The first People's Commissar of Finance of the RSFSR was Ivan Skvortsov. His literary pseudonym - Stepanov - remained in the memory of many colleagues and entrenched in history, so that Karl Marx, a statesman and party leader, translator of Capital, was called only a double surname from the beginning of his active work.
Early biography of the figure
Biography of Skvortsov (Stepanov) Ivan Ivanovich began in February 1870 in a small village of Bogorodsky Uyezd in the Moscow Region. Today it is the Pushkin district of the Moscow region. Karl Marx, the future translator of Capital, was a small factory employee. Nothing more is known about his parents. At the age of twenty, a young man who was destined to make a good party career graduated from a pedagogical institute (Moscow Teachers' Institute) and got a job as a teacher at an elementary school in Arbat.
The first arrest of a revolutionary
Ivan Skvortsov-Stepanov joined the revolutionary movement at the age of twenty-one. Four years later, he was first arrested for revolutionary propaganda. In prison, the teacher spent three years. During this time, he became close to Alexander Malinovsky and Vladimir Rudnev. Rudnev (Bazarov) conducted educational work among workers, later became an editor of the journals Chronicle and Sovremennik. Alexander Malinovsky (Bogdanov) was one of the main ideologists of socialism. In addition, he is also an outstanding revolutionary, doctor, science fiction writer and utopian thinker. Personalities around Skvortsov-Stepanov already gathered extraordinary.
Revolutionary activity
Since 1896, Ivan Ivanovich joined the Social Democrats. Officially, the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party was founded only two years later, and, according to others, only in 1903. The Social Democrats believed that Russia was significantly behind the pace of development in Western countries, and the main reason for this was despotic autocracy. New minds have determined that the Russian people are most sensitive to socialism.
Ivan Skvortsov-Stepanov was inspired by the ideas of the party. He was arrested several times. At thirty-one, he was exiled to Eastern Siberia, at thirty-three he returned to Moscow and again began to engage in party affairs. In 1906, Ivan Ivanovich became a delegate to the Fourth Congress of the RSDLP. There is evidence that at about the same time, Prince Sergei Dmitrievich Urusov accepted him into the Masonic lodge.
Involvement in masons
There are many speculations that the fate of the Land of Soviets was decided precisely by secret Masonic lodges, and not by party meetings. All the symbols of the Soviet era - the Kremlin five-pointed star, the sickle and hammer on the state emblem, the red color of the flag and pioneer ties, the appeal "comrades" - are taken from Masonic teachings. Perhaps the inspiration and organizers of the October Revolution were precisely the Masons. Be that as it may, many revolutionaries had connections with them.
Work in print media
Ivan Ivanovich Skvortsov-Stepanov became a member of the literary group of the Moscow Party Committee. He joined the educational work even more actively. The group was organized to promote the Bolsheviks. The struggle between the parties in those years became widespread. The Social Democrats already lacked leaflets, rallies and discussions, and newspapers published abroad could not provide the ideological content for the start of the revolution in Russia. Then the propagandist actually became the chief editor of the newspaper “Borba” and at the same time took part in the work of the Volna editorial office, which was published in St. Petersburg.
For years of active work in the print media, the most striking achievement was also achieved by Ivan Ivanovich Skvortsov-Stepanov (in the photo below he stands next to Maxim Gorky), which they liked to mention in textbooks on the history of the party and revolution. He translated three volumes of Capital by Karl Marx together with Alexander Bogdanov (pseudonym Malinovsky) and Vladimir Bazarov (Vladimir Rudnev). Subsequently, Vladimir Lenin considered this translation option the best. With the leader of the revolution, Ivan Skvortsov-Stepanov met in 1906.
Political career
In 1911, the party ideologist was sent to the Arkhangelsk province. In the same year he was nominated as a candidate for deputy of the State Duma. After the revolutionary events of the rebellious 1917, Skvortsov-Stepanov became the editor-in-chief of Izvestia, a member of the editorial board of the Social Democrat newspaper, the military revolutionary committee, the people's commissar of finance, and a member of the party committee in Moscow. Ivan Ivanovich did not accept his appointment as people's commissar under the pretext that he was a theorist. He did not take up duties, and only stayed at the post for only four days.
Since 1918, Skvortsov-Stepanov worked in the editorial board of Pravda, the Communist, was a member of the board of the Central Union and deputy chairman of the editorial board of the State Publishing House. It was he who had a hand in creating Soviet political censorship. He wrote a lot of journalistic articles. In an active philosophical discussion of the twenties of the last century, he was one of the leaders of mechanists. The ideas of mechanists were based on classical physics, many representatives of the movement were physicists or philosophers with a physical education.
Relation to religion
Skvortsov-Stepanov was an ardent atheist and one of the main initiators of atheistic propaganda. He used very original tricks: he spoke on behalf of an ordinary believer who wondered that if the church teaches that any authority is from God, then why do priests oppose the Soviets? Not only in the matter of religion, but also in general, Ivan Ivanovich was an active supporter of Joseph Stalin. In the newspapers of the party press, he first defeated Trotsky, then Zinoviev and Kamenev, thereby rendering Stalin an invaluable service.
Death and memory
Ivan Ivanovich Skvortsov-Stepanov died in 1928 in Sochi. Death occurred in just 4 and a half hours from severe typhoid fever. The party leader was cremated, then his ashes were placed on Red Square in Moscow. The burial place of Skvortsov-Stepanov is a necropolis near the Kremlin wall. This is the place where prominent party, military and government leaders of the Land of Soviets, revolutionaries, foreign communists were buried (for example, revolutionary Klara Zetkin or the founder of the Communist Party of Japan, Sen Katayama).
In memory of Skvortsov-Stepanov, streets are named in some Russian settlements. For several years, Bolshoi Putinkovsky Lane in the Russian capital was called Skvortsov-Stepanov Passage. He is also named after the Moscow printing house of the Izvestia newspaper and the City Psychiatric Hospital No. 3 in Leningrad. The latter was a strange choice, because the party leader did not suffer from mental illnesses, did not deal with treatment, and did not touch on medicine at all.