Moisei Uritsky
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Moisei Solomonovich Uritsky (Моисей Соломонович Урицкий; 1873–August 30, 1918) was a Bolshevik revolutionary leader in Russia.
He was born in the town of Cherkasy, Ukraine, to a Jewish family. His father, a merchant, died when Moisei was little and his mother raised her son by herself.
Moisei studied law at the University of Kiev. During his studies he joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party and organized an underground network for importing and distributing political literature. In 1897 he was arrested and exiled for running an illegal mimeograph press. Becoming involved in the revolutionary movement, he participated in the revolutionary Jewish Bund. In 1903, he became a Menshevik. His activities in Petersburg during the 1905 revolution earned him a second term of exile. Along with Parvus he was active in dispatching revolutionary agents to infiltrate the Tsarist security apparatus.
In 1914 he emigrated to France and contributed to the Party newspaper Our Word. Back in Russia in 1917 Uritsky was member of the Mezhraiontsy group. A few months before the October Revolution of 1917, he joined the Bolsheviks and was elected to their Central Committee on July 1917. Uritsky played a leading part in the Bolsheviks' armed take-over in October and was later, he was made head of the Petrograd Cheka, or secret police. In this position Uritsky coordinated the pursuit and prosecution of members of the high nobility, military officers and ranking Russian Orthodox Church clerics who opposed the Bolsheviks.
Because Uritsky was against the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, he resigned his post in 1918, like Bukharin, Bubnov, Piatakov, Dzherzhinsky and Smirnov. On March 4, 1918, the Petrograd committee published the first number of the journal Kommunist, directed by Radek and Uritsky, and it was the public organ of the "left communist" opposition. The Extraordinary Seventh Congress of the Bolshevik party, which was held between March 6 and March 8 in 1918, rejected the Theses on the Present Situation that was submitted as a resolution by the "Left Communists". The "Left Communists" Lomov and Uritsky, who were elected to the Central Committee, stated at the Congress that they would not work in the Central Committee, and did not begin work there for several months in spite of the insistent demands of the Central Committee.
The Civil war began on May 25, 1918, with the rise of the Czechoslovakian Legion and Uritsky retook his post.
Leonid Kanegeiser, a young Russian Orthodox military cadet with Jewish ancestry, assassinated Uritsky on August 30, 1918 in retaliation for the execution of his friend and other officers. Following this event, along with the assassination attempt on Lenin by Fanya Kaplan on August 30, the Bolsheviks began a wave of persecution known as the Red Terror.
