Shvernik was born in 1888 in
St. Petersburg in a working-class family of
Russian ethnicity. His father was a retired sergeant major, who worked in factories in
St Petersburg. Reputedly, he was descended from
Old Believers. Shvernik's mother was a weaver. He worked in factories as a turner, and joined the
Bolsheviks in 1905. After the
February Revolution in 1917, he was elected chairman of the soviet in a pipe factory in
Samara, and chairman of the Samara city soviet. During the
Russian Civil War, he was a political commissar in the Red Army. In 1921–23, he worked in the trade unions. In 1923, he was appointed to the staff of
Rabkrin, which was headed by
Joseph Stalin, whom Shvernik loyally supported during the power struggles of the 1920s. During 1923, he was in charge of combatting the sale of moonshine vodka and cocaine, and gambling. In December 1927, when there were sudden food shortages in the cities because the peasants were holding back their produce in anticipation of rising prices, Shvernik was dispatched to the Urals, as regional party secretary. He continued to support Stalin loyally through the rapid industrialisation of the soviet economy, which was opposed by almost the entire leadership of the trade unions. He was recalled to Moscow in 1929, and imposed as chairman of the Metallurgist Trade Union. From July 1930 to March 1944, he was first secretary of the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions and a member of the
Orgburo. Shvernik presided over the
1931 Menshevik Trial, in which fourteen Russian economists came up for trial on charges of treason. In February 1937, he was a member of the commission that investigated
Nikolai Bukharin and
Alexei Rykov, the two most prominent former oppositionists still living in the USSR, and voted that they should be expelled from the Central Committee, arrested, and shot. During the
Second World War, Shvernik was responsible for evacuating Soviet industry away from the advancing
Wehrmacht. He was
Chairman of the Soviet of Nationalities from 1938 to 1946. After creating
Extraordinary State Commission for Ascertaining and Investigating Crimes Perpetrated by the German-Fascist Invaders and their Accomplices in 1942, he became chairman of it. He was
Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Russian SFSR from 1944 to 1946. In 1946 he became Chairman of the Presidium of the
Supreme Soviet of the USSR, succeeding
Mikhail Kalinin. He only became a member of the
Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee (then named the Presidium of the Party's Central Committee) in 1952 but was demoted in 1953 when the body was reduced in size. Reputedly, Shvernik was so distressed by Stalin's death, in March 1953, that he was the only prominent party leader seen crying at the dictator's funeral. He remained on the body until he retired in 1966. Shvernik died on 24 December 1970 at
Moscow at the age 82 and his ashes were placed in an urn in the
Kremlin Wall Necropolis. ==Personal life==