Isaak Zelensky

Isaak Abramovich Zelensky (1890–1938) was a Russian politician. In 1929 he was briefly Secretary General of the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic.

Isaak Zelensky was born in 1890 in Saratov as the son of a simple Jewish family. There he completed his schooling, and in 1906 he joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, which later became the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Zelensky soon rose in the hierarchy of the party and after some time, he was responsible for the party propaganda in several Russian cities, including Orenburg, Penza and Samara. Because of his work for the party, he was arrested and exiled in 1915 to the vicinity of Irkutsk in Siberia. However, he managed to escape a year later. During the Russian Revolution of 1917, he fought for the Bolsheviks in Moscow.

He was elected a full member of the Central Committee in 1922 by the 11th Party Congress. As First Secretary of the Moscow City Committee, Zelensky served on the commission that arranged the burial of Lenin in 1924. That year, Zelensky was sent to Tashkent to participate in building up the party structures. In 1929 he was briefly the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Uzbekistan, but in December Akmal Ikramov replaced him as the first ethnic Uzbek in this position. The next year Zelensky tried to depose him, but since the Central Committee supported Ikramov, this attempt failed. Zelensky was recalled to Moscow in 1931 to run the state consumer distribution network.

In 1937, during the Great Purge, he was excluded from the party. Zelensky was arrested. During the Trial of the Twenty-One, Public Prosecutor Andrey Vyshinsky accused Zelensky of having been a tsarist police agent since 1911. He was said to have used his position as head of the state distribution network to sabotage the distribution of food by "spoiling" fifty truckloads of eggs, as well as "throwing nails and broken glass into the masses' butter with a view to undermining Soviet health." Zelensky was sentenced to death and executed on 15 March 1938.

In 1959 he was posthumously rehabilitated.