LOZOVSKI (Dridzo), SOLOMON ABRAMOVICH

LOZOVSKI (Dridzo), SOLOMON ABRAMOVICH (1878–1952), Soviet statesman and trade union leader. Born into a poor family in Danilovka, Yekaterinoslav province (today Dnepropetrovsk district, Ukraine), Lozovski went to work at the age of 11 and completed his studies on his own. He joined the Russian Social-Democratic Party in 1901 and in 1905 attached himself to the Bolshevik wing. Lozovski participated in the Revolution of 1905, and several times was arrested, but escaped. In 1909 he arrived in France where he was active in the socialist movement until 1917. Lozovski returned to Russia following the outbreak of the February Revolution and was immediately elected secretary of the Trade Union Council. His opposition to Lenin's policies during and after the October Revolution led to his expulsion from the party in March 1918 and until December 1919, when he rejoined the Bolsheviks, he was a leader of the Internationalist Social-Democrats. From 1920 on, he was appointed to a series of important posts, serving as head of the Communist Trade Union International (Profintern; 1921–37), director of the state publishing house (1937–39), deputy commissar of foreign affairs (1939–46), and deputy director and later director, of the Soviet Information Bureau. From 1939 to 1949 he was a member of the central committee of the Communist Party.

In his capacity as head of the Soviet Information Bureau, Lozovski was responsible for the work of the Jewish *Anti-Fascist Committee and was concerned with world Jewish affairs. It is believed that in 1944 he supported the plan to set up a Jewish autonomous settlement in the Crimea and that this led to his arrest in 1949, when the authorities began to liquidate Jewish culture in the Soviet Union. Lozovski was tried together with 24 other Jewish writers and intellectuals in July 1952, and was executed with them on August 12, 1952. He was posthumously rehabilitated in 1956.

bibliography:

J.B. Salsberg, in: Jewish Life (Feb. 1957); I. Ehrenburg, Memoirs 1921–1941 (1964), 498; vol. 2, p. 11, 120; H.E. Salisbury, To Moscow and Beyond (1960), 72; Deyateli Sovetskogo Soyuza, vol. 1, p. 333–7; Bolshaya Sovetskaya Entsiklopediya, 51 (1958²), 180; Sovetskaya Litva (March 30, 1963); Sovetskaya Istoricheskaya Entsiklopediya, 8 (1965), 760–1; Voprosy istorii kpss, 10:7 (1966), 24.

[Benjamin Pinkus]