Activities and affiliations

Law and justice Affiliation unconfirmed 1870–1928 ○ Natural causes

Secretary of the Petrograd Soviet Executive Committee and the lawyer who drafted Order No. 1

Sokolov sat at the desk writing. Soldiers crowded around him, standing and leaning over the table, half dictating, half suggesting what he should write. ... When the work was done, they put the heading 'Order No. 1' on the sheet. Sukhanov, Notes on the Revolution

Born the son of a court archpriest, he turned to defending revolutionaries and became the lawyer for every radical cause in late imperial Russia. On March 1, 1917, as secretary of the Petrograd Soviet Executive Committee, he chaired the soldiers' section meeting that drafted Order No. 1, the document that democratized the Russian army and signaled the Soviet's de facto supremacy over the Provisional Government. Never a party member, he was among the busiest unofficial leaders of the revolution's first months, then worked quietly as a Soviet legal adviser after the Civil War and died in Yalta.

Law and justice Affiliation unconfirmed 1885–1960 ○ Natural causes

The Socialist Revolutionary official who pressed the revolutionary government toward coercive order

Filonenko later testified that "General Kornilov, under the sway of his staff and the circulating rumours, feared some unforeseen action against himself."

Maxim Filonenko was a lawyer and Socialist Revolutionary who, as government commissar at Supreme Headquarters in 1917, worked with Kornilov and Savinkov to restore the death penalty and tighten military discipline. He sided with Kerensky during the Kornilov crisis, then joined anti-Bolshevik underground activity before emigrating to work as a lawyer and professor of law.

Law and justice Affiliation unconfirmed 1900–1969 ○ Natural causes

The lawyer who confronted state violence

In court, he rejected the authorities’ division of the workers into ‘hooligans’ and argued that state violence had helped create the conditions for the explosion.

Stanisław Hejmowski was a Polish lawyer who defended political defendants and vulnerable people in the postwar years. After the 1956 Poznań workers’ uprising, he represented participants and argued that the cases had to be understood not as ordinary crime but as a social conflict produced by state policy and security-force violence. His advocacy challenged coerced investigations and the authorities’ portrayal of workers as hooligans, defending their dignity and legal rights. He was later punished through surveillance, a press campaign, a heavy fine, and suspension from legal practice.

Law and justice Hungary state institutions 1911–1990 ○ Natural causes

A communist judge who enforced political trials

Even in 1989, he maintained that Imre Nagy was guilty and expressed no regret for the judgment.

Ferenc Vida was a communist lawyer who had taken part in the illegal movement, endured imprisonment, and rose through Hungary’s postwar party and judicial bureaucracy. After the 1956 Revolution he became one of the judges who imposed the greatest number of death sentences in the state’s retaliatory trials. In the 1958 trial of Imre Nagy, he chaired the Supreme Court’s People’s Court Council, sharply restricting defendants’ statements and the defence’s requests for evidence, and sentenced Nagy, Miklós Gimes and Pál Maléter to death. He still refused in 1989 to acknowledge the trial’s illegality or express remorse.