Soviet public and political figure. He was born into the family of a State official. In 1887 he entered the Kherson agricultural college. He took part in the revolutionary movement and was arrested a number of times. At the beginning of the 1900s he was an agent of "Iskra", Lenin's underground revolutionary newspaper. After the February revolution of 1917 he was a member of the Presidium of the Ufa united committee of the Russian Social Democratic Party; after the October armed revolution he was a member of the Ufa committee of the Russian SDP. From 1918 he held the post of people's commissar for food in the Russian Soviet Federal Socialist Republic. During the civil war he was concerned with supplying the Red Army and was the driving force behind the formation of the "committees of the poor" (groups whose task was to "carry the class war to the villages" by fighting the kulaks, or rich peasants). From 1921 he was chairman of the Council of People's Commissars, and from 1925 people's commissar for domestic and foreign trade.