Fomin, Ivan Andreivich (1889-1938) aka Ivan Dlinny, Uncle Vanya, Boris

Ivan Fomin was born in the village of Sukremyl in the Kaluga province of the Russian Empire on February 7th, 1889. His father was a carpenter. He completed three years of rural school and then three years of vocational school in the village of Bezhitsa in Bryansk district.

He joined the Socialist Revolutionary Party in 1904, in both Bezhitsa and Bryansk, carrying out agitation and the distribution of propaganda. In 1906 he joined the Maximalist Socialist Revolutionaries (SSRM) continuing to distribute propaganda in Bryansk, as well as in Orel, Roslavl, and Smolensk. He had not yet completed his political odyssey, joining the Bratstvo (Brotherhood) Anarchist Communist Federation of Bezhitsa the following year. Other important members of this group were Sergei Kudryavtsev, Ivan Belyaev, and Mikhail Ignatov. He maintained links with the Buntar (Rebel) anarchist communist group of Moscow, whose leading activist was Alexander Taratuta. He operated under the name of ‘Uncle Vanya.’

Together with his partner, Sophia Krasnoshchekova, he was involved in a series of expropriations, and in was the killing of Afanasy Papenkov, an unemployed worker, formerly at the Bryansk Plant, a large machine building factory at Bezhitsa, who had informed on seven people. Workers at the plant refused to attend his funeral. He was also involved in the killing of the policeman Khlopkin in Bezhitsa.

With repression unleashed on the Bryansk anarchists, Fomin fled the area and worked underground in Smolensk, and Yekaterinoslav.

On July 1st, 1908, he took part in a robbery of a cashier, a combined action by Bryansk and Roslavl anarchists. He was arrested during the pursuit and sentenced to eight years hard labour on May 8th 1909. He served the first part of his sentence at the Smolensk penitentiary, and from 1911 to 1915 on the construction of the Amur railway, under atrocious conditions.
In 1915 he was resettled in Irkutsk and worked there in the resettlement department. He was amnestied in March 1917 and returned to Bezhitsa, working in the Bryansk plant.

He became a leading member of the Bryansk Anarchist Federation and during the October Revolution was a member of the Bryansk Revolutionary Committee.

From 1918 until 1920 he was continually harassed by the Cheka, arrested several times and imprisoned in a concentration camp.
He decided to drop out of organised activity, in 1919 but remained an anarchist communist by conviction. After the civil war, he lived at the anarchist agricultural community Novy Mir (New World) near Bezhitsa.

In the 1920s and 1930s, he was a member of the All-Union Society of Former Political Prisoners and Exiled Settlers. He worked at the Tekhnokhimik artel (cooperative) in Moscow.

He was arrested by the NKVD (successor to the Cheka) in 1934 on the charge of being a member of a group carrying out sabotage, but soon released without charge.

On January 28th, 1938 he was arrested on the trumped up charge of being a member of a ‘counterrevolutionary Socialist revolutionary Organisation’, along with many other workers at the Tekhnokhimik and Khimrask artels, where many old revolutionaries earned their living. He was held at the Taganskaya prison. It was alleged that within the All-Union Society of Former Political Prisoners and Exiled Settlers there existed a group preparing and commissioning terrorist acts.

He was sentenced to death by the NKVD on February 27th, 1938. He and 38 others were shot on the Butovo firing range on March 7th, of that year. (1)

(1) Among those shot with Fomin were fellow anarchist communists, Mikhail Afanasayev, Genrikh Vaksberg, Georgi Gizer, Alexei Zuyev, Sergei Safronov, the SR-Maximalists turned Bolshevik, Efim Volynets, Efim Mokhov-Salnikov, and Moisei Slomyansky, as well as many old Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks.

Nick Heath

Sources:

https://ru.openlist.wiki/Фомин_Иван_Андреевич_(1889)
https://berkovich-zametki.com/2012/Zametki/Nomer6/Kompaneec1.php