People of the Revolution and the USSR

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1869–1944 ○ Natural causes

The Bolshevik physician who built the USSR Supreme Court and led it for fourteen years

On 30 August 1918, when Lenin was carried into the Kremlin bleeding from an assassin's bullets, it was Vinokurov — a trained physician — who gave him first aid. Nobody imagined that six years later the doctor would sit at the apex of Soviet justice.

A Bolshevik jurist trained as a physician, Vinokurov served as the first Chairman of the USSR Supreme Court (1924–1938) and built the institutional foundations of the Soviet judiciary. A revolutionary of the first generation, he co-founded the Moscow Social Democratic organisation in 1893, joined the Bolsheviks in 1903, and chaired the first Bolshevik Petrograd City Duma in October 1917. He treated Lenin's wounds after the 1918 assassination attempt and, as People's Commissar of Social Security (1918–1921), laid the groundwork for Soviet welfare administration. Throughout his Supreme Court tenure he rivalled Vyshinsky and Krylenko for control of the justice apparatus, holding a comparatively legalistic line while remaining institutionally implicated in the Great Terror. Dismissed in 1938 and relegated to a health-education post, he died of natural causes in 1944.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1870–1939 ○ Died of illness

First Procurator General of the USSR and architect of revolutionary legality

At the 1922 Petrograd trial, Krasikov demanded the death penalty for Metropolitan Veniamin, arguing that "the church must kneel before the revolution" — and the court obliged.

A Bolshevik revolutionary who joined Plekhanov's Emancipation of Labour group in Geneva in 1892 and sat on the Bureau of the II RSDLP Congress in 1903 alongside Lenin and Plekhanov, he became the USSR's first Procurator General in 1924 and laid the institutional foundations of the Soviet judicial system. He founded the anti-religious journal Revolution and Church, helped draft the Soviet constitutions of 1918, 1924, and 1936, and died of illness in 1939 after being removed during the Great Purge.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1874–1932 ○ Natural causes

Architect of revolutionary legality and the first Soviet People's Commissar of Justice and Prosecutor General

The criminal is 'a person who is dangerous at a given time, who must either be isolated or we must try to correct, but whom we must never take vengeance upon.' — during the drafting of the 1922 Criminal Code

A Kyiv-born jurist who joined the Bolsheviks in 1904 and served in the Moscow armed uprising and soldiers' councils. As People's Commissar of Justice and first Prosecutor General (1918–1928), he laid the foundation of Soviet criminal, civil and family law and formalised the doctrine of 'revolutionary legality,' subordinating law to the political needs of the proletarian state. He briefly led Soviet military intelligence (1919–1920) and ended his career as ambassador to Italy.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1884–1965 ○ Natural causes

Bolshevik jurist who joined the party in 1902 and became an architect of Soviet legislation

In October 1917, as chairman of the Saratov Soviet, he proclaimed the establishment of Soviet power from the city's Conservatory and led the Red Guard detachments.

A Bolshevik revolutionary who joined the RSDLP in 1902, Antonov-Saratovsky led the establishment of Soviet power in Saratov as chairman of the Saratov Soviet in 1917 and served as People's Commissar of Internal Affairs of Ukraine in 1920–1921. From 1923 to 1938 he simultaneously chaired the Commission for Legislative Assumptions under the USSR Council of People's Commissars and sat on the USSR Supreme Court, becoming a principal architect of the Soviet judicial and legislative framework and serving as a judge at the Shakhty trial, the Menshevik trial, and the Industrial Party trial. He authored the revolutionary memoirs Under the Banner of Proletarian Struggle (1925) and The Red Year (1927).

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1885–1938 ✕ Executed

Architect of revolutionary legal consciousness, consumed by the Great Terror

In May 1918, when the courtroom stirred at a death sentence passed after the death penalty had been abolished, Krylenko said: "Executions have been abolished. But Shchastny is not being executed; he is being shot."

Born in the village of Bekhteyevo in Smolensk Governorate to a peasant family, he joined the Bolsheviks in 1904 while studying history and literature at St Petersburg University, where he was known as 'Comrade Abram'. After the February Revolution he chaired his regiment's and division's committees and then the 11th Army committee, and in November 1917 he became the first Soviet Supreme Commander-in-Chief, opening armistice talks with Germany. From 1918 he passed through the revolutionary tribunals, prosecution and justice commissariats, casting law as an instrument of class struggle and leading the 1922 SR, 1928 Shakhty, 1930 Industrial Party and 1931 Menshevik trials. Arrested on 31 January 1938 on charges of links to Bukharin's Right organisation and wrecking in the justice organs, he was sentenced to death after a twenty-minute trial, shot on 29 July 1938 and rehabilitated in 1955.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1888–1937 ✕ Executed

First People's Commissar for Justice, Gosplan deputy chairman, and victim of the Great Purge

On October 24-25, 1917, he was in the Smolny Institute helping direct the armed uprising; within days, at 29, he became the Soviet government's first People's Commissar for Justice.

Born into a noble family in Saratov, he joined the Bolsheviks in 1903 and took part in the 1905 revolution. After the October Revolution he was appointed the first People's Commissar for Justice in the original Sovnarkom, then served in the Supreme Economic Council (VSNKh), led economic bodies in Siberia and the Urals, chaired the Oil Syndicate (Neftesindikat) and Donugol, and became deputy chairman of Gosplan. Within the party he sat on the Central Committee from the Sixth Congress (1917) onward; in 1918 he was a 'Left Communist' opposing the Brest-Litovsk Treaty before later backing Stalin. Arrested in 1937 on false charges, he was sentenced to death and shot; rehabilitated in 1956.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1888–1937 ✕ Executed

Founder of the Soviet Procuracy, caught between state security and socialist legality

Bukharin's widow recalled: 'A man of unyielding will and crystal honesty — he began putting the OGPU in order and very soon found himself unwelcome.'

A son of the St. Petersburg poor who joined the Bolsheviks in 1907, Ivan Akulov was a career revolutionary who rose through underground work, Civil War front committees, and party leadership posts across the Urals, Siberia, Crimea, and Ukraine. When the USSR Procuracy was created in 1933, he became its first Procurator, building the institutional framework of 'socialist legality' and carving out an independent prosecutorial space in the tense terrain between criminal justice and the state security apparatus. He was implicated in the emergency laws enacted after Kirov's murder, and in 1937 he was himself consumed by the repressive machinery he had helped construct.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1888–1961 ○ Natural causes

Chairman of the USSR Supreme Court through the Great Terror and war

Solzhenitsyn recorded that Golyakov "knew the work of Tolstoi, Korolenko, and Chekhov." The chairman who approved every death sentence in the USSR left as his final work a singular book: "Court and Law in Fiction."

A peasant conscript who fought in WWI, joined the Bolsheviks in 1918, and rose through Civil War military tribunals to become Chairman of the USSR Supreme Court in 1938. For a decade spanning the Great Terror, World War II, and postwar reconstruction, he headed the entire Soviet judicial apparatus and served on the secret Politburo commission that approved every death sentence, giving legal form to the purges. Yet archival materials show he sought to maximize rehabilitations during periods of relative 'legality,' and as director of the All-Union Institute of Legal Sciences he authored over seventy scholarly works, including the singular 'Court and Law in Fiction' (1959).

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1891–1937 ✕ Executed

The Marxist legal philosopher who argued the legal form corresponds to commodity exchange: the most radical critic of Soviet law from within

In November 1936 he was appointed Deputy People's Commissar of Justice. On 20 January 1937, barely two months later, the NKVD arrested him at the pinnacle of the Soviet legal system he had theorized — the Marxist jurist who had argued law would wither away now stood before the most direct form of state power.

The most important Marxist legal theorist of the twentieth century. In his 1924 work The General Theory of Law and Marxism, he argued that the legal form derives from the commodity-exchange relation and, following Marxist premises, will wither away together with the state under communism. With Pyotr Stuchka he co-founded the law section of the Communist Academy (1922) and later became its vice-president and director of the Institute of Soviet Construction and Law. Appointed Deputy People's Commissar of Justice in 1936, he clashed openly with Andrey Vyshinsky's doctrine of 'proletarian law.' Arrested in January 1937 and executed that September, he was posthumously rehabilitated in 1956. His commodity-form theory remains widely studied in critical legal theory worldwide.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1895–1967 ○ Natural causes

Soviet judge at the Nuremberg IMT, death-sentence arbiter of the Great Purge

Before the Nuremberg trials convened, Nikitchenko said: "If… the judge is supposed to be impartial, it would only lead to unnecessary delays."

Deputy Chairman of the USSR Supreme Court (1938–1949) and Soviet judge at the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal (1945–1946), he was a key executor of Stalin-era judicial repression. Joining the Bolsheviks in 1916, he began his career in military tribunals during the Civil War and rose to deputy chairman of the Military Collegium under Vasily Ulrikh, presiding over the Moscow show trials that sentenced Zinoviev and Kamenev to death in 1936. He was one of three principal drafters of the London Charter establishing the IMT's legal framework, and at Nuremberg filed the sole dissenting opinion against the acquittals of Schacht, von Papen, and Fritzsche. Reprimanded by the Party Control Commission in 1940 for 'conveyor-belt' procedural violations in Far Eastern trials, he retired in 1951 and died in 1967.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1897–1959 ○ Natural causes

The justice commissar without a law degree who ran Soviet courts for a decade, from the Great Terror through the war-crimes trials

In July 1940 Rychkov and Prosecutor Pankratyev ordered: any worker more than twenty minutes late after lunch or leaving more than twenty minutes early was to be prosecuted for absenteeism and could be imprisoned.

A Ural factory worker turned justice commissar, he was the only holder of the post without higher education. As a Military Collegium member he took part in the Moscow show trials and chaired mass counter-revolutionary proceedings in the east. Appointed People's Commissar of Justice in 1938, he ran Soviet courts for a decade through the last terror wave, wartime judicial administration, and the post-war open trials of German war criminals. In 1940 he co-signed the decree making twenty minutes' lateness a criminal offence. Dismissed in 1948 after clashing with Party cadres, he served in deputy military-prosecutor posts and retired in 1955.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1897–1988 ○ Natural causes

The Supreme Court chairman of rehabilitation who survived Orenburg

When Gorkin became Chairman of the Supreme Court in 1957, petitions poured in from old party members shot in the Stalin years, seeking posthumous rehabilitation. He himself had watched his entire Orenburg bureau perish in the purge.

A peasant-born Bolshevik (joined 1916). After his entire Orenburg party bureau perished in the Great Purge on his watch as first secretary, he became Chairman of the USSR Supreme Court in 1957 and spent fifteen years directing judicial rehabilitation of Stalin's victims.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1903–2007 ○ Natural causes

The Supreme Court chairman who purged judges and was removed for rehabilitation measures

In January 1954, Volin's Supreme Court plenum issued a ruling that rehabilitated citizens could reclaim their confiscated housing. The Party leadership immediately branded the interpretation erroneous — and it became the decisive reason for his dismissal three years later.

Born the ninth child of a poor fisherman's family in Kuban, he fought in the Civil War, then rose through workers' faculties and the Leningrad State University law school to become a proletarian jurist. As Prosecutor of the RSFSR from 1939, he led the prosecutor's office through the late Great Terror and the war; as Chairman of the USSR Supreme Court from 1948, he personally organized and supervised judicial panels that purged sitting judges through 1952. But in January 1954 his court's plenum issued guidance suggesting rehabilitated citizens might reclaim their confiscated housing, a position the Party leadership soon branded erroneous, and in February 1957 he was dismissed. He served twelve more years as Deputy Chief Arbitrator of the State Arbitration Commission and lived to 104, the longest-lived senior Soviet judicial official.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1904–1972 ○ Natural causes

USSR Prosecutor General who served at Nuremberg and was removed for refusing to sanction Beria's arrest

On 30 June 1953, Safonov refused to sign the arrest warrant for Beria, saying: "He is a deputy of the Supreme Soviet. Deputies' immunity is written into the Constitution." He was removed that same day.

Born the son of a blacksmith in Rostov, Yaroslavl province, he graduated from Leningrad State University's law faculty in 1925 and worked as legal counsel for Leningrad factories while lecturing in civil law. Spotted by Vyshinsky, he entered the procuracy in 1935 and became Deputy Prosecutor of the USSR at age 35 in 1939, later serving as First Deputy Prosecutor and taking part in the Nuremberg trials. Appointed Prosecutor General in February 1948, he led the Soviet procuracy through the late Stalin years, but on 30 June 1953 he refused to sign the arrest warrant for Lavrentiy Beria, citing Beria's parliamentary immunity as a Supreme Soviet deputy, and was removed the same day. He was demoted to minor posts in the Moscow regional procuracy and served quietly until his retirement in 1968.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1907–1978 ○ Natural causes

The USSR's first Prosecutor General who organized war crimes trials and handed Khrushchev the statistics of the Great Terror

In February 1954 Gorshenin handed Khrushchev the first official tally of everyone sentenced to death, exile, and camps for counter-revolutionary crimes from 1921 to 1954. Drawn up after Stalin's death, those figures launched the thaw-era rehabilitations.

Born to a railway-worker family in Alatyr, he graduated from the Moscow Institute of Soviet Law as a labour-law scholar. Named Prosecutor General in 1943, he sat on the secret Politburo commission approving all death sentences while organising the Vlasov and Krasnov trials and preparing the Soviet case for Nuremberg and Tokyo. As Minister of Justice (1948–1956) he worked to regularise the courts, yet in February 1954 he submitted to Khrushchev the first official tally of victims repressed from 1921 onward, and in 1956 he co-initiated with Zhukov and Rudenko the Central Committee resolution rehabilitating former POWs. After the ministry was abolished he returned to academia, directing the All-Union Institute of Legal Sciences and working on the codification of Soviet labour law.