People of the Revolution and the USSR

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1865–1932 ○ Natural causes

Architect of Soviet Marxist legal theory who defined law as class relations

'Law is a system, an order of social relations which corresponds to the interests of the ruling class and is maintained by the organized power of this class, the state.' (The Revolutionary Role of Law and the State)

Latvian jurist and revolutionary. Born 14 (26) July 1865 in Koknese volost, Riga district, Livonia province, he died in Moscow on 25 January 1932 and his ashes were placed in an urn in the Kremlin wall. With Rainis he led the Latvian Marxist 'New Current' and the newspaper Dienas Lapa, was arrested in 1897 and after seven months' imprisonment exiled for five years to Vyatka province. As People's Commissar of Justice after October he co-authored Decree on Courts No. 1, laying the foundation of Soviet justice, headed the Latvian Soviet government (1918–1920) and served as first chairman of the RSFSR Supreme Court from 1923 until his death.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1869–1944 ○ Natural causes

The Bolshevik physician who built the USSR Supreme Court and led it for fourteen years

On 30 August 1918, when Lenin was carried into the Kremlin bleeding from an assassin's bullets, it was Vinokurov — a trained physician — who gave him first aid. Nobody imagined that six years later the doctor would sit at the apex of Soviet justice.

A Bolshevik jurist trained as a physician, Vinokurov served as the first Chairman of the USSR Supreme Court (1924–1938) and built the institutional foundations of the Soviet judiciary. A revolutionary of the first generation, he co-founded the Moscow Social Democratic organisation in 1893, joined the Bolsheviks in 1903, and chaired the first Bolshevik Petrograd City Duma in October 1917. He treated Lenin's wounds after the 1918 assassination attempt and, as People's Commissar of Social Security (1918–1921), laid the groundwork for Soviet welfare administration. Throughout his Supreme Court tenure he rivalled Vyshinsky and Krylenko for control of the justice apparatus, holding a comparatively legalistic line while remaining institutionally implicated in the Great Terror. Dismissed in 1938 and relegated to a health-education post, he died of natural causes in 1944.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1870–1939 ○ Died of illness

First Procurator General of the USSR and architect of revolutionary legality

At the 1922 Petrograd trial, Krasikov demanded the death penalty for Metropolitan Veniamin, arguing that "the church must kneel before the revolution" — and the court obliged.

A Bolshevik revolutionary who joined Plekhanov's Emancipation of Labour group in Geneva in 1892 and sat on the Bureau of the II RSDLP Congress in 1903 alongside Lenin and Plekhanov, he became the USSR's first Procurator General in 1924 and laid the institutional foundations of the Soviet judicial system. He founded the anti-religious journal Revolution and Church, helped draft the Soviet constitutions of 1918, 1924, and 1936, and died of illness in 1939 after being removed during the Great Purge.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1872–1945 ○ Died

The Bolshevik elder called 'conscience of the party': jurist who confronted the Prosecutor General during the Great Terror

"I have known Trifonov for thirty years as a real Bolshevik — and you I know as a Menshevik!" — to Vyshinsky, 1938, defending an arrested comrade.

Bolshevik jurist (RSDLP from 1898). As architect of the party ethics system in the Central Control Commission, he was called 'the conscience of the party.' In 1937 he publicly denounced Vyshinsky for fabricating cases and was forcibly committed to a psychiatric hospital, where he died.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1874–1932 ○ Natural causes

Architect of revolutionary legality and the first Soviet People's Commissar of Justice and Prosecutor General

The criminal is 'a person who is dangerous at a given time, who must either be isolated or we must try to correct, but whom we must never take vengeance upon.' — during the drafting of the 1922 Criminal Code

A Kyiv-born jurist who joined the Bolsheviks in 1904 and served in the Moscow armed uprising and soldiers' councils. As People's Commissar of Justice and first Prosecutor General (1918–1928), he laid the foundation of Soviet criminal, civil and family law and formalised the doctrine of 'revolutionary legality,' subordinating law to the political needs of the proletarian state. He briefly led Soviet military intelligence (1919–1920) and ended his career as ambassador to Italy.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1882–1938 ✕ Executed

Estonian Bolshevik and Soviet People's Commissar of Justice who helped design the Gulag camp system

On Bloody Sunday, 9 January 1905, the nineteen-year-old Yanson marched with his father toward the Winter Palace and watched him fall wounded as troops opened fire on the crowd.

An Estonian Bolshevik revolutionary who chaired the Reval (Tallinn) Soviet of Workers' Deputies in 1905 and later organized the Estonian Workers' Socialist Federation while in American exile. As a leading figure in the Central Control Commission during the 1920s, he directed party purges and, in 1928, co-authored a proposal to Stalin with Tolmachev and Yagoda to replace the existing prison system with OGPU-model forced labour camps. He subsequently served as People's Commissar of Justice of the RSFSR and People's Commissar of Water Transport of the USSR before his arrest in 1937 and execution the following year.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1883–1954 ○ Natural causes

Stalin's Moscow-trial prosecutor who later carried hardline Soviet diplomacy to the UN

At the UN General Assembly on 18 September 1947, then only Deputy Foreign Minister, Vyshinsky denounced the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan for using relief "as an instrument of political pressure."

Born in Odessa into a Polish szlachta (gentry) family, he moved to Baku as a child and joined the Menshevik wing of the RSDLP in 1903; arrested twice in 1906–1907 and sentenced by a Tiflis court in 1908 to a year in Bailov prison, where he met Stalin. He graduated from Kiev University in 1913, practiced law, and joined the Bolsheviks in 1920. He was RSFSR prosecutor (1931), Deputy Procurator (1933) and Procurator of the USSR (1935–1939), and served as state prosecutor in all three Moscow processes of 1936–1938. From May 1939 he was Deputy Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars, and from 1940 to 1946 First Deputy People's Commissar of Foreign Affairs; he effectively directed the Soviet delegation at Nuremberg. As Minister of Foreign Affairs (1949–1953) and then permanent representative to the UN (1953–1954), he died of a heart attack in New York on 22 November 1954.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1885–1938 ✕ Executed

Architect of revolutionary legal consciousness, consumed by the Great Terror

In May 1918, when the courtroom stirred at a death sentence passed after the death penalty had been abolished, Krylenko said: "Executions have been abolished. But Shchastny is not being executed; he is being shot."

Born in the village of Bekhteyevo in Smolensk Governorate to a peasant family, he joined the Bolsheviks in 1904 while studying history and literature at St Petersburg University, where he was known as 'Comrade Abram'. After the February Revolution he chaired his regiment's and division's committees and then the 11th Army committee, and in November 1917 he became the first Soviet Supreme Commander-in-Chief, opening armistice talks with Germany. From 1918 he passed through the revolutionary tribunals, prosecution and justice commissariats, casting law as an instrument of class struggle and leading the 1922 SR, 1928 Shakhty, 1930 Industrial Party and 1931 Menshevik trials. Arrested on 31 January 1938 on charges of links to Bukharin's Right organisation and wrecking in the justice organs, he was sentenced to death after a twenty-minute trial, shot on 29 July 1938 and rehabilitated in 1955.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 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.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 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.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1891–1937 ✕ Executed

The Marxist legal philosopher who argued the legal form corresponds to commodity exchange: the most radical critic of Soviet law from within

In November 1936 he was appointed Deputy People's Commissar of Justice. On 20 January 1937, barely two months later, the NKVD arrested him at the pinnacle of the Soviet legal system he had theorized — the Marxist jurist who had argued law would wither away now stood before the most direct form of state power.

The most important Marxist legal theorist of the twentieth century. In his 1924 work The General Theory of Law and Marxism, he argued that the legal form derives from the commodity-exchange relation and, following Marxist premises, will wither away together with the state under communism. With Pyotr Stuchka he co-founded the law section of the Communist Academy (1922) and later became its vice-president and director of the Institute of Soviet Construction and Law. Appointed Deputy People's Commissar of Justice in 1936, he clashed openly with Andrey Vyshinsky's doctrine of 'proletarian law.' Arrested in January 1937 and executed that September, he was posthumously rehabilitated in 1956. His commodity-form theory remains widely studied in critical legal theory worldwide.