Activities and affiliations

Security, intelligence and policing Soviet Union state institutions 1888–1937 ✕ Executed

Founder of the Soviet Procuracy, caught between state security and socialist legality

Bukharin's widow recalled: 'A man of unyielding will and crystal honesty — he began putting the OGPU in order and very soon found himself unwelcome.'

A son of the St. Petersburg poor who joined the Bolsheviks in 1907, Ivan Akulov was a career revolutionary who rose through underground work, Civil War front committees, and party leadership posts across the Urals, Siberia, Crimea, and Ukraine. When the USSR Procuracy was created in 1933, he became its first Procurator, building the institutional framework of 'socialist legality' and carving out an independent prosecutorial space in the tense terrain between criminal justice and the state security apparatus. He was implicated in the emergency laws enacted after Kirov's murder, and in 1937 he was himself consumed by the repressive machinery he had helped construct.

Security, intelligence and policing Soviet Union state institutions 1888–1938 ✕ Executed

Chairman of the All-Ukrainian Cheka and theorist of class-based Red Terror

“We are annihilating the bourgeoisie as a class. The first question we must ask is: what class does the accused belong to, what is his origin, upbringing and profession? These must determine his fate.” — Red Terror journal, 1 November 1918

A Soviet revolutionary and writer of Latvian origin, born Jānis Sudrabs. From July to November 1918 he chaired the Cheka and Military Tribunal of the 5th Army on the Eastern Front, and from 1919 to 1921 he chaired the All-Ukrainian Cheka while personally directing the Kiev Cheka. On 1 November 1918 the Kazan journal Krasny Terror carried his article "We are annihilating the bourgeoisie as a class," which held that class origin, upbringing and profession alone should decide a suspect's fate, the clearest theoretical statement of class-based Red Terror. The sources record a reputation for personal cruelty, corroborated by the Denikin commission's materials on the All-Ukrainian Cheka and by Lācis's own statements.

Security, intelligence and policing Soviet Union state institutions 1888–1961 ○ Natural causes

Chairman of the USSR Supreme Court through the Great Terror and war

Solzhenitsyn recorded that Golyakov "knew the work of Tolstoi, Korolenko, and Chekhov." The chairman who approved every death sentence in the USSR left as his final work a singular book: "Court and Law in Fiction."

A peasant conscript who fought in WWI, joined the Bolsheviks in 1918, and rose through Civil War military tribunals to become Chairman of the USSR Supreme Court in 1938. For a decade spanning the Great Terror, World War II, and postwar reconstruction, he headed the entire Soviet judicial apparatus and served on the secret Politburo commission that approved every death sentence, giving legal form to the purges. Yet archival materials show he sought to maximize rehabilitations during periods of relative 'legality,' and as director of the All-Union Institute of Legal Sciences he authored over seventy scholarly works, including the singular 'Court and Law in Fiction' (1959).

Security, intelligence and policing Soviet Union state institutions 1889–1939 ✕ Executed

The Gulag's first chief and builder of Belomor

At the Belomor site in 1932, Kogan told Mikoyan: "'Zaklyuchenny' insults, 'lagernik' is dull — I've coined 'kanaloarmeyets,' canal-army soldier." Mikoyan approved; the abbreviation 'zek' was born from his term.

The son of a wealthy Jewish merchant in Siberia, Kogan began as an anarcho-communist and was sentenced to death in 1908 for armed robbery, commuted to hard labour. Joining the Bolsheviks in 1918, he rose through the Cheka and border troops. In 1930 he became the first chief of the newly created Gulag, where he was instrumental in institutionalizing the Soviet forced-labour system. From 1931 he directed the White Sea–Baltic Canal project, mobilizing roughly 170,000 prisoners to complete the 227-km waterway in under two years, at a cost of tens of thousands of lives. Tied to the Yagoda network, he was arrested in 1938, shot in 1939, and rehabilitated in 1956.

Security, intelligence and policing Soviet Union state institutions 1889–1939 ✕ Died under interrogation

Yezhov’s intimate who rose to deputy commissar and died under interrogation

Arrested in December 1938, he was dead under interrogation within a month, one of the five names Yezhov's own deposition listed as accomplices.

Born to a peasant family in Tambov province, he joined the Bolsheviks in 1918 and came up through military commissar and district administrative posts before working in the Moscow city administration. Under Yezhov he became chief of the NKVD Administrative-Economic Directorate in July 1937, was promoted within weeks to deputy commissar of internal affairs, and in December 1937 moved on to serve as People's Commissar of the Timber Industry until October 1938. He held the rank of major of state security and the Order of the Red Star, and was married to Yezhov's secretary Serafima Ryzhova. Arrested in December 1938 after Yezhov's fall, he was one of the names Yezhov's own deposition listed as members of his conspiratorial group. He died on 19 January 1939 under interrogation conducted with unlawful methods, and was rehabilitated in 1955.

Security, intelligence and policing Soviet Union state institutions 1889–1941 ✕ Executed

The deputy commissar who ran the Soviet police

Dismissed from the OGPU in 1931 for protesting Yagoda's "Vesna" frame-up, he returned under Yezhov to organize the troikas of the Great Terror.

A Cheka veteran, he became chief of the Soviet militia in 1934 and Yezhov's deputy at the NKVD in 1936, where he organized the regional troikas that issued mass death sentences during the Great Terror. Arrested in 1939, he was shot in 1941 and has never been rehabilitated.

Security, intelligence and policing Soviet Union state institutions 1889–1951 ○ Stroke

Presiding judge of the Moscow show trials, Stalin's 'judicial guillotine'

To an Estonian lawyer he had just condemned to death, Ulrikh smiled and said: "So your profession came in handy after all!"

Chairman of the Military Collegium of the USSR Supreme Court (1926–1948) and the judicial face of the Stalin-era Great Purge. Born in Riga to a Baltic German revolutionary father and a Russian noble mother, he joined the Bolsheviks in 1910 and began his Cheka career in 1918. He presided over the Moscow show trials of Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, and Tukhachevsky (1936–1938), directing a body that handed down over 30,000 death sentences in two years. After the war he presided over the trials of Nazi collaborators Vlasov and Krasnov, and the leaders of the Polish Underground State. Reporting directly to Stalin outside the ordinary judicial hierarchy, he embodied a parallel justice system designed for political repression. Removed in 1948, he died of a stroke in 1951.

Security, intelligence and policing Soviet Union state institutions 1890–1937 ✕ Executed

The Soviet trade representative who sent Republican Spain's gold to Moscow

Stashevsky proposed to finance minister Negrín the idea of opening 'a current account in gold' in Moscow, and persuaded him it could be used to buy arms and raw materials.

A Soviet intelligence officer and trade official from the SDKPiL. He ran the joint INO–GRU residency in Berlin as one of the key figures of early Soviet military intelligence, later headed Torgsin and served in the People's Commissariat for Foreign Trade before being posted to Republican Spain as trade representative in 1936. In Spain he negotiated arms sales and managed the financial side of Operation X; he has been identified as the man who persuaded Juan Negrín to deposit the Bank of Spain's gold reserves in Moscow. Recalled in June 1937 and shot two months later, he was rehabilitated in 1956.

Security, intelligence and policing Soviet Union state institutions 1890–1937 ✕ Executed

Dzerzhinsky's Polish comrade, a Cheka founding pillar who defied Yagoda's fabrications

On 26 September 1926, an 18-year-old unemployed youth from Kharkov, Anatoly Truba, walked into Messing's office at the Leningrad OGPU and opened fire with a revolver. Messing ducked under his desk and survived; Truba was shot soon after.

Born into a Jewish musician's family in Warsaw, he joined the Social Democracy of Poland in 1908, earning the trust of Felix Dzerzhinsky and Józef Unszlicht. He rose to chairman of the Moscow Cheka (1921) and head of the Petrograd–Leningrad Cheka-OGPU (1921–1929). In 1929 he became 2nd Deputy Chairman of the OGPU and chief of its Foreign Department (INO), leading Soviet intelligence between Mikhail Trilisser and Artur Artuzov. He openly opposed Genrikh Yagoda's fabricated 'Vesna' case and was dismissed in 1931, pushed into economic diplomacy and shot in 1937 on charges of Polish espionage.

Security, intelligence and policing Soviet Union state institutions 1891–1937 ✕ Executed

Co-founder of Soviet intelligence & counterintelligence; brain of Operation Trust

In 1925, as Sidney Reilly was surrounded by GPU agents at a Moscow safe house, Artuzov is said to have watched the entire operation unfold from the next room.

He founded the Cheka's counterintelligence arm (KRO) and designed Operation Trust, which neutralized White émigré networks. As head of foreign intelligence (INO) from 1931, he expanded illegal networks abroad. Arrested and shot during the Great Purge in 1937.

Security, intelligence and policing Soviet Union state institutions 1891–1938 ✕ Executed

NKVD chief who signed the Romanov execution and joined the Left Opposition

"Inform Sverdlov the whole family have shared the same fate as the head. Officially the family will die at the evacuation." — coded telegram to Lenin's secretary after the Romanov execution, 17 July 1918

A Bolshevik who rose to prominence in the Urals, he signed the Ural Soviet's decision to execute Nicholas II and the Romanov family in 1918 as its chairman. As People's Commissar of Internal Affairs of the RSFSR (1923–1927), succeeding Dzerzhinsky, he oversaw Soviet police and penal administration. He joined the Left Opposition by signing the Declaration of 46 in 1923, was expelled from the party in 1927, recanted in 1930, but was arrested during the Great Purge and executed in 1938.

Security, intelligence and policing Soviet Union state institutions 1891–1938 ✕ Executed

The NKVD chief who expanded the Gulag and became a purge defendant

In April 1937, Yagoda was dismissed as NKVD commissar. When Stalin summoned him, Yezhov was already seated. 'You are four years late,' Stalin said. Accounts of Yagoda's last words at his execution diverge: one version says he shouted 'Long live Comrade Stalin!', another that he met death in silence. Either way, the architect of the Gulag had become a Gulag defendant.

A practical power inside OGPU and NKVD, he oversaw forced-labour projects such as the White Sea-Baltic Canal and was the architect of the Gulag system. As the first NKVD commissar, he consolidated the security organs. He opened the first purge phase after Kirov's murder, but Stalin replaced him with Yezhov for not purging enough. He became a defendant in the Third Moscow Trial and was shot.

Security, intelligence and policing Soviet Union state institutions 1891–1940 ✕ Executed

Architect of the Shakhty case and boss of the North Caucasus

Stalin in 1938: "Yevdokimov came twice demanding Sholokhov's arrest for talking with ex-White Guards. I told him: you understand nothing of politics or life."

A Chekist of the civil-war generation, Yevdokimov made his name through field violence, commanding mass executions of surrendered Wrangel troops. Posted to the North Caucasus as OGPU plenipotentiary in 1923, he built a regional power base and designed the 1928 Shakhty case (the first major show trial of technical specialists), personally directing the extraction of confessions. As chief of the OGPU Secret-Operational Directorate from 1929, he was hostile to Yagoda and remained outside the security organs during Yagoda's tenure, having moved to party work in 1934. Under Yezhov he supplied the central NKVD with North Caucasus cadres and regained influence, but fell with Yezhov, was shot in 1940, and rehabilitated in 1956.

Security, intelligence and policing Soviet Union state institutions 1892–1937 ✕ Executed

The master of the Ukrainian security apparatus

On 7 July 1937, he went to Khabarovsk station to greet his replacement Genrikh Lyushkov and was arrested on the spot on a warrant signed by Yezhov. On 27 November — his 45th birthday — he was shot under the 'special procedure.'

Head of the Ukrainian GPU and NKVD (1923–1937) and the dominant figure in republican security. He directed repression during the Holodomor, sat on a Politburo troika with capital-punishment authority, and orchestrated fabricated nationalist cases. Commissar of State Security 1st Rank (1935); arrested and executed in 1937.

Security, intelligence and policing Soviet Union state institutions 1892–1938 ○ Suicide

Yezhov's personnel chief who purged 14,000 Chekists

At Yezhov's dacha in summer 1938, he told fellow Chekists: "If I see things are bad, I'll shoot myself." That November, an hour before his train to Moscow, he did.

Bolshevik Chekist and Yezhov protégé. As NKVD Personnel chief (1936), purged 14,000 Yagoda-era operatives and led the Bukharin case. Leningrad NKVD chief when Yezhov fell. He shot himself in 1938.

Security, intelligence and policing Soviet Union state institutions 1892–1940 ✕ Executed

Stalin's brother-in-law who chaired the Moscow troika

Arriving in Crimea on 19 January 1921, Redens set up independent city Chekas in Simferopol, Sevastopol, and Kerch, each with the right to pass death sentences, reporting directly to him. These bodies carried out the mass purges of remaining Wrangel forces and 'class enemies.'

A Pole from Łomża, Redens joined the Cheka in 1918 and, as chairman of the Crimean Cheka during the Civil War, directed mass reprisals against the remnants of Wrangel's army. He became Stalin's brother-in-law through marriage to Anna Alliluyeva, sister of Stalin's second wife Nadezhda. As head of the NKVD directorate for Moscow Region from 1933, he oversaw security in the capital and, during the Great Terror, chaired the Moscow troika under NKVD Order No. 00447, presiding over mass death sentences carried out at Butovo and Kommunarka. Arrested in late 1938 on charges of spying for Poland, he was shot in February 1940.

Security, intelligence and policing Soviet Union state institutions 1892–1947 ✕ Died in prison

The sailor who led the Kronstadt rebellion, became a Soviet spy, and died in a camp

March 1921, Kronstadt. The newspaper of Petrichenko's Provisional Revolutionary Committee declared: 'Here in Kronstadt has been laid the first stone of the third revolution, striking the last fetters from the laboring masses and opening a broad new road.'

Stepan Petrichenko was a senior clerk aboard the Baltic Fleet battleship Petropavlovsk who proclaimed the 'Soviet Republic of Soldiers and Fortress-Builders of Naissaar' on an Estonian island in December 1917, serving as its chairman. In March 1921, he emerged as leader of the Kronstadt rebellion, chairing the Provisional Revolutionary Committee and demanding an end to 'the dictatorship of the Communists', the most dramatic internal challenge to Bolshevik rule. After the rebellion was crushed by Trotsky's forces, Petrichenko fled to Finland and, in 1922, was recruited by Soviet intelligence, serving as a secret agent for over 20 years. Arrested and extradited to the USSR in 1945, he was sentenced to 10 years for 'counter-revolutionary terrorist organization' and died during a prison transfer in 1947.

Security, intelligence and policing Czechoslovakia state institutions 1892–1955 ○ Lung cancer

Czechoslovak interior minister whose purge of non-communist police in February 1948 triggered the government crisis and communist takeover

The cabinet voted to reverse his purge, but Nosek ignored the order: eight Prague police commanders were replaced by communists, and twelve non-communist ministers resigned.

The son of a miner, he joined the Social Democratic Party at eighteen and took part in founding the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in 1921. After the Nazi occupation he fled to Britain, where he served as vice-chairman of the London-based Czechoslovak State Council; returning in 1945 as Minister of the Interior, he systematically packed the police and security apparatus with communists. On 13 February 1948 he dismissed eight non-communist senior police officers, triggering a cabinet crisis in which twelve non-communist ministers resigned, clearing the way for Klement Gottwald's communist takeover.

Security, intelligence and policing Soviet Union state institutions 1892–1956 ✕ Died under interrogation

Builder of Soviet covert ops who kidnapped a White general in Paris, then tortured by his own service

Dressed in French police uniforms, they stopped Kutepov on the street on the pretext of questioning him and put him in a car. Kutepov resisted, and during the struggle he had a heart attack and died, Serebryansky told me. — Pavel Sudoplatov, Special Tasks

Born to a Jewish family in Minsk, he was recruited by the OGPU in 1923 and built the first Soviet spy network in Palestine, eventually recruiting over 200 agents across Europe. In 1930 his team, disguised as French police, kidnapped White General Kutepov in Paris; he later stole Trotsky's archives and smuggled warplanes to Republican Spain as head of the NKVD Special Group for Special Tasks. Arrested in 1938 on Beria's orders, tortured by Abakumov into a false confession, and sentenced to death, he was amnestied at Sudoplatov's urging in 1941 and returned to wartime intelligence. Re-arrested after Beria's fall in 1953, he died under interrogation in Butyrka prison; rehabilitated 1971.

Security, intelligence and policing Soviet Union state institutions 1893–1937 ✕ Executed

The operations chief who guarded Stalin

At a December 1936 Cheka dinner, Pauker reenacted Zinoviev's execution: dragged to his knees by two comrades, he begged 'For God's sake, call Comrade Stalin!' — and Stalin roared with laughter.

A Jewish hairdresser and make-up artist from Lemberg, Pauker served as chief of the OGPU/NKVD Operations Department and Stalin's personal bodyguard, directing arrests and executions during the Great Purge. Stalin trusted him intimately. Yet in 1937 he was arrested for allegedly plotting to assassinate the leader and shot.

Security, intelligence and policing United States state institutions 1893–1969 ○ Natural causes

The American intelligence official who institutionalized covert war

In 1945, negotiations for the surrender of northern Italy hastened the war's end while excluding the Soviet representative and Italian partisans.

Allen Dulles was an American diplomat, lawyer, and intelligence chief who linked wartime secret negotiations to the covert interventions of the Cold War. As head of the OSS station in Bern, he advanced Operation Sunrise, the negotiation of the German surrender in northern Italy, while its exclusion of the Soviet ally and implications for Italian partisan power exposed the tensions within the Allied coalition. He later led the CIA through coups in Iran and Guatemala and the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, expanding both the reach of the American intelligence state and the questions of responsibility attached to it. His resignation after Cuba did not end his influence, which remains emblematic of the union of intelligence gathering and imperial intervention.

Security, intelligence and policing Greece state institutions 1893–1972 ○ Natural causes

Architect of the dictatorship's security apparatus

In 1940, the police deployed a counterfeit KKE leadership and forged Rizospastis to confuse the party's members.

A former Greek Army officer, Konstantinos Maniadakis was a central official of Ioannis Metaxas's 4th of August dictatorship, organizing its security state and anti-communist repression. He combined the Asfaleia's intelligence network with torture and island exile to break the KKE's public activity and disable much of its leadership. In 1940, the police created a counterfeit KKE leadership and forged edition of Rizospastis to confuse party members. After liberation, he converted anti-communism into political capital and served as a parliamentarian, while his responsibility under the dictatorship went largely unaccounted for.

Security, intelligence and policing Affiliation unconfirmed 1893–1937/1938? ✕ Disappeared, death unresolved

A White general turned clandestine Soviet collaborator

After luring Miller to the 1937 meeting, Skoblin vanished from Paris.

Nikolai Skoblin was a White Army officer of the First World War and Russian Civil War who became famous as the young major general commanding the Kornilov Shock Division. In exile he rose within the Russian All-Military Union, yet was recruited by Soviet intelligence and operated inside the émigré military milieu. His alleged role in passing material about a supposed Tukhachevsky conspiracy to Reinhard Heydrich places him at the centre of the dispute over whether forged German documents helped drive the purge or were shaped and used on Stalin’s initiative. After helping abduct Yevgeny Miller in 1937, Skoblin disappeared, and the circumstances of his death remain uncertain.

Security, intelligence and policing Soviet Union state institutions 1893–1938 ✕ Executed

The Cheka’s architect of political investigations

Asked, after the 1921 Tagantsev case and the mass executions of Petrograd intellectuals, why he had been so merciless, Agranov answered: "Seventy percent of Petrograd intellectuals were standing with one leg in the camp of our enemies. We had to burn that leg off."

Born on 12 October 1893 in Chechersk, Mogilev Governorate, into a Jewish shopkeeper's family, he joined the Socialist Revolutionaries in 1912 and the RSDLP in 1915, and was arrested and exiled to Yenisei province that same year. From 1918, as secretary of the Sovnarkom, he took orders directly from Lenin and Dzerzhinsky, and in 1919 he entered the Cheka, investigating the Kronstadt rising, the Antonov peasant revolt and the Tagantsev case. Head of the OGPU Secret Department and then deputy chairman of the OGPU, he became first deputy NKVD commissar in 1934 while in practice running the state-security directorate, and directed the Kirov murder investigation; in 1937 he was demoted to the Saratov NKVD, arrested, and shot on 1 August 1938. He was never rehabilitated.