People of the Revolution and the USSR

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1876–1937 ✕ Executed

The revolutionary-historian who seized the railways in October and wrote the party's history

After his 1935 arrest, fellow prisoners recalled, he never renounced his Bolshevik views and delivered lectures to inmates on party history and the October Revolution.

An Old Bolshevik active in the revolutionary movement from 1897. As a member of the Petrograd Military Revolutionary Committee in October 1917 he led the seizure of the railway stations, then served as the first People's Commissar of Railways (1918–1919), managing transport through the Civil War. He became the founding rector of Sverdlov Communist University and a central figure in party historiography, directing the Lenin Library from 1925 to 1935. He authored over 500 works on the history of the revolutionary movement. Arrested in 1935, he was shot in 1937.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1879–1964 ○ Natural causes

The Marxist economist who predicted the Great Depression, and was punished for arguing capitalism could adapt

In the late 1920s, when most analysts proclaimed capitalism stable, he predicted the Great Depression; when the Comintern insisted on capitalism's imminent collapse, he predicted its end — and was proven right both times, earning Stalin's confidence.

A Hungarian Marxist economist who directed the USSR Academy of Sciences' Institute of World Economy and World Politics for two decades as the Comintern's foremost analyst. He earned Stalin's confidence by correctly predicting both the onset of the Great Depression and its end, each time against prevailing orthodoxy. After the war, his argument that wartime state intervention enabled capitalism to adapt provoked a fierce campaign: his institute was shut down in 1947 and he was branded a 'bourgeois economist.' Rehabilitated after Stalin's death, he received the Lenin Prize in 1963; a posthumous manuscript, opened per his will, delivered a sharp critique of Soviet bureaucratic degeneration.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1896–1940 ✕ Suicide

The Saint-Just of the avant-garde, theorist of production art

«Only by jumping out of art will you understand it» — in the final note to his 1924 book on Nathan Altman, Arvatov distilled into a single sentence his methodological leap from formal analysis to social fact.

A Proletkult theorist and co-founder of LEF, he championed 'production art' — merging art with industry — and laid the foundation for Constructivist aesthetics. A frontline concussion forced him to stop writing by the late 1920s; he took his own life in 1940.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1905–1983 ○ Natural causes

Builder of Marxist aesthetics who defended absolute truth and beauty against relativism

"Contrary to the catchphrases of our century, absolute beauty exists just as absolute truth does" — VKHUTEIN journal, 1927

Jewish philosopher from Melitopol. After breaking with the avant-garde at VKHUTEMAS, he devoted his life to reconstructing Marx's aesthetics as a coherent system. In the 1930s, with Lukács, he refuted vulgar sociology and grounded art theory in dialectical materialism, compiling the landmark anthologies Marx and Engels on Art and Lenin on Art. Targeted in the post-war anti-cosmopolitan campaign, he became a lightning rod in the 1960s for his anti-modernist polemics, and in his last years developed an original philosophy centred on 'ontognoseology.'

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1929–2010 ○ Natural causes

A historian who reconstructed the Cold War’s hidden record

As his father's personal secretary, he recorded the Cuban negotiations, and the documents he later donated revealed that tactical nuclear weapons remained in Cuba after the missile withdrawal.

Sergo Mikoyan was a Soviet and Russian historian of Latin America and Soviet foreign policy, as well as the son of Anastas Mikoyan. His experience accompanying his father to Cuba in 1962, together with his personal records, helped reveal that Soviet tactical nuclear weapons remained on the island after the public missile withdrawal and that the negotiations deepened the rift with the Cuban leadership. As editor of the journal Latin America, he helped shape the field and later joined collaborative Soviet-American research on the Cold War.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1965–2019 ○ Natural causes

A historian of the 1950s-60s USSR and the Russian church schism

Pyzhikov noted that the Twenty-Second Congress resolution gave almost four times as much space to the Anti-Party Group as to criticism of Stalin's personality cult.

Aleksandr Vladimirovich Pyzhikov (27 November 1965, Ramenskoye, Moscow Oblast - night of 16-17 September 2019, Moscow) was a Russian historian and state official who died of a pulmonary embolism. He defended his candidate dissertation in 1998 and his doctoral dissertation in 1999, and was Deputy Minister of Education of the Russian Federation in 2003-2004. In his final years he became widely known for research on the 17th-century schism of the Russian Church and the Old Believers; his argument that the Old Believers played an important role in the revolutionary events of the early 20th century and in the formation of the Soviet order divided Old Believer circles. He also provoked controversy with conspiratorial civilizational claims such as denying the reality of the Tatar-Mongol yoke.