To Nicholas II he is reported to have said: "The prolongation of the existing order depends on keeping the country in a frozen state. The slightest warm breath of spring, and everything will collapse."
The chief conservative ideologue of Alexander III's Russia and Ober-Procurator of the Most Holy Synod from 1880 to 1905. He drafted the Manifesto on Unshakeable Autocracy of April 1881, which killed Loris-Melikov's constitutional reform and inaugurated reactionary counter-reforms: parish school expansion, tighter censorship, and repression of religious minorities. A formidable jurist who wrote the three-volume Course of Civil Law, in Reflections of a Russian Statesman he denounced parliamentarism as 'the great lie of our time.' Tutor to Alexander III and Nicholas II, he was in office when the Synod excommunicated Tolstoy in 1901, and resigned after the October Manifesto of 1905; the autocratic order he spent his life defending was precisely what the revolutionary generation set out to destroy.
Career timeline
1846Graduates Imperial School of Jurisprudence; enters Senate service
1860–1865Professor of civil law, Moscow University
1861Appointed law tutor to Tsarevich Nicholas Alexandrovich
1865Becomes law tutor to the future Alexander III
1868–1880Publishes 3-volume Course of Civil Law; doctorate in civil law
1872Member of the State Council
1880–1905Ober-Procurator of the Most Holy Synod; de facto head of Russian Orthodox Church
1881.04Drafts Manifesto on Unshakeable Autocracy; Loris-Melikov reforms scrapped
1884Drives parish school reform (273 schools to 43,696 by 1902)
1896Publishes Moscow Collection, attacking parliamentarism and democracy
1901Survives assassination attempt; Synod excommunicates Tolstoy during his tenure
1905.10Resigns after the October Manifesto; retains only State Council and Senate seats
A Socialist-Revolutionary agrarian thinker who championed peasant cooperation
“We talk too much; at moments like these, action is necessary.”
Semyon Leontyevich Maslov was a Socialist-Revolutionary agrarian economist and organiser of the peasant cooperative movement. He supported land reform but opposed unsanctioned seizures of estates, seeking to join legal reform with rural self-government. As minister of agriculture in October 1917, he lived through the Provisional Government’s final hours and arrest in the Winter Palace, while continuing to defend the Constituent Assembly and cooperative politics. His later defence of cooperative autonomy conflicted with the direction of Soviet policy, and he was executed in 1938 and rehabilitated in 1988.
Career timeline
1897–1903Exiled to Kazan, then graduated from Kazan University’s law faculty
1902–1913Statistician in the Kazan zemstvo, peasant-press editor and Socialist-Revolutionary publicist
1913–1917Worked in Moscow agricultural cooperation and helped organise the Central Flax-Growers’ Association
1917.04–10Deputy chair of the Main Land Committee and member of the All-Russian Council of Peasant Deputies’ executive committee
1917.10.03–25Minister of Agriculture in the Provisional Government
1917.10–1918Arrested in the Winter Palace, then joined the underground Provisional Government and Constituent Assembly
1921–1929Chair of Selsko-Soyuz, professor and vice-rector of the All-Russian Cooperative Institute
1930–1938Exiled and rearrested before being executed in 1938
Founder and head of the Donetsk-Krivoy Rog Soviet Republic, close friend of Stalin and Kirov
March 1902, Moscow. Nineteen-year-old Fyodor raised a homemade red banner — 'Inviolability of the Person! Freedom of Speech! Freedom of Assembly!' — the signal launching the student demonstration. Arrest, prison, expulsion: thus 'Artyom' was born.
An Old Bolshevik from 1901, he rose from Donbas miner and railway worker to organizer of Russian immigrant workers in Australia, and in 1918 founded and led the Donetsk-Krivoy Rog Soviet Republic. A close friend of Stalin and Kirov, he chaired the All-Ukrainian Military Revolutionary Committee and CEC during the Civil War and served as Moscow Party executive secretary. He defended Soviet power against German occupiers and Denikin's White Army, dying at 38 in the 1921 aerowagon derailment. His infant son was adopted and raised by Stalin.
Career timeline
1901–1902Joined RSDLP; led student demonstration at Moscow Technical School, expelled and jailed
1903–1905Underground revolutionary work in Donbas and Kharkov; led December 1905 Kharkov armed uprising
1906–1910Delegate to IV Congress; party work in Perm and Moscow; sentenced to lifetime Siberian exile, escaped
1911–1917Organized Russian workers in Brisbane, Australia; led general strike; published Echo of Australia
1917–1918Elected CC member at VI Congress; founded DKSR, chairman of its Council of People's Commissars
1918–1919Chairman of All-Ukrainian CVRK; chairman of All-Ukrainian CEC
1920Plenipotentiary in Bashkiria; suppressed 'Black Eagle' uprising; executive secretary of Moscow Party Committee
1920–1921Chairman of All-Russian Miners' Union CC; organized International Miners' Union
Petrograd's press commissar whose assassination helped trigger the Red Terror
“Comrades, do you think I am looking at my watch? No — I am looking at the clock of humanity, the clock of the world revolution.”
Petrograd's Commissar for Press and Propaganda and a magnetic crowd orator who built the Bolshevik censorship apparatus and founded Krasnaya Gazeta. Shot dead by an SR militant on 20 June 1918, his assassination, alongside Uritsky's murder and the attempt on Lenin, became the spark for the full-scale Red Terror.
Career timeline
1905Joins the Bund at 14; expelled from gymnasium for unreliability
1908–1911Social Democratic agitator in Volhynia and Podolia
1911–1913Exiled to Pinega; freed under 1913 Romanov amnesty
1913–1917US emigration: Philadelphia garment worker; co-publishes Novy Mir
1917.05Returns to Russia, joins the Mezhraiontsy
1917.06–08Joins Bolsheviks via Mezhraiontsy; chief agitator; VI Congress delegate
1917.09–10Petrograd Soviet Presidium; October rising
1917.11–1918.06VTsIK Presidium; Commissar for Press/Propaganda; founds Krasnaya Gazeta
