Mitskevich

MITSKEVICH Sergei Ivanovich (born 1869), physician, old Bolshevik. Born in the city of Yaransk, former Vyatka Province. Graduated in 1893 from the medical faculty of Moscow University. As a student, he actively participated in the student movement, in circles, in fellow-countrymen's associations, in political protests ("disorders"), and was imprisoned for participation in "disorders" in Butyrka Prison in 1890. From 1892, he took part in a Marxist circle, from which in the autumn of 1893 a group of 6 people separated for systematic propaganda of revolutionary-Marxist ideas among Moscow workers. As early as April 1894, this group organized a central workers' circle from representatives of factory and plant Moscow circles. This organization then adopted the name "Workers' Union" and became the founder of the Moscow Social-Democratic workers' organization, the progenitor of the Moscow Communist Bureau. In 1897, he was arrested and sentenced to administrative exile in Eastern Siberia for 5 years. He served his exile in Olekminsk, Yakut Region, where he arrived in 1898 after a whole year of travel through stages. There he first engaged in private medical practice, soon obtained a position as a physician at gold mines on the Lena River, but after six months was expelled from there and returned to Olekminsk. From the beginning of 1899 for 4 years, he held the position of district physician in the city of Sredne-Kolymsk. Before him, there had been no physician there for 8 years, syphilis and leprosy were rampant. M. built a new hospital and a leprosarium there, and studied the psychoneuroses very common among the northern population (described in the work "Menyerik and emirachenye - forms of hysteria in the Kolyma region", published by the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, Leningrad, 1929). He returned to Moscow only in 1904, took up a position as a physician in a private psychiatric clinic, but was soon expelled from Moscow. He became a physician at the Tver Manufactory, where, while engaged in medical practice, he also worked underground in propaganda among Tver workers. In 1905, he was able to move to Moscow, where again he became a physician in a psychiatric clinic. In Moscow, he intensively engaged in socio-revolutionary work, spoke at many congresses, meetings, and rallies. Together with physician V. A. Obukh, he organized, by order of the Moscow committee of Bolsheviks, a lecture group at the Moscow Committee, which during 1905-1906 carried out extensive work in organizing Marxist social-democratic lectures, speeches, as well as in publishing books and brochures, collections and newspapers. In 1906, he was expelled from Moscow, went to Nizhny Novgorod, where he obtained a position as a physician in the psychiatric clinic of the Nizhny Novgorod provincial zemstvo. There, in addition to medical work, he also took an active part in social work, especially in the Society for the Spread of Public Education, which organized its branches in the Nizhny Novgorod Province and established "People's Houses", libraries, children's clubs, grounds, kindergartens, etc. In 1914, M. moved to the city of Saratov as a school-sanitary physician. He paid special attention to the organization of an auxiliary school for defective children. Here, at his initiative, a society of people's universities was organized, which during 1915-1917 carried out extensive cultural and educational work in Saratov and the Saratov Province. In 1917, M. actively participated in the February Revolution. At the congress of urban public physicians in the summer of 1917, he was elected a member of the Higher Sanitary Council. He then took part in the October Revolution in Saratov. For participation in the October coup, the Saratov Society of Physicians decided to subject him to a boycott; he was also entered on the "blackboard" of the Pirogov Society of Physicians, of which he had been an active member since 1904, speaking at all its congresses. In November, after the dissolution of the Saratov City Duma by the Bolsheviks, he became deputy chairman, and then chairman of the council of city commissioners. In 1917, he was appointed a member of the board of sanitary administration under the Commissariat of Internal Affairs. In 1918, he worked as deputy head of the Moscow department of public education (MONO). In 1919, he was mobilized to the front, where he worked as assistant to the head of the sanitary unit of the southern, and then the southwestern front. After demobilization, he worked in Moscow (from 1921) as chairman of the Moscow provincial department of the union of education workers, then from 1922 to 1928 as chairman of the Moscow section of scientific workers. From 1924, he also served as director of the museum of the revolution of the USSR, while at the same time working as chairman of the health commission of the committee for assistance to the small peoples of the North under the All-Russian Central Executive Committee.