Rosalia Zemlyachka facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Rosalia Zemlyachka
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| Розалия Землячка | |
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| Born |
Rosalia Zalkind
20 March 1876 Kiev, Russian Empire
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| Died | 21 January 1947 (aged 70) Moscow, Soviet Union
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| Nationality | Russian |
| Alma mater | University of Lyon |
| Occupation | Politician |
| Known for | Marxist revolutionary |
| Office | Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers |
Rosalia Samoilovna Zemlyachka, née Zalkind (Russian: Розалия Самойловна Землячка, рожд. Залкинд; 20 March 1876 – 21 January 1947) was a Russian revolutionary and Soviet politician. As a revolutionary, she was best known by the alias Zemlyachka, though she also used the party pseudonyms 'Demon' and 'Osipov', and her married name was Samoilova.
Biography
Rosalia Zalkind was born in Kyiv, (Kiev) the daughter of a wealthy merchant. She was educated in a girls' gymnasium in Kiev, and later at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Lyon. From age of 17, she was involved in revolutionary activities. A member of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party since 1898, Zemlyachka worked in Odessa and Yekaterinoslav as an agent for the Iskra newspaper, founded by Vladimir Lenin and Julius Martov.
Zemlyachka was a delegate to the Second Congress of the RSDLP, which convened in Brussels in July 1903, but she was arrested by the Belgian police and deported. When the RSDLP split into factions, she joined the Bolsheviks and continued to support Lenin when he appeared to be losing control of Bolsheviks who wanted to bring about a reconciliation of the factions of the RSDLP. In July 1904, she travelled to Geneva for the conference of hard line Bolsheviks who formed the 'Bureau of Majority Committees', forerunner of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, to which she was elected, under the name 'Demon', on Lenin's recommendation. Afterwards. she returned to Russia to build the Bolshevik organisation, visiting St Petersburg, Georgia, and Baku. In December 1905, she was in Moscow at the time of the Moscow uprising. After its failure, she insisted on a purge of the Moscow Bolshevik organisation. She was arrested in 1906, but escaped from a police station. She was arrested several times, and in October 1907 was imprisoned in the Lithuania Castle in St Petersburg. After her release in 1909, she was briefly secretary of the Bolshevik organisation in Baku, before emigrating. She returned to Russia illegally in 1914, and took charge of illegal transport across the Finnish border. In 1915-16 she was secretary of the Moscow party organisation.
After the February Revolution, Zemlyachka was appointed secretary of the Moscow party committee. During the Bolshevik Revolution, she directed the armed uprising in the Rogozhsk-Simonovsky district of Moscow In 1918, she supported the 'Left Communists', who opposed the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, and during the Russian Civil War, when she served as a military commissar on the southern front, she supported the 'military opposition', who objected to the deployment of former officers of the Russian Imperial Army.
Massacre of the 'Wrangelites'
Zemlyachka was appointed secretary of the Crimean party committee in November 1920, when the last White Army left in the war, commanded by Baron Wrangel was evacuating the peninsula. Leaflets dropped by aeroplane over Sevastopol, the last city held by the Whites, offered an amnesty to those who surrendered to Red Army, signed in the name of the former commander-in-chief of Imperial Army, General Aleksei Brusilov, who was persuaded by the Deputy People's Commissar for War, Ephraim Sklyansky, to go to Crimea to supervise their surrender. But before Brusilov set out, a decision was made locally to massacre those who had surrendered. The order to kill them was signed by Béla Kun, head of the Crimean regional committee, Zemlyachka, and Semyon Dukelsky, head of the Crimean branch of Cheka. Estimates vary of the number killed, which may have been 70,000.
Later career
In 1921-24, Zemlyachka was secretary of the Zamoskvoretsky district committee, Moscow. In 1924, she was sent to South East Russia. In 1925-26, she was secretary of the Motovilikhsky district party committeee, in Perm. Between 1924 and 1934, she was a member of the Central Control Commission. In 1926, she became a member of the collegium of Rabkrin and head of its complaints bureau. According to a tribute written to mark the 110th anniversary of her birth, she involved hundreds of workers and party members in her campaigns against bureaucracy, and became so well known as "the scourge of bureaucrats and red-tape mongers" that a letter reached her from the provinces with the address 'Moscow, Comrade Zemlyachka'. In February 1934, she was appointed head of the Transport Commission of the Soviet Control Commission, the renamed successor to Rabkrin.
As one of relatively few Old Bolsheviks to survive the Great Purge, Zemlyachka received a major promotion in May 1939, when she was appointed Chairman of the Soviet Control Commission and a Deputy Chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers. She is the only woman to have served at this level in the Stalinist period, and the first woman to be decorated with the Order of the Red Banner.
