Party (1922–1937) |
| Spouse | Vladimir Zagorsky |
Biography
editOlga Pilatskaya was born on 30 July [O.S. 18 July] 1884 in Moscow, into a working-class family. She graduated from the Moscow Mariinsky Women's School.[1][2]
In 1904, she joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) and became a member of its Bolshevik faction.[1][2] She was elected to the RSDLP's Moscow district committee and, in 1905, participated in the December Uprising.[1] In 1909, Olga Pilatskaya was elected a member of the Russian Bureau of the RSDLP's Central Committee. But the following year, she was arrested and internally exiled to Saratov.[1][2] She fled abroad with her husband Vladimir Zagorsky, moving to Leipzig, where she worked with Vladimir Lenin.[1] In 1914 she returned home to Moscow, where she carried out underground work for the Bolsheviks.[1][2]
After the February Revolution in 1917, she was again made a member of the RSDLP's Moscow District Committee.[1][2] She also briefly became a member of the Bolshevik Central Committee, during the events of the October Revolution.[1] In the wake of the Bolshevik takeover, she was appointed secretary of the city's revolutionary committee, as a judge of the local People's Court[2] and as an investigator for the provincial Cheka.[1][2] In 1921, she joined the People's Commissariat for Education,[2] becoming the secretary of the party's agitprop department.[1][2]
Following the establishment of the Soviet Union in 1922, she was transferred to Ukraine,[1][2] where she headed the Communist Party of Ukraine's agitprop department in Katerynoslav province. On 12 December 1925, she was put up as a candidate for the party's Central Committee, which she finally joined on 29 November 1927.[2] On the day she joined the party's central committee, she was simultaneously appointed as head of the women's department of the party, as a member of the presidium of the All-Ukrainian Central Executive Committee, and as a member of the Ukrainian Organisational Bureau.[1][2] In December 1927, she was a Ukrainian delegate to the 15th Congress of the All-Union Communist Party, and in 1928, she was also delegated to the 6th World Congress of the Communist International.[1]
On 9 April 1929, she was put forward as a candidate for the secretariat of the party's central committee, although her candidacy was rejected on 5 June 1930.[2] Instead, she was appointed as deputy chairman of the Ukrainian State Planning Committee, a position she held until 1937.[1][2] During this period, she was a delegate to the 16th Congress and 17th All-Union Communist Party Congresses,[1] worked as director of the Ukrainian Institute of Red Professorship from 1932 to 1934 and as director of the Institute of Party History from 1934 to 1936.[1][2]
In 1937, she was arrested during the Great Purge and consequently stripped of her positions in the Central Executive Committee and the Organisational Bureau.[2] On 22 December 1937,[1][2] she was executed by shooting. The following month, on 27 January 1938, Pilatskaya was posthumously excluded from membership of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine.[2]
References
edit- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q "Пилацкая, Ольга Владимировна". Great Soviet Encyclopedia (in Russian). 2012. Retrieved 4 June 2023 – via Slovar.cc.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r "Пилацкая Ольга Владимировна". Handbook on the History of the Communist Party and the Soviet Union 1898-1991 (in Russian). 2005. Retrieved 4 June 2023.
Bibliography
editFurther reading
edit- Kotlyar, Yuriy (2020). "Жінки Півдня України у селянських повстаннях першої третини ХХ ст" [Women of Southern Ukraine in the peasant uprisings of the first third of the 20th century]. The Universe of History and Archeology (in Ukrainian). 3 (1): 60–69. doi:10.15421/26200105. ISSN 2707-6385. S2CID 230640835.