Activities and affiliations

Military command Affiliation unconfirmed 1895–1919 ✕ Killed in action

The anarchist sailor who dissolved the Constituent Assembly with 'The guard is tired', an icon of the revolution who fell in battle at 24

Tauride Palace, 4 a.m., 5 January 1918. 'The guard is tired. I ask you to leave the chamber.' With those words, after 13 hours of debate, the Russian Constituent Assembly closed forever.

An anarchist revolutionary from the Baltic Fleet. He took part in the storming of the Winter Palace in October 1917, and on 5 January 1918, as chief of the guard at the Tauride Palace, he dissolved the Russian Constituent Assembly with the immortal words 'The guard is tired,' becoming a legend of the revolution. During the Civil War he fought the Don, Krasnov, and Denikin forces as a machine-gunner and armored train commander, though he never joined the Bolshevik Party. Killed by Denikin's artillery in July 1919, he was posthumously revived as a hero of Soviet songs, poems, and films.

Military command Soviet Union state institutions 1895–1919 ✕ Killed in action

Legendary Red Army division commander whom Stalin called the 'Ukrainian Chapayev'

The detachment marched along the riverbank, marched from afar, marched under the red banner, the regimental commander. Head bandaged, blood on his sleeve… — Mikhail Golodny, "Song of Shchors"

A young Bolshevik commander who formed the Bohun Regiment in 1918, led the recapture of Kyiv, and as commander of the 44th Rifle Division directed the defense of the Korosten railway junction. Killed at the front at age 24 in August 1919 and forgotten for over a decade, he was resurrected as one of the Soviet Union's greatest cultural heroes after Stalin personally directed Dovzhenko in 1935 to create a 'Ukrainian Chapayev.' Blanter's 'Song of Shchors,' Dovzhenko's 1939 film, and a landscape of renamed cities, streets, and monuments across the USSR cemented his myth.

Literature and arts 1895–1925 ✕ Suicide

A poet of peasant memory and revolutionary dissonance

He later recalled that he had embraced the Revolution “in my own way, from a peasant standpoint.”

Sergei Yesenin grew up in a peasant family and gave the memories of the Russian village and the imagery of oral folklore a modern lyric form. He initially supported the October Revolution from what he called a peasant standpoint, but became disenchanted as industrialisation and state power diverged from the socialism he had imagined. A leading poet of Imaginism, he recorded both the revolutionary period’s sense of release and the losses produced by urbanisation. He died by suicide in Leningrad in December 1925, a death remembered as an emblem of the darker tensions in NEP culture.

Literature and arts 1895–1926 ○ Typhoid

The revolution's Valkyrie. Poet, scout, and the first woman commissar of the Naval General Staff

Disguised as a peasant woman, she infiltrated White-held Kazan — was arrested by a Japanese intelligence officer, then slipped through a door and vanished. —Trotsky, My Life

Emerging from the Silver Age circles of Petersburg, she became the Bolsheviks' most distinctive literary witness, transforming from an Acmeist poet into a pioneer of revolutionary documentary writing built on first-hand immersion in the events she recorded. As the first woman commissar of the Naval General Staff, a Comintern agent during the 1923 Hamburg uprising, and a member of the Soviet diplomatic mission to Afghanistan, she turned every assignment into literature. She died of typhoid in 1926 at thirty, having burned through a lifetime of action in a single decade.

Military command Affiliation unconfirmed 1895–1934 ✕ Assassinated

Pan-Latin American anti-imperialist hero who waged guerrilla war against US occupation of Nicaragua

“Let it not be permitted that the hands of traitors or invaders shall profane his remains.” — Sandino, 1927

Nicaraguan revolutionary and guerrilla leader. From 1927 to 1933, he led the Army in Defense of National Sovereignty (EDSN) against the US military occupation, becoming a symbol of anti-imperialist resistance throughout Latin America. Assassinated in 1934 by the US-trained National Guard under Anastasio Somoza, his legacy inspired the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), founded in 1961, which overthrew the Somoza dictatorship in 1979.

Social movements and organizing Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks 1895–1937 ✕ Executed

Party master of the Azov-Black Sea krai, brought down on the eve of the Great Terror

At the 1934 Seventeenth Party Congress he went to Kirov and relayed the 'old men's' wish to act on Lenin's testament, moving Stalin to another post and making Kirov general secretary.

An Old Bolshevik who joined the party in 1914, he ran collectivization and grain requisitioning as first secretary of the Lower Volga and then the North Caucasus krai, where the 'blacklist' repressions of the Kuban in 1932 bear his name. First secretary of the Azov-Black Sea krai from 1934, he was encircled when Yevdokimov arrived in late 1936 to purge the 'Sheboldaev clan', with Lyushkov running the regional NKVD. Demoted to Kursk after the February-March 1937 plenum, he was arrested that June and shot in October.

Security, intelligence and policing Soviet Union state institutions 1895–1937 ✕ Executed

The deputy commissar who manufactured the wrecking cases

In 1934, Time magazine described Prokofiev as the OGPU commissar "who attends to such matters as having Russian engineers, after a factory breakdown, 'shot for sabotage.'"

A Chekist who, as OGPU Economic Directorate chief (1926–1931), manufactured the great 'wrecking' cases against Soviet technical specialists. Rose to NKVD second deputy commissar under Yagoda, then was arrested and executed in 1937 after Yagoda's fall.

Literature and arts 1895–1937 ✕ Executed

Latvian-born Civil War hero turned defendant in the Tukhachevsky trial

On the night of 7 August 1920, Eideman's Right-Bank Group crossed the Dnieper to seize the Kakhovka bridgehead, a position sixty kilometres from Perekop that turned the flank and rear of Wrangel's army.

A Latvian-born Soviet commander and writer whose defence of the Kakhovka bridgehead as 13th Army commander helped break Wrangel's offensive from Crimea. He later trained Red Army cadres at the Frunze Military Academy and built the Osoaviakhim civilian defence apparatus, but in 1937 he was shot as a defendant in the Tukhachevsky trial and rehabilitated in 1957.

Government and administration Soviet Union state institutions 1895–1938 ✕ Executed

First USSR People's Commissar for Health, a founder of Soviet preventive medicine

Memoirists report that at the June 1937 plenum he criticised the NKVD and Beria, but the sessions were not stenographed, so the wording of his remarks is not documentarily confirmed.

Born on 20 October (Old Style) 1895 in Ekaterinoslav into a Jewish blacksmith's family; English-language scholarship gives only 1 November 1895. He joined the Bolsheviks in 1913, founded the newspaper Kommunar in Tula and led its city and provincial soviets and Military Revolutionary Committee, and was sent to Azerbaijan in 1920. He led agricultural cooperatives and Kolkhozsentr and drove collectivisation, though in 1925 he opposed barring kulaks from co-operatives. At the June 1937 plenum he criticised the NKVD and submitted material on Beria; he was arrested on 25 June and shot on 10 February 1938, and rehabilitated in 1955.

Military command Soviet Union state institutions 1895–1938 ✕ Executed

GRU chief who expanded Soviet military intelligence, then fell to the Great Purge

Fainting and vomiting blood, he wrote to his NKVD interrogator: "I want to earn the mercy of Soviet power."

Semyon Petrovich Uritsky was a Soviet military intelligence commander who led the Red Army's Intelligence Directorate (GRU) from April 1935 to June 1937. A nephew of Petrograd Cheka chairman Moisei Uritsky and raised in the household of diplomat Vatslav Vorovsky, he joined the Bolsheviks in 1912 and commanded a cavalry brigade during the Civil War. He conducted illegal intelligence work in Germany, France, and Czechoslovakia in the early 1920s, and as GRU chief oversaw the expansion of Soviet intelligence networks abroad and early intelligence operations in the Spanish Civil War. Arrested during the Great Purge in November 1937, he was executed the following year and posthumously rehabilitated in 1956.

Security, intelligence and policing Soviet Union state institutions 1895–1940 ✕ Executed

Yezhov's chief of secretariat, keeper of the Great Terror's papers and figures

In November 1938, days after Yezhov lost the NKVD, his chief of secretariat was arrested — the man who had kept every figure of the Great Terror now became a deposition witness against his own patron.

An economic functionary who had passed through the Finance Commissariat, the Soviet Control Commission, and the Central Committee apparatus, he followed Yezhov into the NKVD in January 1937, serving as deputy chief and then chief of its Secretariat and chief of the 9th Special Department, and from 1938 headed the 1st Special Department in charge of operational records, registration, and statistics. The paperwork and figures of the Great Terror passed through his hands to Yezhov's desk, earning him the Order of the Red Star and the Honorary Chekist badge. Arrested on 13 November 1938 immediately after Yezhov's fall, he testified against his former patron and was sentenced by the Military Collegium and shot in February 1940; he was rehabilitated in 1956.

Security, intelligence and policing Soviet Union state institutions 1895–1940 ✕ Executed

From North Caucasus NKVD chief to government protection head, an executor of the Great Terror

In November 1938, government protection chief Dagin was arrested in Beria's internal NKVD purge. The guardian of the Kremlin was led to the Lubyanka's basement cells.

Yevdokimov's trusted operative, Dagin directed mass arrests in the North Caucasus NKVD during the Great Terror. As head of government protection, he guarded the Kremlin leadership, until Beria had him arrested in 1938 and shot in 1940.

Security, intelligence and policing Soviet Union state institutions 1895–1940 ✕ Executed

The Bloody Dwarf, an executor of the Great Terror shaped by the party personnel apparatus

"I know no more ideal worker than Yezhov. Rather, not a worker but an executor... Yezhov has only one flaw: he does not know how to stop." Ivan Moskvin, Yezhov's patron, to his son-in-law Lev Razgon

Yezhov was born in 1895 in Kovno governorate to a peasant father from Tula and a Lithuanian mother; his 1922 and 1924 forms instead claimed a St Petersburg birth in a Russian worker family and a 'March 1917' party entry, which the record and his own interrogation contradict. He was actually admitted to the RSDLP in Vitebsk on 3 August 1917, and his NKVD career was an extension of the party personnel apparatus. As NKVD chief, under Stalin's leadership, he organized the mass arrest and execution operations of 1937–38. At least 1.3 million people were arrested and 681,692 executed for state crimes, while the Gulag population grew by 685,201. He was no career Chekist, yet he took part in torture and personally carried out the sentence on A. S. Kalygina on 27 November 1937. Arrested on 10 April 1939, he was executed in February 1940; a Russian court denied his rehabilitation in 1998.

Security, intelligence and policing Soviet Union state institutions 1895–1940 ✕ Executed

Yezhov’s confidant who kept the Great Terror’s ledgers

In the summer of 1938 the albums of the mass operations piled up in Moscow, more than a hundred thousand names awaiting review. The records chief who fixed guilt and sentence out of that paper heap was Tsesarsky.

Born to a clerk's family in Odessa, he passed from the Socialist Revolutionaries and the Borotbists into the Bolshevik party in 1919. He worked in the Central Committee apparatus in the 1930s, from 1935 as report aide to CC secretary Yezhov, and when Yezhov took over the NKVD he followed him in, holding a plenipotentiary post created for him before heading the GUGB 8th Department in charge of records and registration. The album reviews of the mass operations and the paperwork of the execution lists passed through his hands, and in 1937 he was promoted to senior major of state security. In 1938 he headed the Secret Political (4th) Department and then the Moscow oblast NKVD before being shunted off to run the Ukhto-Izhemsky camp; arrested in December 1938 right after Yezhov's fall, he was sentenced by the Military Collegium and shot in January 1940. Rehabilitation was denied in 2002.

Security, intelligence and policing Soviet Union state institutions 1895–1940 ✕ Executed

The interrogator who beat a confession out of Tukhachevsky, and spoke of beating only once it was his turn

Under his own interrogation he admitted: “I personally had to beat enemies of the party in Lefortovo, and elsewhere, but I never understood the suffering experienced by those being beaten.” The men beating him as he said it worked for the same service.

Born in 1895 in Kiev Governorate to a Jewish carpenter's family, Ushakov left school at thirteen and joined the Kiev Cheka in 1920, spending fourteen years in Ukraine. In January 1937 he came to Moscow as assistant head of the Special Department of the GUGB. That spring he was lead investigator in the fabricated ‘military-fascist conspiracy’ case against the Red Army, manufacturing the confessions of Tukhachevsky, Yakir and Uborevich. He conducted Tukhachevsky's first interrogation on 25 May 1937 and beat him so severely that blood marked the protocol. In 1938 he tortured Robert Eikhe by working on ribs that had not yet healed. Arrested at Khabarovsk in September 1938, he was shot on 26 January 1940 and has never been rehabilitated.

Political and party leadership Communist Party of Spain (PCE) 1895–1942 ✕ Suicide

From baker to General Secretary: the leader who steered Spanish communism through the Popular Front and Civil War

“We are fighting for the Democratic Republic, for a democratic and Parliamentary Republic of a new type, with deep social content.” — Report to the PCE Central Committee, Valencia, 5 March 1937

As General Secretary of the Communist Party of Spain (PCE), José Díaz led the party through the Popular Front strategy, transforming it from a small sect into a mass party central to the Republican war effort. A Sevillian baker who cut his teeth in the anarcho-syndicalist CNT, he joined the PCE in 1927 and rose to General Secretary in 1932. At the 7th Comintern Congress (1935), he stood with Georgi Dimitrov in championing the anti-fascist united front, and during the Civil War he committed the party wholly to military victory under the banner of a “democratic republic of a new type.” Stricken by stomach cancer, he died in Tbilisi in 1942; his decade of leadership laid the foundations of the Spanish communist tradition for generations.

Security, intelligence and policing Soviet Union state institutions 1895–1944 ✕ Executed

The spy who stole the war’s timetable in Tokyo

“The world war… exerted the deepest influence on my entire life. Whatever other factors may have affected me, it was solely because of this war that I became a communist.” — from his 1927 autobiography

A Soviet intelligence officer who worked under cover as a German correspondent in Tokyo. He warned of Operation Barbarossa and confirmed Japan's southward turn, enabling Siberian divisions to be thrown into the Moscow front. Executed in 1944; made a Hero of the Soviet Union in 1964.

Military command Home Army (Armia Krajowa, AK) 1895–1944 ✕ Killed in prison

An underground commander who grasped Tempest's political conditions

When the Home Army was established in 1942, he became commander of the unified underground force.

Stefan Rowecki was a Polish professional officer and the first commander of the Home Army, who helped turn scattered resistance groups under German occupation into a unified underground force. He developed plans for a rising under the contradictory conditions of German retreat and an advancing Soviet army, and advanced the general-uprising concept after the Home Army was formed in 1942. Arrested by the Gestapo in 1943, he rejected German offers of anti-Soviet cooperation and was murdered at Sachsenhausen shortly after the Warsaw Uprising began.

Military command Nazi party and regime 1895–1945 ✕ Beaten to death

SS special-unit commander implicated in the Wola massacre

Waffen-SS commander of a unit recruited from convicted criminals; from 1940 he led it in anti-partisan operations in occupied Poland and Belarus, massacring civilians on a mass scale.

Nazi German SS officer and war criminal. From 1940 he commanded the special unit bearing his name, which committed war crimes in Poland and Belarus. During the suppression of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, his formation participated in the massacre of civilians in Wola. His command responsibility belongs within the history of Nazi occupation policy and the SS and police command structure.

Military command Affiliation unconfirmed 1895–1946 ✕ Executed

Soviet Air Force colonel turned ROA Air Force commander, builder of the Vlasov movement's air arm

In November 1941, wearing his Red Air Force colonel's uniform, he appeared at the German command post in occupied Yalta and declared his desire to fight the Bolsheviks.

A Soviet Air Force colonel who defected to the German side in Yalta in November 1941 and became a leading figure in the collaborationist movement. As commander of the KONR Air Force under General Andrei Vlasov, he built and led an aviation force of some 5,000 men and 40–45 aircraft, though it saw no combat before the war ended. His 1938 arrest by the NKVD, torture, and eventual release without confession proved a decisive turning point; he later published Conveyor of the GPU, an account of his imprisonment widely used in German propaganda. Handed over to the Soviet authorities by the Americans after the war, he was convicted of treason and hanged in 1946.

Political and party leadership Mongolia state institutions 1895–1952 ○ Natural causes

Mongolian revolution and consolidation

In an August 1945 telegram to Stalin he vowed that the friendship of the Mongolian and Soviet peoples would remain indestructible forever.

A military and political participant in Mongolia’s 1921 revolution. He consolidated power through close Soviet ties and directed major purges in the late 1930s. State-building and political and religious repression are inseparable parts of his leadership period.

Literature and arts 1895–1952 ✕ Executed

A radical lyrical voice of Soviet Yiddish literature

On 12 August 1952, he was executed with other Yiddish writers, becoming a symbol of the Night of the Murdered Poets.

Peretz Markish was a central poet, writer, and playwright of post-revolutionary Soviet Yiddish culture. His work joined war, revolution, and Jewish experience in Yiddish, while his participation in Soviet cultural construction coexisted with an independent concern for Jewish culture and territorial autonomy. His work with the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee made him a target of the postwar state campaign, and he was executed with other Yiddish writers in 1952. His death remains emblematic of a purge that reached beyond political organizations into literature and language institutions.

Security, intelligence and policing Soviet Union state institutions 1895–1953 ✕ Executed

The NKGB chief named first in the Katyn order, who wrote plays under a pseudonym

Testifying as a witness on 21 July 1953, he said of Beria signing a book he had not written: “This is not even plagiarism, it is something more.” The hand that drew a line at literary dishonour drew none at the death lists of 22,000 Poles.

Merkulov was the most educated man in Beria's circle and, for a decade, his executive hand. He entered the Georgian Cheka in September 1921 and was noticed by Beria in 1923, and by December 1938 he was the NKVD's number two. When the Politburo named a troika on 5 March 1940 to dispose of some 21,857 Polish prisoners without hearings or charges, the first name in the decision was Merkulov's. After the Germans found the Katyn graves in 1943 he directed the preliminary work behind the Burdenko Commission's attribution of the massacre to the Germans, so the man who organised the killing organised the denial. He headed state security twice and under the pseudonym Vsevolod Rokk wrote plays. Arrested in the Beria case, he was sentenced to death on 23 December 1953 by the Military Collegium of the USSR Supreme Court and shot the same day.

Security, intelligence and policing Soviet Union state institutions 1895–1955 Cause disputed

The executioner who served twenty-seven years under three chiefs

In April 1940, donning a leather butcher's apron and shoulder-length gloves, Blokhin personally shot about 7,000 Polish prisoners in the Kalinin NKVD basement over 28 nights — one every three minutes.

The Soviet executioner who headed the NKVD Kommandatura for 27 years, carrying out death sentences at the Lubyanka. Serving under Yagoda, Yezhov and Beria, he personally executed victims of the Great Terror and commanded the Kalinin execution team during the 1940 Katyn massacre.