Innokenty Pavlovich Fedenev (Russian: Иннокентий Павлович Феденев) was an Old Bolshevik. Hailing from Irkutsk, Fedenev was born in 1878.[1][2][3] He began working in the Lena mines in 1897.[1][3] Fedenev joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1904.[2][3] He spent long periods in czarist prisons and was exiled.[1][3]
He was a delegate at the First All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies.[1] He was elected to the Russian Constituent Assembly from the Western Front constituency in late 1917.[4] On 26 November (9 December) 1917 he was named People's Commissar for Finance of the Obliskomzap.[5]
Following the October Revolution he was sent to Minsk, Tambov and Kharkov for party work.[3] In the 1920s he worked in Moscow.[3] He was the organizer and first chairman of the Moscow Workers Inspectorate.[1]
In 1926 he was sent to the Mainak sanatorium in Evpatoria, for treatment for ill health caused by imprisonment and exile.[3][6] At the sanatorium he befriended Nikolai Ostrovsky, a young civil war veteran with literary ambitions.[3][6] Fedenev became a mentor for Ostrovsky.[3] In 1932 he helped Ostrovsky get the novel How the Steel Was Tempered published in Molodaya gvardiya.[3] Ostrovsky modelled one of the characters of the novel based on Fedenev - 'Ledenev' who acts as a mentor for the main protagonist Pavel Korchagin.[3][7]
In October 1941 Fedenev returned to Irkutsk, where he worked at an ammunition factory.[3] He remained active in cultural activities, participating in meetings with students at Irkutsk University.[3] He died in 1946.[2]