Aleksei Badayev
Aleksei Yegorovich Badayev was a Soviet politician, functionary and a nominal head of state of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic during the leadership of Joseph Stalin.Biography
Badayev was born at Yuryevo in the Oryol Governorate of the Russian Empire in 1883. He joined the Bolsheviks in 1904, and was an active member of the Metal Workers' Union from its inception in 1906. From 1912 to 1914 he was a Deputy of the Fourth State Duma. In 1912-13, he also worked on the Bolshevik newspaper Pravda. In 1914, along with the other members of the Bolshevik group in the Fourth Duma, and was deported the following year to Turkestan.
Badayev returned to Petrograd after the February Revolution in 1917 and became actively involved in the city duma, and in the management of food distribution. After the Bolshevik Revolution he was appointed chairman of the Food Commissariat for the North West region of Russia.
In September 1919 Petrograd consumer commune was established by Decree of the Sovnarkom "On consumer communities" dated 16 March 1919. It was the germ of the cooperative sector during the "war communism". Badayev was the founding chairman of the Petrocommune governance.
In the first half of the 1920s he worked as Deputy Chairman of the Petrograd gubispolkom. He was a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1925 to 1951 - one of only a handful of members of that body to survive the Great Purge. He was Chairman of the USSR Consumers' Union, 1930-38. From August 1937 to July 1938 he was the People's Commissar of Food Industry of the RSFSR, and from 19 July 1938 to 4 March 1944 he was the Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Russian SFSR. He died in Moscow in 1951.
