User:Asdfghjkl448/Varvara Yakovleva (politician)

= Varava Yakovleva (Politician) =

Early Life
Varvara Nikolaevna Yakovleva (Варвара Николаевна Яковлева) (1884 – 1941) was a prominent Bolshevik party member and Soviet government official who later supported Leon Trotsky's attempt to democratize the party. She was sentenced to 20 years in prison in 1938 for membership in a "diversionary terrorist organization." She was later shot in the Oryol Central Prison on either September 11, 1941 or December 21, 1944, becoming another victim of the purge.

Life and Career
Yakovleva was born to middle-class Jewish parents in Moscow in 1884 and joined the Bolshevik Party when she was 20. During the 1905 Revolution, she was violently assaulted in the breasts by soldiers, which had led to an exacerbation of her health with tuberculosis. She was a candidate for membership in the Bolshevik Central Committee in 1917. She took notes at the meeting that set the date for the October Revolution of 1917. From March 1918 on she was a member of the board of the NKVD and worked in the Moscow Cheka, the Moscow secret police, as a prominent figure. During her time in the Cheka, there is conflicting evidence that she was cruel and a direct reason for many executions in Petrograd. From January 1919, as a board member of the People's Commissariat of Food, she led food inspections and parties that requisitioned food as a punitive measure. She was known for her severity in this matter. In October 1918 she opposed peace with the Germans. She was regarded as a left-wing Communist.

In 1922 she became the Acting Minister for Education for the Russian Federation and in 1929 was named the Minister of Finance. Yakovleva was in favor of the politician Nikolai Bukharin's position on trade unions in 1920–1921. In 1923 she signed the "Letter of the 46", along with forty-five others, in support of Trotsky's attempt to reform the Communist party as a democracy.

Yakovleva was a representative of the Narkompros, the people's commisariat for education, in 1925 in the absence of Anatoly Lunacharsky and was described as a powerful and energetic woman.

Imprisonment and death
Following the Third Moscow Trial in 1937, she was arrested and accused of being a member of a terrorist group. She was sentenced to 20 years in prison and, after the start of World War II, was shot to death on the orders of Lavrentiy Beria in the Oryol Prison. Different records give her date of death as 1941 or 1944.