Gleb Krzhizhanovsky

Gleb Maksimilianovich Krzhizhanovsky (; 24 January [O.S. 12 January] 1872 – 31 March 1959) was a Soviet scientist, statesman, revolutionary, Old Bolshevik, and state figure as well as a geographer and writer. Born to the family of a nobleman of Polish descent (Polish surname: Krzyżanowski), he became the longtime chairman of the Gosplan and director of the GOELRO, an Academician of Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union (1929) and a Hero of Socialist Labour (1957). Life and career Krzhizhanovsky was born in 1872 to an intellectual family in Samara. In 1889 he moved to Saint Petersburg, where he attended the Saint Petersburg State Institute of Technology, becoming involved in Marxist circles in 1891. He was a close friend and colleague of Lenin, with he edited the newspaper Rabotnik ('The Worker') and, in 1895, he was a co-founder, with Lenin, of the League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class. He was arrested with Lenin and others in a police round up of the Union of Struggle in December 1895, and spent 17 months in Butyrka prison, where he wrote the Russian text of the Polish revolutionary song Warszawianka and the Ukrainian song Rage, Tyrants. Afterwards, he was exiled to Minusinsk, in Siberia, near enough to Lenin's place of exile for them to stay in touch. In 1899, he married Zinaida Nevzorova, a fellow Marxist who had shared his time in exile. They settled in Samara, where he worked as a railroad engineer, and they handled distribution of the newspaper Iskra, founded by Lenin, using the aliases 'Clair' and 'The Snail'.