People of the Revolution and the USSR

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1876–1951 ○ Natural causes

The diplomat of collective security, removed in 1939

The slogan that came to symbolize his collective-security diplomacy was that peace is indivisible. The sources do not fix a single occasion: the League of Nations plenum speech whose title explicitly takes up the indivisibility of peace is dated 1 July 1936.

Russian revolutionary and Soviet diplomat. Born in 1876 in Białystok, Grodno Governorate of the Russian Empire (today Poland), into a Jewish merchant family, as Meir-Henoch Wallach. As People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs in 1930–1939 he championed collective security; in May 1939 Stalin dismissed him and installed Molotov. During the Great Purge he publicly endorsed the purges and the campaign against the Trotskyites, and, sitting on the committee that decided the fate of Bukharin and Rykov, voted to expel and try them but not to execute them. In 1940 the NKVD planned his secret killing; it was not carried out. After the German invasion he returned to service as Deputy People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs and was Soviet ambassador to the United States in 1941–1943, concurrently envoy to Cuba. He died in Moscow on 31 December 1951 and was buried at Novodevichy Cemetery.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1883–1954 ○ Natural causes

Stalin's Moscow-trial prosecutor who later carried hardline Soviet diplomacy to the UN

At the UN General Assembly on 18 September 1947, then only Deputy Foreign Minister, Vyshinsky denounced the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan for using relief "as an instrument of political pressure."

Born in Odessa into a Polish szlachta (gentry) family, he moved to Baku as a child and joined the Menshevik wing of the RSDLP in 1903; arrested twice in 1906–1907 and sentenced by a Tiflis court in 1908 to a year in Bailov prison, where he met Stalin. He graduated from Kiev University in 1913, practiced law, and joined the Bolsheviks in 1920. He was RSFSR prosecutor (1931), Deputy Procurator (1933) and Procurator of the USSR (1935–1939), and served as state prosecutor in all three Moscow processes of 1936–1938. From May 1939 he was Deputy Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars, and from 1940 to 1946 First Deputy People's Commissar of Foreign Affairs; he effectively directed the Soviet delegation at Nuremberg. As Minister of Foreign Affairs (1949–1953) and then permanent representative to the UN (1953–1954), he died of a heart attack in New York on 22 November 1954.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1889–1939 ✕ Executed

The Ukrainian party boss who denied the famine, felled by Stalin's bullet

On 26 April 1932, as famine spread in Ukraine, Kosior wrote to Stalin: "We do have isolated cases and even individual starving villages, but this is only the result of local bungling. All talk of 'famine' in Ukraine must be categorically rejected."

Born on 18 November 1889 (6 November O.S.) in Węgrów, Kingdom of Poland, Russian Empire, to a family of factory workers, he joined the party in 1907 and, after underground work in the Donbas and Kiev, took part in founding the Communist Party of Ukraine. Leading the Ukrainian party from 1928 to 1938, he drove collectivisation and industrialisation; he became a full Politburo member in 1930. He is criticised for reports denying the 1932-33 famine, yet also petitioned for relief. Arrested in May 1938, sentenced and shot on 26 February 1939, he was rehabilitated on 14 March 1956; in 2010 a Ukrainian court recognised him as one of the organisers of the 1932-33 famine.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1892–1940 ✕ Executed

Stalin's brother-in-law who chaired the Moscow troika

Arriving in Crimea on 19 January 1921, Redens set up independent city Chekas in Simferopol, Sevastopol, and Kerch, each with the right to pass death sentences, reporting directly to him. These bodies carried out the mass purges of remaining Wrangel forces and 'class enemies.'

A Pole from Łomża, Redens joined the Cheka in 1918 and, as chairman of the Crimean Cheka during the Civil War, directed mass reprisals against the remnants of Wrangel's army. He became Stalin's brother-in-law through marriage to Anna Alliluyeva, sister of Stalin's second wife Nadezhda. As head of the NKVD directorate for Moscow Region from 1933, he oversaw security in the capital and, during the Great Terror, chaired the Moscow troika under NKVD Order No. 00447, presiding over mass death sentences carried out at Butovo and Kommunarka. Arrested in late 1938 on charges of spying for Poland, he was shot in February 1940.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1896–1968 ○ Prostate cancer

Marshal of two nations, the USSR and Poland, who commanded the 1945 Victory Parade

In 1939 the NKVD led him into the prison yard and fired; the shots were blanks. Torture cost him nine teeth and three ribs, but he refused to sign a false confession. After his release he always carried the small pistol taken from Paulus; he said he would not be taken alive if arrested again.

Born into a Polish noble family. His father Ksawery Rokossovsky (1853-1902), a railway inspector, died after an accident, leaving him orphaned young; he worked in a confectionery and a dentist's office and as a factory labourer. In August 1914 he volunteered for the 5th Kargopol Dragoon Regiment, winning the Cross of St. George 4th degree, and joined the Red Guards in October 1917. In the Civil War he commanded cavalry, joining the party on 7 March 1919. Arrested on 17 August 1937, he was held in the NKVD internal prison at Shpalernaya in Leningrad until 22 March 1940 and tortured, but refused to sign false testimony. In the Second World War he commanded at Moscow, Stalingrad and Kursk and planned Operation Bagration, and is the only man to be both Marshal of the Soviet Union (1944) and Marshal of Poland (1949). He died on 3 August 1968.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1897–1937 ✕ Executed

A Polish intelligence agent turned Cheka counter-intelligence officer

After operating in Soviet Russia as a Polish intelligence officer, he was arrested by the Cheka, then served in counter-intelligence posts in the Cheka, OGPU and NKVD before his execution in 1937.

Born in Riga to a Polish family, he was a Polish army intelligence officer and member of the Polish Military Organisation in 1918, and in 1919–1920 ran a Polish intelligence network in Soviet Russia. Arrested by the Cheka in June 1920, he agreed to work for it in August, and Dzerzhinsky, after consulting Lenin, recommended him for party membership. He headed the White Guard section of the counter-intelligence department and was deputy head of the OGPU special department, and from 1935 was first deputy NKVD chief of Saratov krai. Arrested in November 1936, soon after Yezhov took over, he was shot on 15 November 1937 under the 'special procedure' and rehabilitated in 1958.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1898–1937 ✕ Executed

Second Soviet ambassador to Spain, recalled and shot barely three months after taking the post

Kollontai wrote in her diary in Mexico, 1927: 'I wonder how I can work when I only have two senior staff members: Gaikis and myself. We do our own ciphering. We are terribly isolated.'

Born in Warsaw in 1898 to a Jewish family, Gaikis was active in Polish socialist parties before joining the Bolsheviks in 1917. After serving as Chicherin's secretary, first secretary in Mexico, and consul-general in Istanbul, he was posted to Madrid in 1936 as counsellor to the Soviet embassy and succeeded Marcel Rosenberg as ambassador in February 1937. Barely three months later he was recalled to Moscow, arrested on arrival, and shot on 21 August 1937 on charges of 'betrayal of the Fatherland'; he was posthumously rehabilitated in 1955. His execution left the Soviet embassy in Spain effectively vacant for the remainder of the Civil War, with no ambassador appointed again until after Franco's death.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1899–1937 ✕ Assassinated

Soviet illegal who broke publicly with Stalin and was murdered by the NKVD

“Whoever remains silent today becomes an accomplice of Stalin.” — his break letter to the Soviet Central Committee, 17 July 1937

Born Nathan Markovich Poretsky into a Jewish family in Austrian Galicia, he joined the Polish communist movement in 1919 and later ran Soviet military-intelligence and state-security networks in Western Europe under the names “Ludwig” and “Ignace Reiss.” He received the Order of the Red Banner in 1928 but broke with Stalinism amid the Moscow trials and Great Purge. In an open letter to the Soviet Central Committee dated 17 July 1937, he returned his decoration and declared support for the Fourth International. On 4 September 1937 he was lured out near Lausanne by his longtime acquaintance Gertrud Schildbach and shot dead by an NKVD team directed by Sergei Shpigelglas.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1899–1941 ✕ Ruled a suicide, long disputed

The defector who first told the West how Stalin's secret service worked

In December 1936 Slutsky told him of the coming understanding between Moscow and Berlin: 'This time it is serious. There are perhaps only three or four months left before an agreement with Hitler...' Krivitsky's recollections are among Naumov's main sources for the hidden politics of 1936 and 1937.

Born into a Jewish family in Galicia as Samuel Ginsberg, he was a Soviet military-intelligence officer who ran illegal networks across Western Europe from The Hague in the 1930s. In December 1936 the foreign-intelligence chief Slutsky told him of the back-channel contacts between Moscow and Berlin, and in the summer of 1937 he talked through the real nature of the Tukhachevsky affair with Shpigelglas in Paris; when his fellow officer Ignace Reiss was assassinated that autumn, he defected. He published In Stalin's Secret Service in 1939 and testified before the US Congress, and in February 1941 was found shot dead in a Washington hotel, a death ruled a suicide and disputed ever since.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1907–1998 ○ Natural causes

Co-discoverer of spontaneous fission, a pillar of the Soviet atomic project

After they removed the neutron source, their ionization chamber kept firing. To rule out cosmic rays, they hauled the apparatus 50 meters underground into Moscow's Dinamo metro station, where the signal persisted: uranium fissions all by itself.

Soviet nuclear physicist. In 1940, together with Georgy Flyorov, he discovered the spontaneous fission of uranium-235, a finding that established the scientific foundation for the Soviet atomic bomb project. Drafted into the Red Army in 1941 and recalled to Kazan in 1942, he developed the associated-particle method for measuring neutron source yields and created express techniques for plutonium detection under Kurchatov. In 1947 he founded the neutron physics and nuclear fission laboratory at the Khlopin Radium Institute, which he led for nearly four decades, and in 1949 he established the nuclear physics department at the Lensovet Technological Institute, training generations of Soviet nuclear engineers.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1908–1979 ○ Natural causes

Chief designer of the KV and IS heavy tanks, builder of Tankograd

A fellow designer said of him: 'Kotin won't sleep at night if he hasn't hooked someone.' His tanks bore the names Kirov, Voroshilov, and Stalin.

A giant of Soviet heavy-tank design: the engineer-administrator who gave the Red Army the KV series, the IS (Iosif Stalin) heavy tanks, and the SU-152 and ISU-152 self-propelled guns. Appointed chief designer at the Kirov Plant in 1937 at just 29, he began by upgrading the T-28, then, drawing lessons from Spain, turned to developing heavily armoured breakthrough tanks. After the German invasion he served as Deputy People's Commissar for the Tank Industry while personally directing the evacuation of factories from Leningrad to Chelyabinsk, forging the vast 'Tankograd' complex that produced 18,000 tanks and SPGs during the war. After 1945 he designed the PT-76 amphibious tank, the T-10 heavy tank, and the K-700 tractor, before capping his career as Deputy Minister of Defence Industry in 1968.