People of the Revolution and the USSR

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1881–1925 ✕ Murdered

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.

Party of Left Socialist Revolutionaries Soviet communism 1887–1961 ○ Died

Revolutionary who went from Left SR leader to architect of Soviet chemical warfare

In July 1918, Left SR Central Committee member Fishman personally manufactured the two bombs used to assassinate German ambassador Wilhelm von Mirbach and handed them to his comrades.

An SR militant who escaped Siberian exile to study explosives and poison-gas chemistry at the University of Naples, Fishman returned in 1917, became a Left SR Central Committee member, and personally manufactured the bombs for the 1918 assassination of German ambassador Mirbach. After joining the Bolsheviks in 1920, he was appointed the first head of the Red Army's Military-Chemical Directorate (VOKhIMU) in 1925, laying the foundations of the Soviet chemical and biological weapons program; his 1928 report to Voroshilov argued for the offensive use of bacteriological warfare. Arrested in 1937 and sentenced to ten years, he developed a new gas mask model at the NKVD Special Technical Bureau; he was rehabilitated in 1955 with the rank of major general of technical troops.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1891–1920 ○ Typhus

The Left SR figurehead chairman of the MRC, lending a non-Bolshevik face to the Bolshevik insurrection while Trotsky directed operations

On the night of 21 October 1917 Lazimir, as MRC chairman, went with Sadovsky and Mekhonoshin to military district headquarters to claim supreme authority over the garrison; Colonel Polkovnikov refused, saying he did not recognise their commissars and would arrest them if they broke the law.

A feldsher at the Petrograd military hospital who turned to SR agitation among soldiers, Pavel Lazimir rose after the February Revolution to chair the soldiers' section of the Petrograd Soviet. In October 1917 the Bolsheviks installed him, a Left SR, as chairman of the newly created Military Revolutionary Committee to give the body a non-Bolshevik front; the real direction came from Trotsky, while Lazimir himself drafted the MRC's founding statute. He joined the Bolsheviks in 1918 and served on the Revolutionary Military Council of the Southern Front, organizing supply and sanitation, before dying of typhus in 1920 at twenty-nine.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1894–1920 ✕ Burned alive

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 state institutions 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 state institutions 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.