People of the Revolution and the USSR

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Left critics of Bolshevism 1873–1928

The man who made Lenin furious over philosophy, then died swapping his own blood: a forerunner of cybernetics

Every organisation, on achieving decisive influence in society, inevitably — regardless of how democratic its programme — tries to impose its own internal structure on the whole social order. Every collective recreates the social environment in its own image and likeness.

Bolshevik co-founder and Lenin's early philosophical rival. His 'Tektology,' a universal organizational science, made him a forerunner of systems theory and cybernetics. Founder of the world's first blood transfusion institute, he died in 1928 during an exchange transfusion self-experiment.

Soviet Ukraine state institutions Left critics of Bolshevism 1873–1941 ✕ Executed

From Balkan revolutionary to head of Soviet Ukraine: the diplomat who became an opposition theorist

"Our misfortune is that we held responsible posts and power turned our heads." Final plea at the 1938 Moscow trial

A pan-European revolutionary of Bulgarian ethnic origin who also held Romanian citizenship, Rakovsky founded the Balkan Social Democratic Federation. As chairman of the Ukrainian Council of People's Commissars from 1919 to 1923 he helped build the Ukrainian Soviet state, and he later served as Soviet ambassador to Britain and France. A Left Opposition theoretician who challenged Stalin's nationalities policy and party bureaucratisation, he was expelled in 1927, admitted his errors to Stalin in 1934 and was readmitted in 1935. Sentenced to 20 years at the Third Moscow Trial in 1938, he was shot at Oryol on 11 September 1941 and rehabilitated on 4 February 1988.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Left critics of Bolshevism 1876–1936 ○ Died

Vyborg Bolshevik organizer who turned the Women's Day protest into the February Revolution

On 28 February, hearing of the Provisional Government's formation, Kayurov shouted to the soldiers: "Comrades! Has the workers' blood been flowing in the streets of Petrograd for three days merely to exchange one landlord for another?"

A metalworker who joined the RSDLP in 1898, Kayurov was a Bolshevik organizer in Petrograd's Vyborg district who, on 23 February 1917, defied the party committee's caution and transformed the women textile workers' International Women's Day strike into a revolutionary general strike. On 27 February he led an armed detachment that raided arsenals for rifles, freed revolutionaries from prisons, and attacked police stations: the moment the street protest became an armed uprising. After heading the 5th Army's political department in the Civil War, he worked in economic administration until 1932, when he and his son founded the Union of Marxist-Leninists with Ryutin's platform, an open challenge to Stalin; he died in Kazakh exile in 1936.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Left critics of Bolshevism 1876–1937 ✕ Executed

A physician of the Left Opposition who shares a name with the first president of Russia

He has no connection to Boris Yeltsin, the first president of Russia. Even the Russian spellings differ: Eltsin for him, Yeltsin for the president.

He was born in 1876 in Zvenigorodka, Kiev Governorate (some sources give 1875). He joined the RSDLP in 1897 and completed medical studies at Novorossiysk University in Odessa the following year, working thereafter as a physician. Exiled to Ufa Governorate in 1910 for revolutionary activity, he worked as a sanitary doctor in Belebey and attached himself to the Bolsheviks. After the revolution he served in local soviets and on various commissions, and from 1923 he belonged to the Left Opposition and signed the Declaration of 46. Expelled from the party in 1927, he was exiled to Ust-Vym early the next year and held in the Suzdal political isolator in 1929. Arrested again in 1936 and exiled to Siberia, he was one of the organizers of a hunger strike by political prisoners in Magadan that year. He was shot in 1937 and rehabilitated on 23 November 1956. His son Viktor Borisovich Eltsin was also active in the opposition.

Soviet Union state institutions Left critics of Bolshevism 1877–1937 ✕ Executed

The revolutionary soldier who founded Post No. 1 at Lenin's Mausoleum

In a letter to Trotsky from Siberian exile dated 6 June 1928, Muralov wrote: "I would rather be drawn and quartered than write a confession. Even if I am alone — I will not write it."

Born on a farm, Grecheskie Roty, he left at seventeen for an agricultural school and joined the Bolsheviks in 1903 while working as an assistant agronomist in Podolsk. After serving on the Moscow Military Revolutionary Committee in October 1917 he became the first commander of the Moscow Military District, and in the Civil War he sat on the Revolutionary Military Councils of the Eastern Front and the 12th Army. He signed the Declaration of the 46 in 1923, joining the Left Opposition, and in 1924 he founded Post No. 1 at Lenin's Mausoleum; after defending his views at the 15th Party Congress in 1927 he was expelled and exiled to Siberia. Arrested in Novosibirsk on 17 April 1936, he was sentenced to death on 30 January 1937, shot on 1 February 1937, and rehabilitated posthumously by the Supreme Court of the USSR in April 1986.

Georgia state institutions Left critics of Bolshevism 1877–1937 ✕ Executed

The Georgian communist who led Lenin's last fight against Stalin's centralization

"Being shot is not enough for me; I need to be quartered! It was I who brought the 11th Army here. I betrayed my people and helped Stalin and Beria, these degenerates, enslave Georgia and bring Lenin's party to its knees." — At his NKVD trial, 1937

Born into Georgian nobility, Mdivani joined the Bolsheviks in 1903 and fought in the Caucasus revolutionary underground and Civil War. As chairman of the Georgian Sovnarkom in 1922, he led opposition to Stalin's 'autonomization' plan, defending Georgia's sovereign rights within the Soviet federation (a dispute that drew Lenin into his last political battle on Mdivani's side against Stalin and Ordzhonikidze). He joined the Left Opposition in 1923, was expelled and exiled in 1928, reinstated in 1931, and shot in 1937 during the Great Purge.

Soviet Ukraine state institutions Left critics of Bolshevism 1879–1925 ✕ Suicide

First woman to lead a Soviet government, between revolution and terminal illness

As German troops advanced on Kyiv, Bosch refused to abandon the city without a fight. Her comrades had to forcibly evacuate her.

A Bolshevik of German settler background, she became the first woman to head a Soviet government as acting leader of Ukraine's People's Secretariat in 1917. In Swiss exile she opposed Lenin on the national question; later she signed the Left Opposition's Declaration of 46. She died in 1925 after years of incurable illness.

Soviet Union state institutions Left critics of Bolshevism 1879–1940 ✕ Assassinated · Mexico

The orator who built the Red Army, felled by an ice axe

25 October 1917, the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets in Petrograd. As Menshevik and Right SR delegates walked out in protest against the Bolshevik insurrection, Trotsky declared of them from the chair: 'Go where you belong from now on, into the dustbin of history!'

Born on 7 November 1879 (O.S. 26 October) in Yanovka, Kherson Governorate, in the Russian Empire, into a Jewish farming family. After the February Revolution of 1917 he joined the Bolsheviks and, as chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, helped lead the October rising. As People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs he negotiated the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, and from 1918 to 1925 he headed Military and Naval Affairs, building the Red Army and leading it to victory in the Civil War. From 1923 he led the Left Opposition, but Stalin outmanoeuvred him: expelled from the party in 1927, exiled to Alma-Ata in 1928, deported in 1929, and stripped of Soviet citizenship in 1932. In exile he argued in The Revolution Betrayed (1936) that the USSR had become a degenerated workers' state, and founded the Fourth International in 1938. He was killed in Mexico City in August 1940 by the NKVD agent Ramón Mercader.

Soviet Union state institutions Left critics of Bolshevism 1880–1918 ✕ Killed during rebellion

Tsarist officer turned Red commander who took Kyiv, battled in Bessarabia, and rebelled against Brest-Litovsk

After taking Kyiv he reported to Lenin: 'I ordered artillery to strike at high-rise and rich palaces, at churches and priests.'

A peasant-born officer of the Imperial Russian Army who distinguished himself in the Russo-Japanese War and World War I, he joined the Left SRs in 1917 and commanded the defense of Petrograd during the October Revolution. In early 1918 he seized Kyiv, establishing Soviet power in Ukraine, then led operations on the Romanian front to defend Bessarabia. Appointed commander of the Eastern Front in June 1918, he rebelled against the Brest-Litovsk Treaty in July, declared a 'war against Germany,' and was killed in Simbirsk.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Left critics of Bolshevism 1881–1936 ✕ Executed

The Siberian Bolshevik of the Left Opposition

Stripped of his commissar post in 1927, Smirnov, penniless, went to the labor exchange to register as an unemployed precision mechanic. When he wrote 'People's Commissar of Posts and Telegraphs' in the box marked 'last position held,' the petty clerk at the window stared dumbfounded at the tall, greying man with lively eyes standing before him.

A Bolshevik who joined the RSDLP in 1899, he endured seven arrests and years of prison and exile in service of the revolutionary movement. A Civil War-era party organizer in the Urals and Siberia and chairman of Sibrevkom, he played a decisive role in defeating Kolchak's White forces. In the 1920s, he became a leading figure of the Left Opposition. Even after his 1927 expulsion, he led a clandestine opposition group from 1931, reestablishing contact with Trotsky via Berlin, and was arrested in 1933, sentenced to death at the first Moscow Trial in 1936, and executed.

Party of Left Socialist Revolutionaries Left critics of Bolshevism 1883–1918 ○ Typhus

Left SR People's Commissar in the first Soviet coalition: 'the core of the party'

'Proshyan succeeded in doing more to strengthen the Soviet power before July 1918 than he did after July 1918 to undermine it.' — Lenin, 'In Memory of Comrade Proshyan,' December 1918

Core leader of the Left Socialist Revolutionary Party and People's Commissar for Posts and Telegraphs in the first Soviet coalition government, serving alongside Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin on the Provisional Executive Committee of the Council of People's Commissars (February 1918). As commissar (December 1917–March 1918) he broke the postal-telegraph sabotage and normalized communications, while also serving as political commissar to the Supreme Military Council and member of the VTsIK Presidium. He resigned in protest against the Brest-Litovsk Treaty and became one of the leaders of the July 1918 Left SR uprising; he died of typhus while underground. Maria Spiridonova called him 'the internal builder, the main spring, the core of the Left SR party.'

Soviet Union state institutions Left critics of Bolshevism 1883–1938 ✕ Executed

He arrested the Provisional Government in 1917; Stalin arrested him in 1937

Summoned to be shot, he gave his jacket and shoes to his cellmates. According to Yuri Tomsky, he said: "Tell people that Antonov-Ovseenko was a Bolshevik and remained a Bolshevik to his last day." Twenty-one years earlier he had arrested the Provisional Government.

Born into a Chernigov noble family, he joined the revolutionary movement in 1901. In October 1917, as secretary of the Military Revolutionary Committee, he prepared the seizure of the Winter Palace with Podvoisky and Chudnovsky and carried out the arrest of the Provisional Government. He commanded Soviet forces in the south and in Ukraine during the Civil War, and in 1921 chaired the plenipotentiary commission for the suppression of the Tambov peasant rising, signing its decision to use poison gas. Head of the Red Army Political Directorate from 1922, he was removed in January 1924 for defending Trotsky, then served as plenipotentiary to Czechoslovakia, Lithuania and Poland. Named RSFSR People's Commissar of Justice in 1937, he was arrested that year and shot on 10 February 1938. He was rehabilitated on 25 February 1956.

Soviet Union state institutions Left critics of Bolshevism 1884–1928 Death circumstances disputed

Bolshevik military leader of 1917 and the Civil War

On the evening of 24 October 1917, Lashevich ordered A. V. Belyshev, the Military Revolutionary Committee commissar aboard the cruiser Aurora, to restore traffic across the Nikolaevsky Bridge that junkers had drawn apart the day before, and the task was carried out.

Born in 1884 in Odessa, in the Russian Empire, into a Jewish merchant family; he joined the RSDLP in 1901 and was a Bolshevik from 1903. In 1917 he took part in the October rising in Petrograd, and in the Civil War he commanded the 3rd Army. In 1925 he became First Deputy Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs and Deputy Chairman of the USSR Revolutionary Military Council. After joining the United Opposition in 1926 he was demoted and worked at the Chinese Eastern Railway in Harbin until his death in 1928.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Left critics of Bolshevism 1884–1937 ✕ Executed

Editor of Krasnaya Nov, Marxist critic who discovered Babel and Pasternak and led Pereval against RAPP

1921, in Lenin's Kremlin apartment. At the founding meeting of Krasnaya Nov, Gorky showed a collection of Indian tales. Lenin cut him short: "We pay for this in gold currency. This year there will be famine." Voronsky recalled: "Two truths collided — one said man does not live by bread alone, the other answered: but what if there is no bread?"

Marxist critic who founded Krasnaya Nov and discovered Babel and Pasternak. As leader of the Pereval group, he championed art as cognition of life against RAPP's class-war aesthetics. Joined the Left Opposition in 1923; executed in 1937.

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.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Left critics of Bolshevism 1885–1937 ✕ Executed

Leader of the Workers' Opposition, defeated by Lenin, devoured by the Purge

At his closed Military Collegium trial on 2 September 1937 he pleaded not guilty, refusing to confess to the terrorist conspiracy or to implicate others. He maintained that the programme of the Workers' Opposition had been right.

A skilled metal turner born into a poor Old Believer family in Murom, he joined the RSDLP in 1901 and sided with the Bolsheviks after the 1903 split. Working in French, German and British factories, he absorbed the European labor movement firsthand and ran the party's clandestine Scandinavian courier network during the war. In February 1917 he was the most senior Bolshevik in the capital, active in the Russian Bureau of the CC and the Petrograd Soviet's executive committee. After October he became the first People's Commissar of Labor, laying the foundations of the eight-hour day; at the end of the Civil War he and Kollontai led the Workers' Opposition, which Lenin defeated at the Tenth Congress in 1921. Sidelined into diplomacy, expelled in 1933 and imprisoned in 1935, he was executed on 2 September 1937 on fabricated charges. Rehabilitated in 1963 and restored to the party in 1988.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Left critics of Bolshevism 1885–1937 ✕ Executed

The metalworker who co-led the Workers' Opposition, defeated by the party machine, consumed by the Purge

At his Military Collegium trial on 10 September 1937, charged under Article 58 with terrorist intentions, he never confessed and implicated no one. He was shot the same day.

A Bolshevik metalworker from a poor peasant family near Moscow, he became a turner at the Obukhov factory at thirteen. During WWI he helped Shlyapnikov organize the Russian Bureau of the Bolshevik CC in Petrograd and formed the Achinsk Soviet in 1917. After the Civil War he co-led the Workers' Opposition with Shlyapnikov from the Metalworkers' Union CC, demanding trade union control of the economy and working-class democracy within the party. He co-signed the 'Letter of the Twenty-Two' to the Comintern in 1922 protesting the suppression of worker voices, was expelled in 1933, and refused to confess at his 1937 trial before being shot.

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.

Comintern Left critics of Bolshevism 1885–1939 ✕ Killed in prison

The polemicist who survived trial only to die in prison

"Do you know the difference between Stalin and Moses? Moses led the Jews out of Egypt, but Comrade Stalin led them out of the Politburo." — Radek to Boris Bazhanov, after Trotsky and Zinoviev were expelled from the Politburo.

A Polish-born Jewish journalist and diplomat who moved between the international social-democratic and communist movements. A close associate of Lenin, he participated in the Brest-Litovsk negotiations and the founding of the Comintern, serving on the Bolshevik Central Committee and as Comintern secretary. Renowned for his sharp polemics and biting wit, he led the Left Opposition before recanting publicly in 1930 and rejoining the Party. During the Great Purge he became the central defendant at the Second Moscow Trial, delivering theatrical confessions that earned him a 10-year sentence; in 1939 he was killed in prison on Stalin's orders.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Left critics of Bolshevism 1886–1937 ✕ Executed

The theorist of primitive socialist accumulation

Victor Serge recalled: "He had driven himself so hard that during meetings it seemed he might at any moment drop off to sleep; but his brain was still fresh, and crammed with statistics."

A Bolshevik economic theorist and co-author, with Bukharin, of The ABC of Communism (1919), the foundational textbook of early communist parties worldwide, he served as a Central Committee Secretary during state-building. As an initiator of the Declaration of 46 (1923) and the Left Opposition's chief polemicist, he formalized the theory of 'primitive socialist accumulation' in The New Economics (1926), arguing that surplus must be transferred from the peasant sector to fund industrialization, framing the NEP debate. He returned to the Stalin line in 1929 but soon broke over collectivization violence, joined an underground opposition group, and was executed in 1937.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Left critics of Bolshevism 1887–1924 ✕ Suicide

Bolshevik revolutionary and metalworker from Lugansk, a leader of the Workers' Opposition

As one of the leaders of the Workers' Opposition in 1920–1921 he defended collegial management of industry and workers' interests, was defeated by Lenin at the 10th Party Congress, and, disillusioned with the NEP and the bureaucratization of the party, shot himself on 7 May 1924.

Born in 1887 in Lugansk, Yekaterinoslav Governorate, into a peasant family, he worked from childhood as a metal turner at the Lugansk cartridge factory. He joined the RSDLP in 1904, was exiled to Arkhangelsk and Yakutsk provinces and escaped twice, and during the reaction of 1907–1910 belonged to the SR party before returning to the Bolsheviks. In March 1917 he became a member of the Lugansk Bolshevik committee, in August was elected chairman of the metalworkers' union board, and in November was elected to the All-Russian Constituent Assembly. In March 1918 he headed the SNK of the Lugansk region and then became deputy chairman of the SNK of the Donets-Krivoy Rog Soviet Republic, and after the civil war he served on the VTsSPS presidium and as chairman of the Union of Communications Workers.

Soviet Union state institutions Left critics of Bolshevism 1887–1936 ✕ Executed

A revolutionary who consistently pursued the intra-party left line, from Left Communism to the United Opposition

In February 1918, as chairman of the Moscow Regional Bureau, he led the resolution opposing Lenin's course of accepting the Brest-Litovsk Treaty.

Having joined the Bolsheviks in 1905 and endured six years in tsarist prisons and exile, he led the Left Communists against the Brest-Litovsk Treaty as chairman of the Moscow Regional Bureau in 1918. During the Civil War he served on the Revolutionary Military Council of the 5th Army and chaired the Ufa Revolutionary Committee, then adhered to every major intra-party left opposition: the Democratic Centralists (Decists), the Declaration of the 46 (1923), and the United Opposition (1926–27). Expelled and exiled in 1927, he returned to work as head of the Economic Research Sector of the RSFSR People's Commissariat of Finance, but was arrested and shot in 1936.

Party of Left Socialist Revolutionaries Left critics of Bolshevism 1887–1937 ✕ Executed

First People's Commissar for Agriculture in the Soviet coalition, co-author of the Law on the Socialization of Land

'What emerged was not a law on the socialization of land, but on the nationalization of land.' — on the Bolshevik-amended land law passed by the Third Congress of Soviets, January 1918

A Left Socialist Revolutionary leader who served as the first People's Commissar for Agriculture in the Soviet coalition government (November 1917–March 1918), co-authoring the landmark Law on the Socialization of Land with Ivan Mayorov. He resigned in protest against the Brest-Litovsk Treaty but refused to join the July 1918 Left SR uprising, instead founding the Party of Revolutionary Communists and joining the Bolshevik Party that November. A key architect of revolutionary agrarian reform who navigated the SR–Bolshevik coalition and later served on the Revolutionary Military Council of the Southern Front during the Civil War.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Left critics of Bolshevism 1887–1937 ✕ Executed

Leader of the 'Democratic Centralists' who demanded inner-party workers' democracy

'To call such an economy socialist means committing a crime before the working class and discrediting the ideas of communism.' From 'The Agony of Petty-Bourgeois Dictatorship', written December 1931, published 1932

Born into a Russian peasant family in the village of Mostaushka, Tula Governorate, he worked as a house painter from the age of 15, joined the revolutionary movement in 1905 and became a Bolshevik in 1912. After the October Revolution he served as chairman of the Moscow Provincial Executive Committee and of the Kharkov provincial revkom, deputy chairman of VSNKh, secretary of VTsIK and chairman of the Small Sovnarkom. In the early 1920s he led the 'Democratic Centralists' demanding inner-party democracy, was expelled at the 15th Party Congress in 1927 and exiled, and later became a key theoretician of the Left Opposition. In December 1931 he wrote 'The Agony of Petty-Bourgeois Dictatorship', analysing the Soviet system as a 'deformed state capitalism'; he was executed in Moscow on 28 September 1937.