People of the Revolution and the USSR

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 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 Ukraine state institutions Left critics of Bolshevism 1890–1937 ✕ Executed

The Bolshevik between revolution and the industrial plan

January 1937, in the dock at the second Moscow trial. The German writer Lion Feuchtwanger recorded: "I shall never forget how Georgy Pyatakov, a gentleman of medium height, middle-aged, with a small bald patch and a reddish, old-fashioned, trembling pointed beard, stood before the microphone and calmly, diligently narrated how he had wrecked the industry entrusted to him. He explained, pointing with an outstretched finger, like a university lecturer — a historian delivering a report on the life and deeds of a long-dead man named Pyatakov, striving to clarify every detail, seized by the single desire that his listeners and students should understand everything correctly."

A Bolshevik revolutionary and the first head of Soviet Ukraine. As a Left Communist, he fiercely opposed Lenin over the Brest-Litovsk Treaty and the national question, and was one of only six Bolsheviks named in Lenin's Testament. Expelled as a Left Oppositionist, he recanted and returned to drive the Five-Year Plans as Deputy Commissar of Heavy Industry, before becoming chief defendant at the second Moscow show trial and being executed in 1937.