Emelyan M. Yaroslavsky (19 February 1878-4 December 1943), born Meaney Izrailevich Gubelman, was a Soviet politician and atheist activist.
Biography[]
Meaney Izrailevich Gubelman was born on 19 February 1878 in Chita, Siberia, Russian Empire to a family of political exiles, and he joined the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. Gubelman led the RSDLP's Trans-Baikal Railway branch, and he worked as a correspondent for the group's Iskra magazine. He joined the party's committee in Chita in 1902, and he became a leader of the group's "combat center", engaging in "expropriation" - bank robberies and theft of goods from people - to fund the revolution. After leading a strike of textile workers in Yaroslavl, he took on the nickname "Yaroslavsky", and he took part in the 1905 Russian Revolution against Czar Nicholas II of Russia. His wife Olga Genkina was killed by the Black Hundreds in 1905, and he became a member of the central committee of the Bolsheviks and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Yaroslavsky led the Union of Militant Atheists after the Russian Revolution, and he was an active supporter of Joseph Stalin after 1930. He served as a science professor and a historian, writing a book comparing Stalin to Vladimir Lenin, and he died of stomach cancer in Moscow in 1943.