Nikolai Glebov-Avilov

Nikolai Pavlovich Glebov-Avilov (Russian: Никола́й Пáвлович Глéбов-Ави́лов; 11 October 1887 – 13 March 1937[1]) was a prominent Bolshevik revolutionary and the first People's Commissar of Posts and Telegraphs.

He became a Bolshevik in 1904, and during the 1905 Revolution he was active in Moscow, Kaluga and the Urals working in underground printshops, being hidden by the All-Russian Union of Railway Workers.

Released in 1910, he moved to Moscow, and then enrolled as a student at the party school in Bologna.,[2] which was run by the Vpered group, Bolsheviks who followed the lead of Alexander Bogdanov, rather than Vladimir Lenin.

Returning to Russia in 1912, Glebov-Avilov was arrested and deported to Tobolsk, but he escaped, moved to Ukraine, and joined the underground party organisation in Kherson.

Early in 1914, the Bolshevik faction in the state Duma sent him abroad to help organise a party congress, and he met Lenin in Poronin, near Cracow.

At the 14th Party Congress of December 1925, he complained angrily that there were supporters of the left opposition who dared not declare their allegiance because they did not want to be sent to "Murmansk or Turkestan".