Activities and affiliations

Military command Nazi party and regime 1887–1973 ○ Convicted of war crimes 1949, released 1953

Nazi Germany's finest operational strategist and the apex of the 'clean Wehrmacht' myth

"Preussische Feldmarschälle meutern nicht": "Prussian field marshals do not mutiny." With these words he explained why he did not join the 20 July 1944 plot on Hitler's life.

Erich von Manstein was a field marshal of Nazi Germany and widely regarded as the most dangerous operational mind on the Eastern Front. He devised the Ardennes flanking manoeuvre (the Sichelschnitt, or sickle cut) that broke France in 1940, captured the Crimea and Sevastopol in 1941–42, and in February–March 1943 executed the backhand-blow counteroffensive at Kharkov that restored the German southern front and created the Kursk salient. Relieved in March 1944 for disagreements with Hitler, he was convicted of war crimes by a British tribunal in 1949 and sentenced to 18 years (released 1953), then advised West Germany on rearming. His memoir Lost Victories narrated only his operational record, ignoring the Holocaust and Wehrmacht crimes, and became a cornerstone of the 'clean Wehrmacht' myth.

Political and party leadership Kuomintang 1887–1975 ○ Natural causes

Nationalist leader who combined resistance to Japan with anti-communist rule

After signing the pact with the Soviet Union in 1937, he insisted that it did not mean permitting communism to grow, explaining that Nanking could not fight Japan and the Communists simultaneously.

Chiang Kai-shek was the Nationalist Party's military and political leader, rising through the Northern Expedition of the 1920s to consolidate much of China under a government based in Nanjing. He had prioritised the civil war against the Communists, but after the Xi'an Incident accepted a united front against Japan and secured Soviet arms and aircraft through the 1937 Sino-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact. He led China's wartime resistance, then moved the Republic of China's government to Taiwan after defeat in the civil war, where he built a long authoritarian rule under martial law.

Military command United Kingdom state institutions 1887–1976 ○ Natural causes

Commander of the Allied ground forces in Normandy

At a Normandy briefing on 12 June 1944, he told the troops: “We have got to go off and do a job together very soon now.”

Bernard Montgomery was a British field marshal shaped by First World War experience and an intense commitment to troop training. In the Second World War he rebuilt the Eighth Army before leading it at El Alamein, then commanded Allied operations in Sicily and Italy. Recalled to Britain for the Normandy invasion, he commanded the 21st Army Group and all Allied ground forces in the opening phase, pressing to enlarge the initial assault and secure a broad lodgement. His methodical, tightly controlled style reduced some risks but also drew criticism for slowing operations and accepting costly battles.

Political and party leadership Affiliation unconfirmed 1888–1922 ✕ Executed

Bolshevik who led the underground communist party in independent Estonia and was executed

A Cheka investigator on the Lockhart conspiracy and Kaplan affair, he was arrested after the May Day demonstration of 1922 and shot that same night in a forest by Lake Ülemiste.

The Bolshevik who led the October Revolution in Estonia in 1917, he directed the underground communist party in the independent republic until his arrest and execution in Tallinn in 1922.

Diplomacy and international organization Soviet Union state institutions 1888–1927 ✕ Assassinated

Bolshevik diplomat who took part in the decision to execute Nicholas II: gunned down in Warsaw

7 June 1927, Warsaw Central Station. Voykov was meeting Arkady Rosengolts when White émigré youth Boris Kowerda rushed forward and fired his pistol. Upon arrest, Kowerda declared: "I avenged Russia, for millions of people."

Voykov, born into a Ukrainian peasant family, was a Bolshevik revolutionary and Soviet diplomat who joined the RSDLP as a teenager. As Commissar of Supply for the Ural Soviet in 1918, he took part in the special session that decided the execution of Nicholas II and his family, and signed orders for sulfuric acid used to destroy the bodies. From 1924 he served as Soviet Polpred to Poland, conducting diplomatic work in Warsaw until June 1927, when he was shot and killed by Boris Kowerda, a young White émigré. His assassination became a flashpoint in Soviet-Polish relations; in retaliation, the Soviet government extrajudicially executed twenty former imperial aristocrats in Moscow.

Military command Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine (Makhnovists) 1888–1934 ○ Bone tuberculosis

The anarchist peasant commander who fought Bolsheviks, Whites, Germans, and nationalists in succession

Kremlin, June 1918. Lenin told Makhno, "If anarchists were like you, we'd gladly work together." Two years later, Makhno would be betrayed by the Bolsheviks twice.

Ukrainian anarcho-communist revolutionary. Led a peasant army and built the Free Territory, an experiment in anarchist self-governance. Allied with the Red Army twice to defeat the Whites, and was betrayed each time. Exiled in 1921, he wrote his memoirs in Paris.

Economy, finance and planning Soviet Union state institutions 1888–1935 ○ Natural causes

Planning official of the first Five-Year Plans

On 25 January 1935, after chairing meetings all morning, he returned home pale and refused his housekeeper's offer to call a doctor, retiring to his room. When the Kremlin physician arrived, Kuibyshev was already dead of a coronary thrombosis.

Born the son of a tsarist officer, he joined the Social Democratic Party at sixteen and endured eight arrests and exiles in the Bolshevik underground. During the Civil War he served on the Revolutionary Military Councils of the 1st and 4th Armies; afterwards he chaired Rabkrin, the Supreme Economic Council, and Gosplan, becoming the architect and executor of Stalin's industrialization drive. A Politburo member from 1927, he oversaw the full span of economic policy and became a loyal symbol of Soviet industrialization whose name was bestowed on cities and factories after his death.

Military command Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks 1888–1936 ✕ Executed

The Red commander of the Urals

In 1926, after Zinoviev broke with Stalin, the Left Opposition weighed an alliance. Mrachkovsky: 'With no one — Zinoviev will run and Stalin will deceive.'

A Bolshevik organizer and Civil War hero from the Urals, he led the Special Northern Expeditionary Detachment to capture Tobolsk and was twice awarded the Order of the Red Banner. He later commanded military districts before becoming the first head of Baikal-Amur Mainline (BAM) construction. A key figure in the Left Opposition, he coined the famous warning 'Zinoviev will run away, and Stalin will deceive,' and was executed at the first Moscow Trial in 1936.

Economy, finance and planning Soviet Union state institutions 1888–1937 ✕ Executed

The agrarian economist who uncovered the moral logic of peasant economy

In Essays on the Theory of Labor Economy (1912-1913) he wrote: "Every labour economy has a limit to its output, which is determined by the proportion between the annual labour and the degree of satisfaction of the needs of the farming family."

Russian and Soviet agrarian economist, born in Moscow on 17 (29) January 1888 and killed on 3 October 1937 at Alma-Ata, who founded the theory of the labor-consumer balance of the peasant family farm. His Essays on the Theory of Labor Economy (1912-1913) argued that the peasant family farm works for a living rather than for profit, and read the degree of its self-exploitation as set by consumption needs against the drudgery of labor. Attribution of the term 'moral economy' to him comes from Russian-language biography, while English-language scholarship usually credits the concept to E. P. Thompson. Criticized from 1926 as petty-bourgeois and anti-Marxist, he was arrested in July 1930 in the fabricated 'Toiling Peasant Party' case, sentenced to five years, and, after his exile was extended in 1935, was shot on 3 October 1937.

Government and administration Soviet Union state institutions 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.

Security, intelligence and policing Soviet Union state institutions 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.

Economy, finance and planning Soviet Union state institutions 1888–1937 ✕ Executed

Revolutionary-turned-banker who led Gosbank through collectivization

In 1919 he led armed detachments through the villages of Belarus, forcibly seizing grain from the peasantry. Eighteen years later the system he helped build shot him as a 'wrecker.'

Born to a Jewish merchant family in Siberia, he joined the Socialist Revolutionary Party in 1904 and switched to the Bolsheviks in July 1917. During the October Revolution he served as head of the Minsk garrison and on the Military Revolutionary Committee of the Western Front; during the Civil War he was food commissar in Belarus and Lithuania-Belarus, becoming one of the organizers of forced grain requisitioning expeditions. From 1930 to 1934 he chaired the USSR State Bank while serving simultaneously as Deputy People's Commissar of Finance, overseeing the credit reform of 1930–1932 that accompanied collectivization. He then led the People's Commissariat of Grain and Livestock Sovkhozes from 1934 until his arrest during the Great Terror; he was shot in November 1937.

Economy, finance and planning Soviet Union state institutions 1888–1937 ✕ Executed

Bolshevik industrial administrator who rose from the Cheka to chair VSNKh RSFSR

In 1936 Lobov received the Order of Lenin for his commissariat's overfulfillment of the production plan. One year later the same party arrested him for 'anti-Soviet terrorist' activity; he was sentenced and shot on the same day, 30 October 1937.

Son of a forester in Smolensk, he worked as a labourer and draftsman before joining the Bolsheviks in 1913. During the Civil War he chaired the Petrograd, Saratov and Bashkir Chekas, becoming an early cadre of the Soviet security organs. Under NEP he managed the fuel and oil syndicate, then became chairman of VSNKh RSFSR in 1926, laying the administrative basis for industrialization. As People's Commissar for Timber Industry from 1932, he oversaw lumber supply for the Five-Year Plans and received the Order of Lenin in 1936. Arrested in June 1937, he was shot on 30 October 1937 and rehabilitated in 1956.

Political and party leadership Mongolia state institutions 1888–1938 ✕ Executed (details of sentence disputed)

Buryat revolutionary, drafter of Mongolia's 1924 constitution, victim of the Great Terror

At the third party congress in August 1924, as leader of the leftist faction he joined the rightists led by Dambadorj in accusing Danzan of representing bourgeois interests and dealing with American and Chinese firms; Danzan and Bavaasan were sentenced and shot within twenty-four hours.

A Buryat from Transbaikalia, he was elected first chairman of the Buryat-Mongol Central National Committee (Burnatskom) in April 1917 and helped lay the foundations of Buryat autonomy. In 1920 he became secretary of the Mongol-Tibet section of the Comintern's Far Eastern Secretariat. After the 1921 revolution he served until 1925 as chairman of Mongolia's Revolutionary Military Council, a government adviser, a member of the MPRP Central Committee presidium and a deputy in the Great and Small Khural. He helped draft the 1924 constitution and argued for the non-capitalist path at the third party congress, where he also joined in denouncing Danzan. Arrested in Moscow on 19 June 1937 (custody records date it 19 July), he was sentenced in 1938; sources disagree on the sentencing date and on when and where he was executed. A review of his case began in 1955 and he was rehabilitated in 1957.

Security, intelligence and policing Soviet Union state institutions 1888–1938 ✕ Executed

Chairman of the All-Ukrainian Cheka and theorist of class-based Red Terror

“We are annihilating the bourgeoisie as a class. The first question we must ask is: what class does the accused belong to, what is his origin, upbringing and profession? These must determine his fate.” — Red Terror journal, 1 November 1918

A Soviet revolutionary and writer of Latvian origin, born Jānis Sudrabs. From July to November 1918 he chaired the Cheka and Military Tribunal of the 5th Army on the Eastern Front, and from 1919 to 1921 he chaired the All-Ukrainian Cheka while personally directing the Kiev Cheka. On 1 November 1918 the Kazan journal Krasny Terror carried his article "We are annihilating the bourgeoisie as a class," which held that class origin, upbringing and profession alone should decide a suspect's fate, the clearest theoretical statement of class-based Red Terror. The sources record a reputation for personal cruelty, corroborated by the Denikin commission's materials on the All-Ukrainian Cheka and by Lācis's own statements.

Diplomacy and international organization Comintern 1888–1938 ✕ Executed

The “favourite of the whole party,” killed in its name

In the mid-1920s Stalin told his comrades he and Bukharin were “the Himalayas; all the rest are little spots.” Ten years later he had him shot.

The brilliant theorist Lenin's testament called “the favourite of the whole party.” At Brest he was the far-left voice for revolutionary war; a decade later, defending NEP and the peasants against Stalin's Great Break, he became the “Right Deviation.” Removed from the Politburo in 1929, he returned to the Central Committee in 1934, edited Izvestia and helped draft the 1936 constitution, was arrested on treason charges in 1937 and shot after the 1938 trial. His note to Stalin, “Koba, why do you need me to die?”, is attributed through the Medvedevs' writing.

Ideology and propaganda Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks 1888–1938 ✕ Executed

Ukrainian Soviet state-builder and scholar-politician, revolutionary bureaucrat across education, party, and control

As counting commission chair at the 17th Party Congress in 1934, he reported to Kaganovich that many ballots were cast against Stalin; according to his son Dmytro's testimony, he regarded this as signing his own death sentence.

A founding-generation Bolshevik Ukrainian statesman who helped create the CP(B)U and served as Chairman of the All-Ukrainian Central Executive Committee. He led the delegation of the Ukrainian People's Republic of Soviets at the Brest-Litovsk peace talks and signed the treaty establishing the USSR. Twice People's Commissar of Education (1922–1924, 1933–1938), he succeeded Mykola Skrypnyk in 1933 and implemented the rollback of Ukrainization. As the first editor-in-chief of the Ukrainian Soviet Encyclopedia and a full member of the Academy of Sciences, he helped build Soviet Ukraine's scholarly infrastructure. He also served as CC Secretary of the CP(B)U and head of Workers' and Peasants' Inspection. Arrested in a cinema with his family in November 1937, he was sentenced after a 20-minute trial to a term meaning death and shot the same day; rehabilitated in 1956.

Scholarship and theory 1888–1939 ○ Heart attack

Educator who raised street children through labour and self-rule: one of UNESCO's four great 20th-c. pedagogues

"As much demand of the person as possible and as much respect for him" — Makarenko's principle

Founder of Soviet pedagogy. He built the 'Makarenko system': rehabilitating post-Civil-War street children through collective labour and self-government at the Gorky Colony and Dzerzhinsky Commune. His fictionalised account, The Pedagogical Poem, became a world classic of educational literature. In 1988 UNESCO named him one of four defining 20th-century pedagogues.

Economy, finance and planning Soviet Union state institutions 1888–1939 ✕ Killed in prison in

The finance commissar of NEP stabilization

At the 14th Party Congress in December 1925, before 1,306 delegates, Sokolnikov took the rostrum to demand Stalin's removal as General Secretary and the continuation of NEP. He was the only speaker to demand this from the rostrum. The move failed to win a majority.

Bolshevik leader killed in prison under Stalin. Born Grigory Brilliant, he took a law degree and a doctorate in economics at the Sorbonne and was fluent in six languages. After the October Revolution he oversaw bank nationalization and signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, and in the Civil War commanded the 8th Army that completed the defeat of Denikin. As Finance Commissar he directed the 1922–1924 monetary reform, stabilizing the ruble with the gold-backed chervonets. He advocated hard financial policy and gradual socialist construction, opposing forced industrialization and collectivization, and at the 14th Party Congress of 1925 demanded Stalin's resignation as General Secretary.

Industry and production Soviet Union state institutions 1888–1941 ✕ Suicide

Builder of Soviet defence industry in the shadow of his brother Lazar

1 July 1941, Mikoyan's office. Confronted with a confession extracted by torture, he stepped outside to wait — and shot himself in the lavatory before they could arrest him.

A Bolshevik metalworker, he rose through Ordzhonikidze's heavy-industry apparatus to become People's Commissar for Defence Industry (1937–1939) and Aviation Industry (1939–1940), building the organizational framework of Soviet military production during the Great Purge. Elder brother of Lazar Kaganovich, he was notorious for a loud, lecturing style and dependence on talented deputies; dismissed in 1940, he shot himself in the lavatory of Mikoyan's office just after the German invasion, when Vannikov under torture falsely implicated him.

Military command Germany state institutions 1888–1954 ○ Natural causes

A leading architect of armoured warfare and a general of Nazi Germany

In May 1940, he argued that the armoured forces across the Meuse should keep moving toward the Channel rather than wait for the infantry.

Heinz Guderian was a professional soldier who helped develop the doctrine of concentrated armoured manoeuvre and shape Germany’s panzer force and early wartime victories. He presented himself after the war as the “father” of the panzer arm, but his ideas rested on work by Oswald Lutz and many other officers. During the 1940 invasion of France, he pressed for a rapid thrust through the Ardennes, across the Meuse and onward to the English Channel, helping isolate Allied forces around Dunkirk. He nevertheless collaborated with the Nazi regime and commanded in an eastern war of aggression marked by occupation crimes, while his postwar memoirs minimized his responsibility and political ties.

Political and party leadership Party of Left Socialist Revolutionaries 1888–1957 ○ Natural causes

First People's Commissar of Justice under Lenin: the Left SR who defended revolutionary legality against the Cheka

"Then why bother with a Commissariat for Justice? Let's call it frankly the Commissariat for Social Extermination!" — to Lenin, protesting a Cheka summary-execution clause, February 1918

Left SR lawyer, first People's Commissar of Justice in Lenin's coalition government. He championed revolutionary legality against the Cheka and resigned over the Brest-Litovsk Treaty. In exile he was a Yiddish writer and territorialist activist.

Diplomacy and international organization United States state institutions 1888–1959 ○ Natural causes

An American diplomat who drove the Cold War through alliance-building

At the 1954 Berlin Conference, he rejected an all-German government without free elections and upheld the Western electoral procedure.

John Foster Dulles was an American diplomat and lawyer who sought to organize the postwar order through alliances and military deterrence. As Dwight D. Eisenhower’s secretary of state, he pressed beyond containment toward rolling back communist influence and consolidated the Western bloc around NATO. At the 1954 Berlin Conference, he opposed Molotov’s collective-security proposal and call for an all-German government, insisting on reunification through free elections; later that year he secured West German entry into NATO, choosing institutionalized division in Europe over an unguaranteed settlement. The policy strengthened Western cohesion and American influence, but also carried responsibility for interventionism, including support for coups in Iran and Guatemala and reliance on nuclear threats.

Security, intelligence and policing Soviet Union state institutions 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).