People of the Revolution and the USSR

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1875–1946 ○ Natural causes

The long-serving formal head of state

On 1 March 1921, before the Kronstadt uprising, Kalinin entered the fortress unarmed with his wife, was met with applause at Anchor Square, but the sailors derailed his speech with jeers and catcalls.

A peasant-born Bolshevik metalworker who became the Soviet Union's formal head of state from 1919 until his death in 1946, serving 27 years as the country's nominal president. He signed the key laws of the mass-repression period, including the 7 August 1932 decree on state property, the 1 December 1934 decree on simplified terror cases, and the 7 April 1935 decree lowering criminal responsibility to 12. He also approved a cipher from the Belarusian first secretary proposing to shoot 3,000 and expel 9,800 people, and in March 1940 signed the order to execute 25,700 Polish officers and prisoners. Yet on 4 May 1932 he voted against the expulsion of 38,000 peasant families as unfounded, and the reversal halted the operation.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1877–1937 ✕ Executed

Stalin's close friend and the 17-year organizational backbone of the Soviet state, the first fall that opened the Great Purge

"Coco, they are old Bolsheviks like me, like you. You won't shed the blood of old Bolsheviks!" Yenukidze tried to dissuade Stalin from putting Kamenev and Zinoviev on trial and executing them. Stalin replied: "Remember, Avel — whoever is not with me is against me."

An Old Bolshevik (party member since 1898), co-founder of the Baku Social-Democratic organization and the underground 'Nina' press in the Caucasus. As Secretary of VTsIK (1918–1922) and then the TsIK of the USSR (1922–1935), he managed the apparatus of the Soviet state's highest formal body for 17 years, across the formation and consolidation of the Union. A close member of Stalin's inner circle and godfather to Nadezhda Alliluyeva, he was the first individual recipient of the Order of Lenin (No. 3). His expulsion in 1935, the first member of the XVII Congress Central Committee to fall, was a significant prelude to the Great Purge.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1888–1970 ○ Natural causes

Formal head of state in late Stalinism

On 9 January 1905, 16-year-old factory worker Nikolai Shvernik witnessed the 'Bloody Sunday' shootings before the Winter Palace. That autumn he joined the Bolsheviks.

A Petersburg worker who joined the Bolsheviks at 17, he built the Soviet trade-union system as First Secretary of the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions for 14 years. He succeeded Kalinin as Chairman of the Supreme Soviet Presidium in 1946, though real power lay with Stalin and the Politburo. During the war he directed industrial evacuation and the Nazi atrocities investigation commission; after Stalin's death he worked with Khrushchev as head of the Party Control Committee, overseeing the rehabilitation of victims of political repression.