GUSEV, SERGEI IVANOVICH

GUSEV, SERGEI IVANOVICH (formerly Yakov Davidovich Drabkin; 1874–1933), Soviet party and government official. Gusev was born in the settlement of Sapozhok, Riazan district, Russia. In 1896 he entered the St. Petersburg Technological Institute and in the same year joined the revolutionary movement. He was one of the leaders of the workers' uprisings in Rostov in 1902–03. At the second congress of the Russian Social Democratic Revolutionary Party he joined the Bolsheviks and was secretary of the bureau of the St. Petersburg committee of the Party (1904–05), of the Odessa committee (1906),   and from 1906 to 1917 was engaged in Party work in Moscow and St. Petersburg. In 1917 he was secretary of the Petrograd military-revolutionary committee which organized the October armed uprising. From 1918 to 1920 Gusev was a member of the Revolutionary Military Soviet (RVS) of the 2nd and 5th Armies of the Eastern, Southeastern, and Southern Fronts, Commander of the Moscow defense sector, and member of the RVS of the republic. In 1921 he became head of the political directorate of the Red Army and in 1922 chairman of the Turkestan bureau of the Russian Communist Party. From 1923 he was secretary of the Party's Central Control Commission. In 1925–26 he headed the press department of the Control Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks). From 1928 to 1933 Gusev was a member of the Comintern. Gusev's daughter, ELIZAVETA YAKOVLEVNA DRABKINA (1901–1974) was a writer, who spent the years 1934–56 in forced labor camps and exile. She wrote novels and literary memoirs devoted to the revolution and civil war periods (written after her rehabilitation). (The Shorter Jewish Encylopaedia in Russian)