People of the Revolution and the USSR

Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) Soviet communism 1876–1947 ○ Natural causes

The 'Demon' Underground and the Only Woman Vice-Chair of Sovnarkom

In the Bolshevik underground she took the codename 'Demon' (Демон) — by one account, from Lermontov's poem used as a cipher book. The name stuck for life as an emblem of her fierce revolutionary persona.

An Iskra agent and Bolshevik organiser co-opted to the Central Committee in 1903, she helped lead the 1905 and 1917 Moscow uprisings. During the Civil War she served as political commissar of the 8th and 13th Armies and became the first woman awarded the Order of the Red Banner. Her role organising the Red Terror as Crimean party secretary in 1920–21 remains fiercely debated. In 1939 she became Deputy Chair of Sovnarkom (the only woman to hold that post) and was one of the very few Old Bolshevik women to survive the Stalin-era purges, dying in 1947.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1894–1937 ✕ Jumped during interrogation

The decade-long head of Byelorussia's government who signed the Academy purge, then stood in the same dock

On 21 June 1937, during interrogation in a fifth-floor room of the Minsk NKVD, Goloded — accused as a 'Polish spy' — threw himself from the window; the official cause was suicide, but unofficial accounts claim he was beaten to death and the jump staged.

Born a peasant who herded cattle from age seven, he joined the Bolsheviks in 1918 and from 1927 chaired the Byelorussian government for a decade, leading the industrialization and collectivization that turned the republic from an agrarian into an industrial land, for which he received the Order of Lenin in 1935. Yet he who had personally signed the resolution expelling the republic's academicians fell victim to the same terror: arrested in 1937 as a 'Polish spy,' he died after throwing himself from a fifth-floor NKVD window in Minsk.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1914–1989 ○ Natural causes

Belarusian partisan leader who rose to Brezhnev's Politburo and served as USSR First Deputy Premier for thirteen years

If I were asked today to lead such an operation, I would not accept. I ask the Czechs to forgive us.

A Belarusian partisan leader who became First Secretary of the Communist Party of Belarus in 1956, then served as a full Politburo member and First Deputy Premier of the USSR for thirteen years from 1965, overseeing economic policy and acting as Brezhnev's political supervisor during the 1968 Warsaw Pact intervention in Czechoslovakia.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1917–1983 ○ Cancer

Belarus's premier for nearly 20 years who rose to First Secretary and candidate Politburo member, then died of cancer two years later

He seized on the idea of the Minsk Metro and lobbied Moscow relentlessly until he got his way. He laid the first stone himself.

Born into an Old Believer peasant family in Gomel and trained as a teacher of Belarusian language and literature, Kiselyov served nearly twenty years as Chairman of the Byelorussian SSR Council of Ministers (1959–1978), steering the republic's postwar reconstruction and industrialisation as a pragmatic economic manager. He tenaciously lobbied Moscow to secure the Minsk Metro and the Zhlobin steel plant, rose to Deputy Chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers in 1978, then returned to Minsk in 1980 as First Secretary of the Communist Party of Belarus and candidate member of the CPSU Politburo, succeeding Pyotr Masherov. He prioritised stable management over reform but died of cancer barely two years into the role.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1918–1980 ✕ Car crash

Belarus's partisan-hero leader for 15 years who transformed an agrarian republic into an industrial powerhouse - his death a legend

It is not so much about knowing and being able to do things yourself, as about seeing the good in other people. Then you yourself will mean a great deal.

A mathematics and physics teacher, he became a leader of the Belarusian partisan movement during the Great Patriotic War, earning Hero of the Soviet Union in 1944. As First Secretary of the Communist Party of Belarus for 15 years from 1965, he transformed a war-ravaged agrarian republic into a Soviet industrial and scientific powerhouse, spearheading the Minsk Metro, major chemical plants, and the Brest Fortress and Khatyn memorials. A candidate Politburo member (1966-1980) and pragmatic reformist who backed the Kosygin reforms, he was widely tipped to succeed Kosygin as Chairman of the Council of Ministers when he died in a car crash in October 1980.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1926–2022 ○ Natural causes

A Belarusian party leader who combined agricultural development with late-Soviet reform

He called himself a “progressive conservative” who restrained innovation pursued merely for its own sake.

An agricultural specialist by training, Yefrem Sokolov rose through local administration and party work to become a practical leader of Soviet Belarus. He expanded the Brest region's productive infrastructure through large livestock complexes and road construction, receiving the title Hero of Socialist Labour in 1986. During perestroika he called for clearer ownership rules and wider republican economic authority, and ordered the publication of maps showing radioactive contamination in Belarus after the Chernobyl disaster, while describing himself as a progressive conservative wary of innovation for its own sake. He left the republican party leadership in 1990 and briefly served on the CPSU Politburo that year.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1933–2022 ○ Natural causes

A Belarusian party organizer who sought continuity as the Union dissolved

After the 1991 coup failed, he called the State Committee's formation “a crime against the party.”

Anatoly Malofeyev was a Soviet and Belarusian politician who rose from industrial work through party administration to republican leadership. In the final years of perestroika, he led Belarus's Communist Party with a record of regional administration and a union-preserving party line, and supported the State Committee on the State of Emergency in 1991. After the coup's defeat, he sought to preserve the party organization and later worked in the parliamentary politics of independent Belarus.