Babushkin, Ivan Vasilevich

(Party pseudonyms Nikolai Nikolaevich, Bogdan, Novitskaia, and others). Born Jan. 3, 1873; died Jan. 18, 1906. Professional revolutionary and a Bolshevik. He was born in the village of Ledenskoe, Tot’ ma District, Vologda Province, into a peasant family.

From 1887 to 1891, Babushkin was an apprentice metalworker in Kronstadt; he became a metalworker at the Semiannikov Factory in St. Petersburg in the summer of 1891. In 1894 he studied in the workers’ Marxist circle under the guidance of V. I. Lenin. In 1895 he was active in St. Petersburg’s League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class. He conducted revolutionary work among workers of the Semiannikov and Aleksandrov factories and the glass works and organized workers’ circles and libraries. In January 1896 he was arrested in the case of the League of Struggle and was exiled to Ekaterinoslav in February 1897. In December 1897 he was one of the organizers of the Ekaterinoslav League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class. In October 1898 he set up the Ekaterinoslav Committee of the RSDLP. In 1900 he organized the illegal newspaper luzhnyi rabochii. Babushkin was an agent and active correspondent for Lenin’s Iskra. In 1900–01 he conducted revolutionary work in Moscow, Smolensk, Polotsk, Orekhovo-Zuevo, Ivanovo-Voznesensk, and other cities. In 1902 he escaped from the Ekaterinoslav prison and went to London. He returned to Russia in October 1902. While he was a member of the St. Petersburg RSDLP committee, he fought against the “economists” and the Zubatov unions and upheld the positions of Lenin’s Iskra. In 1903 he was arrested and exiled to Verkhoiansk (Eastern Siberia) for five years. After being released by amnesty in 1905, he participated actively in the revolution of 1905–07. He was a member of the Irkutsk and Chita RSDLP committees and wrote in the Bolshevik newspaper Zabaikal’skii rabochii. With V. K. Kurnatovskii and A. A. Kostiushko-Valiuzhanich, he was one of the leaders of the armed uprising in Chita. In January 1906, while transporting arms for workers from Chita to Irkutsk, he and five other comrades were captured at the Sliudianka station on the Trans-Baikal Railroad by the punitive expedition of General Meller-Zakomel’skii and were shot on Jan. 18, 1906, at Mysovaia station without trial or investigation. Lenin, in an obituary, called Babushkin a people’s hero and the pride of the Bolshevik Party. The city of Mysovsk in the Buriat ASSR has been renamed after Babushkin.