Alexander Krasnoshchyokov (10 October 1880-26 November 1937), born Avram Moiseevich Krasnoshchyok, was a Soviet leader in the Russian Far East during the Russian Civil War and the leader of the Far Eastern Republic.
Biography[]
Alexander Krasnoshchyokov was born on 10 October 1880 in Chernobyl, Russian Empire (present-day Ukraine) to a Jewish family as "Avram Moiseevich Krasnoshchyok", and he joined the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party in 1897 while studying in Kiev. He fled to the German Empire and the United States rather than be exiled to Siberia, and he joined the Socialist Labor Party of America and the American Federation of Labor.
After the 1917 Russian Revolution, he returned to Russia after the Russian Revolution, and he met with other Bolsheviks at a workers' convention in Vladivostok on 28 October 1917. He set up the Far Eastern Republic, a socialist state, and he had to fight against Japan, the US Army, China, and other Triple Entente nations in addition to the White Army. Krasnoshchyokov was a moderate socialist, harboring a disdain for collective leadership; in April 1921, he was forced to step down by the local Bolsheviks under Nikolay Matveyev. He would serve in the Commissariat for Finance and open the Prombank, a new bank that would disrupt the Finance Commissariat's control over the economy (it now controlled just the regulation of money and credit).
After Vladimir Lenin's death, Krasnoshchyokov lost his protector in politics, and he made enemies with the Stalinist faction of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In March 1924, he was sentenced to six years in prison and expelled from the CPSU for living a bourgeois lifestyle (although many party elites did the same). In 1925, he was amnestied, and he went to work for the Ministry of Agriculture. On 25 November 1937, he was sentenced to death by the NKVD for "espionage", and he was executed by firing squad on 26 November. In 1956, he was rehabilitated under Nikita Khrushchev.