Georgia

Non-Soviet revolutionary 1881–1959 ○ Natural causes

Architect of Revolutionary Defencism and the man to whom Lenin replied, 'There is such a party!'

At the First Congress of Soviets on 4 June 1917, Tsereteli declared that 'there is no party in Russia that says: give us power.' Lenin rose from his seat and answered: 'There is such a party!'

A Georgian Menshevik leader who championed Revolutionary Defencism in 1917 and served as Interior Minister in the Provisional Government. He is remembered for drawing Lenin's famous retort, 'There is such a party!' After the October Revolution he helped found an independent Georgia.

Foreign affairs 1928–2014 ○ Natural causes

The foreign minister who ended the Cold War, then a president in a civil war

On 20 December 1990, Shevardnadze stood before the Congress of People's Deputies and declared: "A dictatorship is coming. I am resigning. Let this be my protest." Eight months later, the August coup made his warning real.

He met Gorbachev at a 1958 Komsomol congress and remained his closest ally for over thirty years. Named first secretary of Georgia in 1972, he waged a sweeping anti-corruption campaign (arresting 30,000) and piloted the experimental Abasha economic reforms. Handed the Foreign Ministry in 1985, he negotiated arms control, the Afghan withdrawal, and German unification in five years, then resigned in December 1990 warning that 'dictatorship is coming.' When the USSR collapsed he returned home to lead Georgia through civil war and assassination attempts for over a decade, stepping down peacefully in the 2003 Rose Revolution.

Socialist-bloc reform leader 1939–1993 ✕ Shot dead under disputed circumstances

The nationalist dissident who became Georgia's first democratically elected president

"All my life I was in the opposition and fought against the government. Now I am the government": said in an interview after becoming chairman of the newly elected Supreme Council, 1990.

Georgian philologist and dissident, son of the celebrated writer Konstantine Gamsakhurdia. In 1977 he co-founded the Georgian Helsinki Group with Merab Kostava, exposing Soviet human rights abuses to the world, and was repeatedly imprisoned. In April 1989, as co-leader of the Independence Committee, he organized mass peaceful demonstrations and hunger strikes in Tbilisi; the Soviet military's bloody crackdown on them decisively radicalized Georgian opinion toward independence. Leading the Round Table-Free Georgia coalition, he won the first multiparty elections in 1990 and was elected Georgia's first president in May 1991 with 87% of the vote, only to be overthrown in an armed coup seven months later, flee to Chechnya, and die under disputed circumstances in western Georgia in December 1993.

Imperial establishment and White movement 1849–1915 ○ Natural causes

The fixer his Tsar could not forgive

1888: he warned the Tsar's aides, to their faces, that using two freight locomotives to speed the imperial train was reckless. Days later the Borki derailment proved him right. Alexander III remembered — and made him Director of State Railways.

Architect of the empire's modernization: the Trans-Siberian railway, the gold standard. In 1905 he made peace with Japan and wrung the October Manifesto from a cornered Tsar, who never forgave him for it. He died sidelined, writing his memoirs.

Non-Soviet revolutionary 1864–1926 ✕ Suicide

Chairman of the Petrograd Soviet in the dual-power era, face of revolutionary defencism

"Deprived of direct contact with his people, he lost his power of resistance. Even a mighty oak, overturned by a storm and torn from the soil that fed it, withers. So it was with Chkheidze." — Irakli Tsereteli at his funeral, 1926

A Georgian nobleman and Menshevik who produced the first Georgian translation of the Communist Manifesto. In 1917 he chaired the Petrograd Soviet during dual power but opposed the October Revolution; he went on to lead Georgia's independence and its government-in-exile in Paris.

Theorist 1865–1934 ○ Stroke

Creator of the Japhetic theory who, as the sole Imperial academician to join the Communist Party, dominated Soviet linguistics for decades

'The formulation of the study of language on a worldwide scale' — that was Marr's favourite phrase for his own theory. To him, all languages descended from four primordial elements, and language itself was a class superstructure.

Born in Kutaisi, Georgia to a Scottish father and Georgian mother, Marr made his name in Caucasian linguistics and archaeology at St. Petersburg University, becoming a full member of the Imperial Academy of Sciences in 1912 and conducting landmark excavations at the ancient Armenian capital of Ani. After the Revolution, he propounded the 'Japhetic theory,' the New Doctrine of Language, which treated language as a class-bound superstructure and traced all words to four primordial elements (sal, ber, yon, rosh); joining the Party in 1930 as the Academy's only Imperial-era member to do so, he became vice-president and dominated Soviet linguistics until 1934. His pseudo-scientific doctrine was officially repudiated by Stalin's 'Marxism and Problems of Linguistics' in 1950, yet his career epitomizes the collision of science, ideology, and state power in the early Soviet period.

Theorist 1868–1941 ○ Natural causes

The Bolshevik elder removed by Stalin for trying to Sovietize Georgia gently

"The establishment of Soviet power in Georgia had the outward appearance of a foreign occupation, because in the country itself there was nobody ready to take part in a rebellion": report to the Central Committee, December 1921

Born in Guria to a priest's family, Makharadze studied at Tbilisi Theological Seminary and the Warsaw Veterinary Institute before joining the Social Democratic movement in 1891. He became one of the few Bolshevik leaders in Menshevik-dominated Georgia, and as chairman of the Georgian Revolutionary Committee in February 1921 proclaimed the Soviet republic, only to be removed by Stalin in July for his moderate treatment of the Menshevik opposition and insistence on Georgian sovereignty, replaced by Mdivani. This ousting was the direct prelude to the 1922 Georgian Affair; Makharadze later held the chairmanships of Gosplan, Sovnarkom, and the Supreme Soviet Presidium in Georgia, and was one of the few Old Bolsheviks to survive the Great Purge, dying a natural death in 1941.