Józef Unszlicht or Iosif Unshlikht , a Bolshevik revolutionary activist, one of the founders of the Extraordinary Commission Against Counterrevolution, Sabotage and Speculation, and Soviet government official of Polish-Jewish extraction from the Masovian region.
Career
Unschlicht participated to and in fact initiated some of the worst excesses of the Bolshevik revolution including mass murders of political opponents. In 1924, he was replaced by Genrikh Yagoda who continued and amplified Unschlicht"s previous policies. In 1919 Unszlicht served briefly as an authority in Lithuania and Belarus, and in 1920 joined the Political Bureau of the Communist Party.
Józef Unszlicht was arrested in 1937, during the Great Purge, and executed in 1938.
Politics
A member of Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania from 1900 and the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party from 1906 (following their merger), Unszlicht took part in Vladimir Lenin"s October Revolution and in 1918 joined the Red Army.
Membership
During the Polish-Soviet War in August 1920 he became a member of Provisional Polish Revolutionary Committee, the Bolshevist puppet government of Poland in Białystok.