People of the Revolution and the USSR

Party of Left Socialist Revolutionaries Left critics of Bolshevism 1884–1941 ✕ Executed

Face of the Left SR Party and peasant tribune: the last revolutionary opposition leader to challenge the Bolsheviks from the left

"I undertook this sentence because my heart was tearing from pain... it was shameful and hard to live, hearing what was happening in the villages after Luzhenovsky." — Trial statement, 1906

A leading woman revolutionary of the Russian movement. Born in Tambov into a non-hereditary noble family, she left gymnasium in 1902 before joining the SRs. In 1906 she assassinated Tambov official Luzhenovsky over his suppression of peasants and became a national hero; her death sentence was commuted to lifetime hard labor at Nerchinsk. Freed by the February Revolution, she became a leader of the Left SR Party and chaired the All-Russian Peasant Congresses, and was nominated for Chair of the Constituent Assembly with Bolshevik support (153 votes to Chernov's 244). She broke with the Bolsheviks in 1918 and joined the Left SR uprising, then endured decades of arrest and exile. Rearrested in Ufa in 1937, she was sentenced to 25 years and shot near Oryol on 11 September 1941; Russian sources record 157 political prisoners executed there.

Party of Left Socialist Revolutionaries Left critics of Bolshevism 1885–1938 ✕ Executed

Co-founder and chief theoretician of the Left SR Party: from coalition with the Bolsheviks to the July 1918 uprising

"We, as political actors, at a moment when an event of immense historical significance is taking place, could least of all occupy ourselves with moral characterization. It was clear to us that our place was with the revolution." — First PLSR Congress, November 1917

Co-founder and chief theoretician of the Left SR Party. Entered coalition with the Bolsheviks, then led the July 1918 uprising against the Brest-Litovsk Treaty. After its suppression he endured repeated exile and was executed in 1938.

Party of Left Socialist Revolutionaries Left critics of Bolshevism 1887–1960 ○ Liver cancer

Left SR who organised the 1918 assassination of the German field marshal Eichhorn in Kiev and spent decades in Soviet prisons and exile

In 1918, she and Boris Donskoy prepared the assassination of German occupation commander Hermann von Eichhorn in Kiev; her attempt to kill Hetman Skoropadskyi failed.

A grandniece of the Decembrist Pyotr Kakhovsky, she joined the SR Maximalists after 1905 and in 1908 was sentenced to hard labour, which she served at Nerchinsk alongside Maria Spiridonova. After the October Revolution she went with the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries and sat on the presidium of the Second Congress of Soviets. When the Left SR leadership resumed terror against the Brest-Litovsk peace in 1918, she and Boris Donskoy prepared the killing of Field Marshal Eichhorn in Kiev; her attempt on Hetman Skoropadskyi failed, and the Germans sentenced her to death but released her in January 1919. From 1921 she passed through Soviet exile, the 1937 "All-Union SR Centre" trial and the Krasnoyarsk camps, was released in 1954 and spent her last years keeping alive the memory of Spiridonova and Izmailovich.

Party of Left Socialist Revolutionaries Left critics of Bolshevism 1888–1957 ○ Natural causes

First People's Commissar of Justice under Lenin: the Left SR who defended revolutionary legality against the Cheka

"Then why bother with a Commissariat for Justice? Let's call it frankly the Commissariat for Social Extermination!" — to Lenin, protesting a Cheka summary-execution clause, February 1918

Left SR lawyer, first People's Commissar of Justice in Lenin's coalition government. He championed revolutionary legality against the Cheka and resigned over the Brest-Litovsk Treaty. In exile he was a Yiddish writer and territorialist activist.

Soviet Union state institutions Left critics of Bolshevism 1900–1929 ✕ Executed

Left SR assassin of Mirbach turned OGPU illegal resident, executed for meeting Trotsky

"A man who, amid the crowd, shot the imperial ambassador / Came up to shake my hand / And thank me for my poems." — Nikolai Gumilyov, 'My Readers'

A Jewish revolutionary from Odessa. As a Left SR inside the Cheka, he led the 1918 assassination of German ambassador Mirbach, sparking the Left SR uprising. Amnestied, he became one of the OGPU Foreign Department's first illegal residents, building agent networks in Persia, Palestine, Mongolia, and the Middle East under commercial cover. A flamboyant figure in Moscow literary circles who befriended Mayakovsky and Yesenin, he was arrested and shot in 1929 after secretly meeting Trotsky in Constantinople and agreeing to carry opposition letters into the USSR.