People of the Revolution and the USSR

Soviet Union Soviet communism 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.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1899–1981 ○ Natural causes, Moscow

The NKVD's master of covert action: from Trotsky's assassination to Soviet atomic espionage

On 20 August 1940 in Coyoacán, Eitingon and Caridad Mercader waited in separate cars while Mercader struck Trotsky, and fled when Mercader was detained.

Born into a Jewish family in Shklov, Belarus, he survived a pogrom as a child, joined the SRs in 1917, switched to the Bolsheviks during the Civil War, and rose through the Gomel Cheka. As an OGPU Foreign Department operative he ran undercover missions in China, Turkey, and Western Europe; during the Spanish Civil War he was Orlov's deputy and directed the transfer of Republican gold to the USSR. In 1940 he and Sudoplatov designed the operation that killed Trotsky, and in the German-Soviet war he masterminded strategic deception operations behind enemy lines as deputy head of the 4th Directorate. After the war he oversaw atomic intelligence as deputy head of Department S, but was arrested in 1951 and served twelve years; released in 1964, he worked as a publishing-house editor until his death of natural causes in Moscow in 1981, and was rehabilitated posthumously in 1992.