Cohn, Feliks

  General Notes:

His Jewish name was probably Fiszel. One of his early pseudonyms was "Fis" perhaps short for Fiszel. He is usually known by the Russian spelling of his name Feliks Yakovlevich Kon. Communist revolutionary, journalsit, and politician. He wrot e in his memoirs that his parents were "Polish patriots, body and soul" and that Polish patriotism took the place of religion in his family. As a child he too was a convinced Polish patriot and anti-Russian. He joined the "Proletariat," the firs t Polsih socialist party when he was a teenager. He was arrested in 1884 and sentenced to eight years hard labor in Siberia. After his release from prison he took part in an anthropological expedition to study primitive peoples of Siberia for wh ich he won a gold medal. In 1892 he married Kristina Grynberg, who had also been imprisoned in Siberia for revolutionary activity. She was a member of the Russian revolutionary organization "Narodnaya Volya" [The People's Will] and was imprisio ned for her p art in the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. While in exile Felks met Lenin several times.

In 1917 he took part in the October Revolution and Civil War, first as a Menshevik and later as a Bolshevik. In 1920, during the Polish-Soviet War, he supported the Bolshevik takeover of Poland. At this time he was a member of the Provisional Re volutionary Committee of Poland, along with Julian Marchlewski and Felisk Dzierzynski (head of the Cheka), which had set up headquarters in Bialystok.

Feliks was the editor of several newspapers and journals such as Krasnaya Zvezda [Red Star] (1925-1928), Rabochaya Gazeta [Workers' Gazette] (1928-1930) and Nasha Strana [Our Country] (1937-1941). He was the author of numerous articles and books , including his memoirs which he wrote in four volumes -- Za Piat 'desiat' let [During Fifty Years] (1932-1934). His many political positions included: member of th eCentral Executive Committee of the Ukraine, chief of the Ukrainian Political Ad ministration of the Red Army, member of the Presidium of the Central Executive Committe of the Soviet Union, secretary of the Executive Committee of the Comintern [Communist International], member of the International Control Commission of the Exe cutive Committe of the Comintern, and director of the Department of Museums of the comissariat of the Enlightenment of the RSFSR. Feliks was a great lover of the arts and was the first president of the Central Art Workers House, a club for actor s to gather together. Despite the fact he was an Old Bolshevik and Polish he survived Stalin's purges.

Feliks married Kristina Grynberg in 1892.