Gerstein, Lev Yakovlevich

By class origin from the middle class. From the age of 12 he began his career as an apprentice watchmaker. Watchmaker by profession. Graduate of the Belotserkovskaya gymnasium in 1904, which he graduated from as an external student. In 1912 he entered the Kiev Commercial Institute . Since 1898, participated in the revolutionary movement in Ukraine. Member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party since 1902. Participated in the first SDRP conference in Tammerfors in December 1905.

He was expelled to the Arkhangelsk, and then to the Tobolsk province, he disappeared from exile. In 1915 he was called up for military service. In 1917 he was elected chairman of the Narva-Zastava Council in Petrograd. During the Kornilov rebellion, he became a member of the Committee of the People's Struggle against Counter-Revolution at the CEC. He was a delegate to the III and IV congresses of the party of socialists-revolutionaries, from June 1917 he was elected to the Central Committee. He was a member of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and the Pre-Parliament.

Obligatory candidate of the party of socialists-revolutionaries to the Constituent Assembly. At the end of 1917 he was elected to the All-Russian Constituent Assembly from the Perm Electoral District according to list No. 2 (Socialist-Revolutionaries and the Council of Peasant Deputies) ^[2] . Member of the Bureau of the Socialist Revolutionary fraction in the Constituent Assembly.

He participated in the work of COMUCH .

He was a member of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of the III and IV convocations. In 1918 he was arrested by Kolchak intelligence, but freed by Czech legionnaires. In 1919, one of the leaders of the Political Center in Irkutsk. In February-March 1920, a member of the Extraordinary Commission of Inquiry chaired by S. G. Chudnovsky in the case of the Kolchakov Ministers ^[3]

Arrest and Investigation

Arrested on April 19, 1921. In the investigation of the Socialist Revolutionary Party (1921-1922), he refused to testify. During the process, Gerstein made several protests, in particular, he stated that the accused were given only 24 hours to get acquainted with the multi-volume case ^[4] .

On August 7, 1922, L. Ya. Gerstein was sentenced to death with a suspension of sentence until the SRs committed the first terrorist attack. On January 11, 1924, the death penalty was changed to 5 years in prison with strict isolation. He served his sentence in Butyrka prison. From October 9 - November 1, 1925 he participated in the so-called "distributed" group hunger strike. The conflict leading to the hunger strike developed as follows. On July 11 and 12, 1925 the OGPU re-arrested the right-wing Social Revolutionaries convicted of the process and released into exile A.R. Gots and E.M. Timofeev in Ulyanovsk and Kokand, respectively. In response, they went on a hunger strike ^[5] . On October 9, Agapov, Rakov , Handelman, Gerstein, Likhach , Ivanov , Ivanova and Fedorovich joined the hunger strike of Gotz and Timofeev. At the direction of the head of the SB OGPU Deribas, the starving people were taken to various prisons, and Gerstein was sent to Vyatka. The starving people, taken to different prisons, put forward an additional demand - to return to Butyrskaya prison in Moscow. Gershtein was not placed in the Vyatka House of Imprisonment, but in the detention facility at the Gubotdel OGPU, where the security, according to his boss Argov, is more reliable. Artificial feeding began on October 21, doctors predicted a quick death for Gerstein, which caused concern for the OGPU. On October 25, after promising to return to Moscow, Gerstein, like other participants, stopped the hunger strike ^{[6] [7]} .

In 1926 he was exiled for 3 years to Sverdlovsk, the link was extended twice for one year. In Sverdlovsk he worked in Soviet institutions. In 1931 he was arrested and exiled for 3 years to Orenburg. Died in exile.

Rehabilitated in 1989.

• Wife - Margarita Robertovna Gershtein (12/9/1890-?), Nee Erdman ^[8] . The husband of her sister Ella was the Ural paleontologist and local historian M. D. Claire ^[9] .
• Sister - Leah Yakovlevna Egonova.
• Brothers (cousins?) - translator F. M. Gershtein ^[10] and surgeon G. M. Gershtein ^[11] .

• Gerstein Lev Yakovlevich (1877) - An open list.
• Protasov L.G. People of the Constituent Assembly: a portrait in the interior of the era. M., ROSPEN, 2008.
• Morozov KN Paradoxes of rehabilitation of the defendants of the process of socialists-revolutionaries of 1922 by the Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation in the context of the problem of legal “guilt” of participants in the civil war.

Recommended Sources

• Babin B. February 1922 // Past. - T.2. - M., 1990. - S. 7-80.
• Morozov K. N. The trial of the socialist revolutionaries and the prison confrontation (1922 - 1926): ethics and tactics of confrontation. M .: ROSSPEN, 2005.736 c.
• The trial of the socialists - revolutionaries (June-August 1922). Reasons, conduct, results. Comp. Krasilnikov S.A., Morozov K.N., Chubykin I.V. -M .: ROSSPEN. 2002.
• Jansen M. Court without trial. 1922 year. The show trial of socialists - revolutionaries: Per. from English -M .: Return, 1993.