Jan Borissowitsch Gamarnik

Jan B. Gamarnik on a Soviet postage stamp from 1964

Yan Gamarnik ( Russian Ян Борисович Гамарник ; born June 2 ^{. Jul} / 14. June  1894 ^greg. In Zhitomir , Russian Empire , now Ukraine ; † 31 May 1937 in Moscow ) was a Soviet politician.

life and career

Jan Gamarnik was born in 1894 into a Jewish family in Zhitomir , in today's Ukraine. Birth name - Jakow Tzudikowitsch Gamarnik ( Russian Яков Цудикович Гамарник ). He first studied at the Neuropsychiatric Institute in Saint Petersburg , but then decided to study law at the University of Kiev . In Kiev he met many well-known communists, such as Mykola Skrypnyk and Stanislaw Kossior . In 1916 he joined the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party , which later became the Communist Party of the Soviet Union . Gamarnik then worked for party propaganda in the Kiev arsenal works .

After the February Revolution in 1917 , he was a member of the Kiev city council and was its chairman from 1921 to 1925, which is de facto Kiev mayor. He then went through numerous other positions within the Communist Party, in 1927 he was involved in economic planning for the Far Eastern provinces of the Soviet Union . From 1928 to 1929 he was the First Secretary of the Central Committee in the Belarusian SSR . In this position he supported the collectivization policy .

He then moved to the political leadership of the Red Army , where he enthusiastically supported Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevski's plans to turn the Soviet Union into a military superpower. In 1933, Gamarnik received the Order of Lenin .

Tukhachevsky finally fell victim to the Great Terror under Stalin as one of the first military commanders of the Soviet Union . When Gamarnik tried to defend Tukhachevsky, he too fell out of favor. Before he could be arrested, Gamarnik committed suicide on March 31, 1937. Shortly afterwards he was publicly discredited and dubbed an enemy of the people .

In 1955 he was finally rehabilitated under Nikita Khrushchev .

Between 1932 and 1937, a town in the Far East of Russia was named Gamarnik in his honor .

Web links

Commons : Yan Gamarnik  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Biography on hrono.ru

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Russian Горлов, Василий Михайлович. Военно-политическая деятельность Я. Б. Гамарника (1917—1937 гг.)  : Автореферат дис. … Кандидата исторических наук: 07.00.01 / Военно-полит. акад. им. В. И. Ленина. - Москва, 1990. - 23 с.