Varvara Nikolayevna Yakovleva

Varvara Yakovleva, born into a Moscow merchant family and trained in mathematics, was a professional revolutionary of the Moscow underground. In 1917, as secretary of the party's Moscow Regional Bureau, she helped organize the October street fighting in Moscow, which was far longer and bloodier than in Petrograd. In early 1918 she belonged to the core of the Left Communists who opposed the Brest-Litovsk peace alongside Bukharin, and her Moscow Regional Bureau was that opposition's stronghold.

In November 1918 she became chair of the Petrograd Cheka: in a city still reeling from Uritsky's assassination and the Red Terror, she was the first and only woman to head a major organ of the revolutionary state's security police. Her tenure was short, ending in January 1919, but the fact that even the revolution's harshest institution was open to a woman was unthinkable under the old regime.

In the 1920s Yakovleva served on the collegium of the Commissariat of Enlightenment, and in 1923 she signed the Declaration of 46 calling for wider party democracy. From 1929 to 1937 she was People's Commissar of Finance of the RSFSR, running the republic's finances through the first two Five-Year Plans. Despite her oppositional past she never let go of the practical work of building the Soviet state.

Arrested in September 1937, she was produced as a prosecution witness at the Bukharin trial of 1938 to testify about the alleged Left Communist "plot" of 1918, and was then sentenced to twenty years. On 11 September 1941, as the Wehrmacht approached Oryol, she was taken from the prison with Rakovsky, Spiridonova and some 150 other inmates and shot in the Medvedev Forest. She was rehabilitated in 1958. Her life testifies at once to the possibilities the revolution opened to women and to what the Terror took away.

Arrested in 1937, Yakovleva was subjected to a fifteen-day continuous interrogation with sleep deprivation, after which she broke and signed a confession. In March 1938, at the Third Moscow Trial (the trial of the 'Anti-Soviet Right-Trotskyist Bloc') she appeared as a witness for the prosecution against Nikolai Bukharin. The sight of her denouncing comrades from the Left Opposition she had once led became emblematic of the Old Bolshevik generation's tragedy. Sentenced to 20 years, she was being transferred toward Kazan in a prison train when she encountered Valentina Polyakova, whose husband Abram Kamensky had been executed on the basis of Yakovleva's false testimony. Confronted, Yakovleva admitted: 'I gave false testimony on the orders of Commissar Yezhov. They wouldn't let me sleep for fifteen days and nights. I lost control and signed.' The exchange was recorded in Polyakova's 1954 letter to the Procurator-General of the USSR.