Leonid Tarskiy

This is a copy of my father Leonid Tarskiy's photo from the album published in 1967 on the 50th anniversary of the Soviet power. The title of the album was 'For the power of Soviets'. There were photos of all outstanding leaders who fought for the establishment of the Soviet power. This photo was taken in Odessa in 1918. My father is 22 here and was a secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine. This is the only photograph of my father I have. I know little about my father Leonid Tarskiy, or Emmanuel Sokolovskiy, which was his real name. My father was actively involved in the revolutionary communist movement. Leonid Tarskiy was his pseudonym. His documents indicating this name were issued to him at the time, when the Communist Party was in the underground and was persecuted by the tsarist authorities. In the early 1920s this became his name for the rest of his life, and he was called that at home and at work, and it was given in his documents. My father got involved in revolutionary activities when he was young. His older brother Ilia provided money for my father to finish a Humanitarian Faculty in Switzerland. At the age of 22 he was elected a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine at the 1st and 2nd Congresses of the Communist Party of the Bolsheviks of Ukraine and the Central Committee sent him to Odessa to organize the Bolshevik underground to struggle against Denikin. My father became a Bolshevik journalist. He supervised the 'Odesskiy communist' newspaper publications. Later my father was chief editor of the 'Knigonosha', a popular magazine in Odessa in the 1920s.