The Bessarabian 'Red Robin Hood' who rose from Tsarist outlaw to legendary Soviet Civil War commander
In May 1917, during Carmen at the Odesa Opera House, the recently pardoned Kotovsky appeared to a standing ovation, delivered a revolutionary speech from the stage, and watched his prison shackles auctioned for 10,000 rubles.
A Bessarabian revolutionary commander. Notorious under the Tsar as a bandit who sided with the poor, he led Red cavalry in the Civil War and helped establish the Moldavian ASSR. Mythologized in his lifetime as a legend of Soviet folklore; murdered in 1925.
Career timeline
1905–1916Led armed raiding bands in Bessarabia and Odesa; repeatedly arrested and escaped; sentenced to death 1916, commuted to hard labor
1917Amnestied after February Revolution; served on Romanian Front, awarded George Cross for bravery; joined Left SRs
1918–1919Commanded cavalry in Tiraspol Detachment defending Odesa Soviet Republic; military commissar of Ovidiopol, commander 2nd Brigade, 45th Rifle Division
1920Awarded Order of the Red Banner; joined RCP(b); commanded cavalry brigade on Soviet-Polish front
1921Commander, 17th Cavalry Division of Red Cossacks; wounded suppressing Makhnovist and Antonov uprisings; awarded Honorary Revolutionary Weapon and second Red Banner
1922–1924Commander, 2nd Cavalry Corps; contributed to founding Moldavian ASSR; awarded third Order of the Red Banner
1924–1925Member of USSR Central Executive Committee and Ukrainian/Moldavian CECs; member of Revolutionary Military Council
Left SR who organised the 1918 assassination of the German field marshal Eichhorn in Kiev and spent decades in Soviet prisons and exile
In 1918, she and Boris Donskoy prepared the assassination of German occupation commander Hermann von Eichhorn in Kiev; her attempt to kill Hetman Skoropadskyi failed.
A grandniece of the Decembrist Pyotr Kakhovsky, she joined the SR Maximalists after 1905 and in 1908 was sentenced to hard labour, which she served at Nerchinsk alongside Maria Spiridonova. After the October Revolution she went with the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries and sat on the presidium of the Second Congress of Soviets. When the Left SR leadership resumed terror against the Brest-Litovsk peace in 1918, she and Boris Donskoy prepared the killing of Field Marshal Eichhorn in Kiev; her attempt on Hetman Skoropadskyi failed, and the Germans sentenced her to death but released her in January 1919. From 1921 she passed through Soviet exile, the 1937 "All-Union SR Centre" trial and the Krasnoyarsk camps, was released in 1954 and spent her last years keeping alive the memory of Spiridonova and Izmailovich.
Career timeline
1906–1914SR Maximalist; arrested 1907; hard labour at Nerchinsk
1917–1918Left SR; member of the presidium of the Second Congress of Soviets
1918–1919Left SR combat organisation; organised the Eichhorn assassination; sentenced to death by the Germans, released
1921–1954Arrests and exile; ten years in 1937; Krasnoyarsk camp
The man whose name became the rebellion: SR leader of the Tambov 'Antonovshchina,' the largest peasant uprising against Bolshevik rule
'Power was not torn from the hands of the tsarist executioners to be handed over to a handful of executioner-communists' — from a leaflet distributed during the uprising
A Socialist Revolutionary militant who served a twenty-year katorga sentence in the Schlisselburg Fortress under the Tsar for armed expropriations. Freed by the February Revolution, he became chief of the Kirsanov district militia, but the Bolsheviks' grain requisitioning and local repression drove him underground in 1918. In August 1920 he seized leadership of the Tambov peasant uprising, building a partisan army of roughly twenty regiments and an alternative government based on Unions of the Working Peasantry: the revolt was so identified with him that it became known as the 'Antonovshchina.' He was killed in a firefight with GPU forces alongside his brother Dmitri in June 1922.
Career timeline
1905Joined the SR Party; participated in armed expropriations
Left SR sailor who killed the German field marshal Eichhorn with a bomb in Kiev in 1918 and was hanged
A member of the Left SR combat organisation who worked against the German occupation of Ukraine, he was convicted by a German military court and hanged after the 1918 assassination of Eichhorn.
A peasant from Ryazan Governorate who went to Petrograd at fifteen and was conscripted into the Baltic Fleet in 1915. He joined the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries in 1916 and was arrested for organising a sailors' hunger strike. Freed by the February Revolution, he sat on the Kronstadt executive committee, led Baltic sailors against Kornilov and in October 1917 was commissar of Fort Ino. In spring 1918 he went to Ukraine with Irina Kakhovskaya to organise resistance to the German occupation and joined the Left SR combat organisation. On 30 July 1918 in Kiev he threw the bomb that killed Field Marshal Hermann von Eichhorn; a German military court sentenced him to death and he was publicly hanged on 10 August.
Career timeline
1915–1917Sailor on the transport Asia, Baltic Fleet; joined the Left SRs in 1916
1917Member of the Kronstadt executive committee; commissar of Fort Ino in the October Revolution
1918Member of the Left SR combat organisation; assassinated Eichhorn in Kiev on 30 July; hanged on 10 August
Moldovan nobleman turned Bolshevik revolutionary who established Soviet power in the Far East
Standing alone and unarmed before the cadets of Russky Island, Lazo declared: 'For this Russian land on which I now stand, we will die but give it to no one!'
A Moldovan boyar by birth and an Imperial Russian Army officer, Lazo joined the 1917 Revolution and became the Bolshevik military leader who established Soviet power across Siberia and the Russian Far East. He seized control of Krasnoyarsk for the Soviet, commanded the Transbaikal Front against Grigory Semyonov's White forces, and after underground work and partisan warfare in Primorye, organized the January 1920 Vladivostok uprising that ended Kolchak's rule in the Far East. Captured by Japanese troops in April 1920, he was burned alive in a locomotive firebox alongside his comrades, becoming one of the most commemorated martyrs of the Soviet Civil War.
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.
Career timeline
1917–1919Joined SR Party; worker and cooperative organizer in Mogilev; joined RCP(b) 1919
1920–1924Gomel Cheka — deputy head of secret-operations; wounded fighting Savinkov; graduated Military Academy Eastern Dept
1925–1930OGPU Foreign Dept — covert ops in China and Turkey; vice-consul, Harbin
1930–1936OGPU Special Operations — assistant to Serebryansky; head of INO illegal operations section
1936–1939Spanish Civil War — deputy NKVD resident (Gen. Kotov); Republican gold transfer to USSR
1940Co-directed Operation Duck with Sudoplatov — Trotsky's assassination in Mexico
1941–1945Deputy head, 4th NKVD Directorate — ran deception ops Monastery and Berezino
1945–1951Deputy head, Dept. S — atomic intelligence; operations against anti-Soviet partisans
1951–1964Arrested in MGB 'Zionist conspiracy' case, 12 years; briefly reinstated by Beria 1953, rearrested
1964–1981Released; senior editor at publishing house; posthumously rehabilitated 1992
