- Grigory Sokolnikov
politician and economist.
He was born to a
Jew ish railway doctor in present-dayPoltava Oblast but eventually moved toMoscow . he joined theBolshevik Party in 1905 at the age of 17. He served time in prison and studied economics whilst at theSorbonne .After the Russian
October Revolution he held various government positions. He was appointedPeople's Commissar of Finance following the introduction of theNew Economic Policy .He was Soviet
ambassador toEngland from 1929 to 1932. He was a member of the delegation for peace negotiations withGermany , replacedLeon Trotsky as chairman of the delegation and signed theBrest-Litovsk treaty in 1918. In 1918-1921 he worked on the establishment ofSoviet power inTurkestan . He was a creator of the first stable Soviet currency.During the
Great Purge , Sokolnikov was arrested during theTrial of Parallel Anti-Soviet Trotskyist Centre and sentenced to 10 years of imprisonment. Reportedly, he was killed in a prison by other convicts. The investigation during theKhrushchev Thaw it was revealed that the murder was orchestrated by theNKVD . In 1988 he was rehabilitated.External links
* [http://www.hrono.ru/biograf/sokolnikov.html Sokolnikov] @ khronos
* [http://members.optushome.com.au/spainter/Sokolnikov.html Grigorii Yakovlevich Sokolnikov and the development of the Soviet state, 1921-1929]
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