Dimanshtein (Dimanstein) Semyon (Shimon) Markovich (1886, Sebezh, Vitebsk Governorate – 1937) - Soviet statesman, Party official, and journalist.

Educated in the traditional Jewish manner, Semyon Dimanshtein passed the rabbinical examination at age 18. From the early 1900s he was active in the revolutionary movement, working in underground printing presses in Vilnius and Moscow. He translated the RSDLP programme into Hebrew and Yiddish and authored numerous leaflets. He took part in the revolutionary events of 1905–07. In 1907 he joined the Riga committee of the RSDLP. In 1909 he was sentenced by the Riga military court to four years in Siberian penal servitude (served in the Saratov prison), after which he was exiled to Siberia. He escaped in 1913 and soon left Russia, joining the Bolshevik group in Paris.

Following the February Revolution, Dimanshtein returned to Russia and worked within military organisations in Riga. After October 1917 he joined the Collegium of the People’s Commissariat for Labour. In January 1918 he became head of the Jewish Commissariat under the People’s Commissariat for Nationalities and founded, editing the first Yiddish-language newspaper in Soviet Russia, Di Varkhayt (later Der Emes).

From October 1918 he chaired the Jewish Section and authored several works on the history of the Jewish labour movement in Russia. In July 1919 he issued a circular ordering the closure of boards of Jewish communal organisations and their institutions. In spring 1919 he served as People’s Commissar for Labour in the Lithuanian–Belarusian Soviet Republic and was a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Lithuania and Belarus. During 1920–21 he was Commissar of Education for the Turkestan ASSR. From 1922 to 1924 he headed the Main Political–Educational Department of Ukraine.

From 1924 he worked in the Central Committee apparatus of the All‑Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), overseeing its national sector. In 1930 he openly opposed forced collectivisation in national regions and received Party disciplinary action. Later that year he was appointed Director of the Institute of Nationalities under the Central Executive Committee of the USSR, and chaired the Society for Jewish Agrarian Settlement. He was involved in the establishment of the Jewish Autonomous Oblast in the Far East and advocated plans for Jewish agricultural settlements.

He edited the journals Revolution and Nationalities and Tribuna Evreiskoi Obshchestvennosti, and compiled the Yiddish anthology Jews in the USSR (1935). From October 1936 he served as editor of the quarterly Forpost in Birobidzhan. He was repressed during the Stalinist purges and died in custody in 1937.

Selected work: Ocherki revolyutsionnogo dvizheniya sredi evreiskikh mass in Istoriya revolyutsionnogo dvizheniya v otdelʹnykh ocherkakh, vol. 3, part 1, Moscow–Leningrad, 1927.

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