People of the Revolution and the USSR

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1871–1923 ✕ Assassinated

The first Soviet diplomat, a bridge between revolution, letters, and diplomacy, felled by a bullet in Lausanne

10 May 1923, the restaurant of the Hôtel Cécile, Lausanne. During dinner, White émigré officer Maurice Conradi approached and fired his pistol. Handing the revolver to the maître d', he said: "I have done a good deed — the Russian Bolsheviks have ruined all of Europe… This will benefit the whole world."

Vorovsky was a pioneer of Russian Marxist literary criticism and among the very first Soviet diplomats. Of Polish noble descent, he joined the Bolsheviks in 1903 and contributed sharp literary criticism and political feuilletons to Iskra and the party press under pseudonyms including P. Orlovsky. Appointed Soviet diplomatic representative to Scandinavia in late 1917, he opened revolutionary Russia's first diplomatic channels; from 1921 he served as Polpred to Italy and took part in the Genoa Conference. In 1923, while attending the Lausanne Conference, he was assassinated by a White émigré officer. The Swiss jury's acquittal of the killer led the USSR to sever diplomatic relations with Switzerland.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1874–1934 ○ Natural causes

Dzerzhinsky’s successor who ran OGPU from a sickbed

On his first day as People's Commissar for Finance, he dragged a sofa into his office, tacked a note saying 'Commissariat of Finance' on it, and lay down. Lenin walked in and found him asleep.

A Polish noble turned Bolshevik, he was a polyglot intellectual who mastered 19 languages and published fiction in Silver Age literary circles. He chaired the OGPU from 1926 to 1934 after Dzerzhinsky's death, overseeing collectivization, the early show trials, and the expansion of the Gulag system. Crippled by a Paris car accident and heart disease, he directed the agency mostly from his sickbed while day-to-day power shifted to Yagoda.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1875–1937 ✕ Executed

First Commissar for Food, purged for his NEP-era agrarian Marxism

In 1917, should our party have begun with 'war communism,' or could it have proceeded from what in 1921 would be called the 'new economic policy'? I held the latter opinion even then.

Born in Smolensk, the son of a land surveyor, into a family of ethnic Polish origin with insurgent traditions. He joined the Moscow 'Workers' Union' in 1895 and organized Smolensk's first social-democratic circle, and was elected to the RSDLP Central Committee at the 5th Congress in 1907. After the October Revolution he became the first People's Commissar for Food Supply; he resigned over the proposed broad coalition but continued his duties until December. As Deputy People's Commissar of Agriculture from 1922 to 1928 he interpreted NEP as accumulating funds through 'strong' peasant farms, and protected the economist N. D. Kondratiev. Arrested on 11 June 1937, he was convicted in the trial of the so-called 'Moscow Centre' on 20 September 1937, sentenced to death and shot the same day; he was rehabilitated in 1956. Some accounts give his death as 1940.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1877–1926 ○ Natural causes

“Iron Felix”: the ascetic who forged the revolution’s sword

On 20 July 1926, visibly ill, he delivered a furious two-hour speech against the United Opposition at the Central Committee plenum — then collapsed of a heart attack and died hours later.

Born to Polish gentry, he spent eleven years in Tsarist prisons and exile. In December 1917 he founded the Cheka and administered the Red Terror, demanding of his men “clean hands, a cool head and a burning heart.” He died of a heart attack in 1926, minutes after a furious speech to the Central Committee. The institution he built outlived him under many names.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1879–1937 ✕ Executed

The Polish revolutionary who ran Lenin's financial pipeline from Kraków to Stockholm

April 13, 1917, Stockholm station. Parvus waited for Lenin, who arrived on the sealed train. Lenin refused to meet him in person and used Ganetsky as intermediary. Parvus asked: "Peace is necessary. What does he intend to do?" Ganetsky relayed the question; Lenin answered: "I am not interested in diplomacy. My task is social-revolutionary agitation."

A Polish revolutionary from Warsaw who co-founded the SDKPiL and became Lenin's trusted financial operative. During World War I he partnered with Alexander Parvus to establish trading companies in Copenhagen and Stockholm, channelling profits from scarce wartime goods into revolutionary coffers, a route central to the 'German gold' controversy. After the October Revolution he helped build the Soviet financial system as deputy head of the State Bank and a collegium member of Narkomvneshtorg, later serving as plenipotentiary to Latvia and signing the Treaty of Kars before perishing in the Great Terror.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1879–1938 ✕ Executed

From Cheka deputy to civil aviation: the revolution's all-weather organizer

At his Military Collegium trial on 28 July 1938 he retracted the confession extracted from him, stating he had never belonged to the 'Polish Military Organisation', but the hearing lasted about twenty minutes and ended in a death sentence.

Born into a Jewish petty-bourgeois family in Mława, then in the Płock Governorate of the Russian Empire, he trained as an electrical engineer at the Higher Technical Courses in Warsaw and joined the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL) in 1900. Sources agree he was arrested repeatedly between 1902 and 1913 and spent years in Tsarist prisons and Siberian exile, but they differ on the number of arrests, recording six in some accounts and seven in others. In 1917 he sat on the Irkutsk Soviet as a Bolshevik, served on the Petrograd Soviet executive and the Military Revolutionary Committee during the October uprising, and was elected to the Constituent Assembly. From 1921 he was deputy chairman of the Cheka and later the GPU, and from 1925 to 1930 deputy chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council; arrested in 1937, he was shot in 1938 and rehabilitated in 1956.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1882–1937 ✕ Executed

The Polish nobleman turned internationalist who became the first Soviet leader of Kazakhstan

In November 1917, at Smolny, he mentioned to Menzhinsky that he had studied finance at the University of London. Menzhinsky sat up and declared: 'In that case we'll make you manager of the State Bank.' Thus he became the first People's Commissar of the Soviet State Bank.

A Polish nobleman turned Bolshevik who joined the SDKPiL under Rosa Luxemburg's influence and served on its main board during the 1905 Revolution. Appointed the first People's Commissar of the State Bank after the October Revolution, he later became Stalin's deputy at Narkomnats, helping institutionalize Soviet nationality policy. In 1919 he was named first chairman of the Kirghiz (Kazakh) Revolutionary Committee, de facto the first Soviet leader of Kazakhstan, and went on to serve as the USSR's first plenipotentiary to Mexico and as a Comintern and Profintern activist. Executed in the Great Purge of 1937 and posthumously rehabilitated in 1955.

Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL) Soviet communism 1882–1968 ○ Natural causes

Polish Social Democrat who forged an independent revolutionary path from the SDKPiL underground to the Comintern

In June 1911 she gave birth to her son Jan in Warsaw's Pawiak prison and lived with him in her cell for eight months.

Born into a Polish-Jewish family in Warsaw and trained at the Warsaw Conservatory, Sofia Dzerzhinskaya joined the SDKPiL in 1904 and became a core cadre of the Polish revolutionary movement alongside Rosa Luxemburg and Leo Jogiches. Despite repeated arrests and Siberian exile, she continued underground newspaper publishing and exile organizing in Kraków, then served with the Soviet diplomatic mission in Bern (1918) before settling in Moscow. From 1939 to 1943 she handled Polish affairs on the Comintern Executive Committee, directed Radio Kościuszko broadcasting communist messages into occupied Poland during World War II, and received the Order of Lenin three times.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1890–1937 ✕ Executed

The Soviet trade representative who sent Republican Spain's gold to Moscow

Stashevsky proposed to finance minister Negrín the idea of opening 'a current account in gold' in Moscow, and persuaded him it could be used to buy arms and raw materials.

A Soviet intelligence officer and trade official from the SDKPiL. He ran the joint INO–GRU residency in Berlin as one of the key figures of early Soviet military intelligence, later headed Torgsin and served in the People's Commissariat for Foreign Trade before being posted to Republican Spain as trade representative in 1936. In Spain he negotiated arms sales and managed the financial side of Operation X; he has been identified as the man who persuaded Juan Negrín to deposit the Bank of Spain's gold reserves in Moscow. Recalled in June 1937 and shot two months later, he was rehabilitated in 1956.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1890–1937 ✕ Executed

Dzerzhinsky's Polish comrade, a Cheka founding pillar who defied Yagoda's fabrications

On 26 September 1926, an 18-year-old unemployed youth from Kharkov, Anatoly Truba, walked into Messing's office at the Leningrad OGPU and opened fire with a revolver. Messing ducked under his desk and survived; Truba was shot soon after.

Born into a Jewish musician's family in Warsaw, he joined the Social Democracy of Poland in 1908, earning the trust of Felix Dzerzhinsky and Józef Unszlicht. He rose to chairman of the Moscow Cheka (1921) and head of the Petrograd–Leningrad Cheka-OGPU (1921–1929). In 1929 he became 2nd Deputy Chairman of the OGPU and chief of its Foreign Department (INO), leading Soviet intelligence between Mikhail Trilisser and Artur Artuzov. He openly opposed Genrikh Yagoda's fabricated 'Vesna' case and was dismissed in 1931, pushed into economic diplomacy and shot in 1937 on charges of Polish espionage.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1895–1926 ○ Typhoid

The revolution's Valkyrie. Poet, scout, and the first woman commissar of the Naval General Staff

Disguised as a peasant woman, she infiltrated White-held Kazan — was arrested by a Japanese intelligence officer, then slipped through a door and vanished. —Trotsky, My Life

Emerging from the Silver Age circles of Petersburg, she became the Bolsheviks' most distinctive literary witness, transforming from an Acmeist poet into a pioneer of revolutionary documentary writing built on first-hand immersion in the events she recorded. As the first woman commissar of the Naval General Staff, a Comintern agent during the 1923 Hamburg uprising, and a member of the Soviet diplomatic mission to Afghanistan, she turned every assignment into literature. She died of typhoid in 1926 at thirty, having burned through a lifetime of action in a single decade.