Pyotr Alekseevich Kobozev (Russian: Пётр Алексеевич Кобозев) (13 August 1878, Pesochnya, (now Shilovsky District), Ryazan Oblast — 4 January 1941, Moscow) was a prominent Russian revolutionary, Soviet statesman and professor. He had played a significant role in establishing and maintaining Soviet regime in the Ural region, Turkestan and the Far East. Biography Pyotr Kobozev was born in 1878 in the village of Pesochnya, Spassky Uyezd (now Shilovsky District), Ryazan Governorate, in the family of Aleksey Fedotovich Kobozev, a Moscow railroad employee. Influenced by his mother, the daughter of a church acolyte, he went to a theological school and later to the Moscow seminary. In 1895 he left (other sources say he was expelled for participating in a student uprising) the seminary and entered the Moscow secondary school of Ivan Findler. In 1896 he began to take part in A.P. Alabin's Marxist circle, where he met his future wife, Alevtina Ivanovna Rakitina, a gimnasium student. They married in 1898. In 1898 he entered the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party and started studies at the Moscow Higher Technical School. But in 1899 he was expelled from it due to being involved in the all-Russian student strike. In 1900, together with his wife and a new-born daughter, he was exiled to Riga, Latvia, where he lived and studied at the Riga Polytechnical Institute until 1904. In Riga, Pyotr Kobozev worked at the German-Dutch Van der Zypen und Charlier company manufacturing railroad wagons. He was part of the Riga RSDLP section and a member of the editorial board of the Voice of the Soldier Newspaper. Later on, he, together with his family, went to the petrolium mines in the Caucasus, but returned to Moscow in a short while, where he was arrested and exiled to Riga again. He was blacklisted for his revolutionary activity, which resulted in unemployment, and P. Kobozev had to earn through private tuturing. In 1915 – 1916 P. Kobozev and his family were in exile in Orenburg, where he worked as a railroad engineer. In Orenburg P. Kobozev became the leader of the local section of RSDLP, and was under personal control of the governorate's gandarmerie head. The Revolution After the February Revolution, Pyotr Kobozev organized an agitation train, in which he covered the route from Orenburg to Tashkent agitating among railroad employees for support of the Bolsheviks. In April 1917, P. Kobozev was appointed the Commissar of the Tashkent