People of the Revolution and the USSR

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1873–1955 ○ Natural causes

He built the Soviet government apparatus and studied the religious dissenters of the empire

On the night of October 1917, after the Smolny session, he put Lenin up in his own apartment. He fastened every chain and lock on the front door, loaded two revolvers, and dozed on the sofa listening for sounds — only to catch Lenin tiptoeing past him to the desk, pretending his host was asleep. By grey morning Lenin pulled from his pocket the handwritten draft of the famous Decree on Land and read it aloud. Bonch-Bruevich greeted the household: 'Congratulations on the first day of the Socialist Revolution.'

As Lenin's de facto personal secretary and first Administrator of Affairs of Sovnarkom (1917–20), he laid the foundations of the Soviet administrative apparatus. An ethnographer of Russian religious sectarianism, he was the driving force behind the 1919 law legalising conscientious objection.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1878–1918 ✕ Executed

The 'Caucasian Lenin', Marxist theorist of the national question and leader of the Baku Commune

As the Baku Commune crumbled, a comrade's wife urged him to flee first. Shaumyan answered: "What will the workers say to me? It would be a disgrace to flee first."

Pioneer of Armenian Marxism and leader of the Caucasus Bolsheviks. Born to a Tiflis merchant family, he studied at Riga Polytechnic and Berlin University, organizing Armenia's first Marxist circle in 1899. He translated the Communist Manifesto into Armenian, pioneered Armenian Marxist literary criticism, and was elected a candidate CC member at the 1912 Prague Conference. In 1918 he chaired the Baku Council of People's Commissars, the 'Baku Commune', and famously debated Lenin by correspondence on the national question. Captured and shot with the 26 Baku Commissars in September 1918, he became a Bolshevik martyr.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1881–1938 ✕ Executed

Lenin’s successor as premier, destroyed as the Right Opposition

In November 1917 Rykov resigned from Sovnarkom and the Central Committee alongside Kamenev, Zinoviev and others, objecting that the government had not formed a coalition of all socialist parties. Sources date this to 16 or 17 November; he retracted it a few days later.

Rykov became chairman of Sovnarkom after Lenin's death, leading the Soviet government for six years and embodying the administrative continuity of NEP. During the Civil War he had directed the wartime economy as chairman of VSNKh and overseen Red Army logistics. As premier he stood with Bukharin and Tomsky as the core of the party's 'Right,' championing the worker-peasant alliance, gradual socialist construction through the market, and balanced industrialization. He opposed Stalin's forced collectivization and breakneck industrialization during the 1928-29 grain crisis, was branded the 'Right Opposition' and removed as premier in 1930, arrested in 1937, executed after the third Moscow trial of 1938, and rehabilitated in 1988.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1890–1937 ✕ Executed

Worker-Bolshevik premier of the Russian Republic destroyed by the state he helped industrialize

Arrested on 27 June 1937 while still performing his duties — seized during a session of the very Central Committee plenum that had just expelled him.

An Old Bolshevik who joined the party at fourteen as a factory worker, Sulimov rose through the Ural party apparatus to become Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the RSFSR (1930–1937), overseeing the republic's industrialization during the first two five-year plans. A member of the Central Committee (1923–1937) and the OrgBuro (1927–1930), he was among the highest-ranking Bolsheviks of worker origin to lead a Soviet government. Arrested during the June 1937 Central Committee Plenum immediately after Vyacheslav Molotov accused him of political disloyalty, he was tried for wrecking, espionage, and participation in an anti-Soviet terrorist organization of the Right, and executed on 27 November 1937. He was posthumously rehabilitated in 1956, and the city of Cherkessk bore his name, Sulimov, from 1934 to 1937.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1893–1936 ✕ Poisoned

Stalin's closest friend turned Beria's first victim: the red prince of Abkhazia

Stalin's words to Lakoba: 'I am Koba, you are Lakoba.' On the night of December 27, 1936, after dinner at Beria's residence, he collapsed with violent vomiting. His driver testified that Lakoba's last whispered words were: 'Beria killed me.'

Bolshevik leader who governed Soviet Abkhazia from 1922 to 1936, advancing agriculture and Black Sea resort development. Stalin's close friend, he was poisoned by Beria and posthumously rehabilitated.