Yakubovich Mikhail Petrovich

Born in 1891 in Gzhatsk, Smolensk province. Great-grandson of Decembrist A. I. Yakubovich, nephew of poet and revolutionary P. F. Yakubovich. First arrested as a 6th grade high school student. Member of the RSDLP - initially a Bolshevik, during World War I he joined the Mensheviks. After the February Revolution - Chairman of the Smolensk Council of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies, as a representative of the Western Front he was co-opted into the Petrograd Soviet, elected a member of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and a member of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee Bureau. During the Kornilov Rebellion - Commissar of the Provisional Government under the 1st Army, arrested General A. Denikin. After the October Revolution - Food Commissar of the Smolensk Province. Left the RSDLP in 1920. In the 1920s and 1930s, he was the manager of the commission on state funds of the Council of Labor and Defense, and the head of the industrial goods department of the USSR People's Commissariat of Trade. He was arrested in 1930 in the case of the "Union Bureau of Mensheviks", and gave self-incriminating testimony during the investigation. In March 1931, he confirmed this testimony at an open trial. Sentenced by the Supreme Court of the USSR on March 9, 1931 under Articles 58-4, 58010, and 58-11 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR to 10 years' imprisonment. Until 1939, he was in the Verkhneuralsk political isolator, then in the Oryol prison, and in Unzhlag (Gorky region). He was released in August 1940 and worked in Unzhlag as a civilian employee in the position of economist in the financial department of the Unzhensky Corrective Labor Camp Administration. Arrested on 29 June 1941. Sentenced by the Special Special Department of the NKVD of the USSR on 21 November 1942 under Articles 58-10 and 58-11 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR to 10 years in a labor camp. He was transported from places of imprisonment in the Gorky Region to the Lugovaya ITL of the Komi ASSR, and in 1950 he was transferred to Peschanlag. He was released in 1953 and sent to the Tikhonovsky Home for the Disabled in Karaganda, where he was an exile until 1955. He was rehabilitated in the 1942 case in 1956.
His letters on the issue of rehabilitation in the case of the “Union Bureau of the RSDLP(m)”, memoirs, historical, literary and philosophical research circulated in samizdat.
In 1961, he sent a statement to the 22nd Congress of the CPSU requesting a review of the trial of the "Union Bureau of the RSDLP (m)", but was refused. On 24.04.1968, he was searched, as a result of which manuscripts and letters were confiscated. On 24.06.1968, the preliminary investigation was terminated, the manuscripts were returned. He died on 15.10.1980.
Yakubovich's memoirs were used by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago and by Roy Medvedev in his history of Stalinism, Before the Judgement of History.