People of the Revolution and the USSR

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1871–1923 ✕ Assassinated

The first Soviet diplomat, a bridge between revolution, letters, and diplomacy, felled by a bullet in Lausanne

10 May 1923, the restaurant of the Hôtel Cécile, Lausanne. During dinner, White émigré officer Maurice Conradi approached and fired his pistol. Handing the revolver to the maître d', he said: "I have done a good deed — the Russian Bolsheviks have ruined all of Europe… This will benefit the whole world."

Vorovsky was a pioneer of Russian Marxist literary criticism and among the very first Soviet diplomats. Of Polish noble descent, he joined the Bolsheviks in 1903 and contributed sharp literary criticism and political feuilletons to Iskra and the party press under pseudonyms including P. Orlovsky. Appointed Soviet diplomatic representative to Scandinavia in late 1917, he opened revolutionary Russia's first diplomatic channels; from 1921 he served as Polpred to Italy and took part in the Genoa Conference. In 1923, while attending the Lausanne Conference, he was assassinated by a White émigré officer. The Swiss jury's acquittal of the killer led the USSR to sever diplomatic relations with Switzerland.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1872–1936 ○ Natural causes

The first foreign commissar who translated the revolution into diplomacy

"Chicherin is a superb worker, most conscientious, intelligent, knowledgeable. Such people should be valued. That his weakness is a lack of 'commandership' — that is not a problem." — Lenin, July 1918

Born in 1872 at the Karaul estate, Tambov Governorate, into an old Russian noble family, he headed Soviet diplomacy for thirteen years until 1930. Taking over from Trotsky as Foreign Commissar in 1918, he broke the Versailles quarantine at Rapallo in 1922. Commissar for the USSR from 1923, he stepped down to Maxim Litvinov in 1930, his health ruined.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1876–1951 ○ Natural causes

The diplomat of collective security, removed in 1939

The slogan that came to symbolize his collective-security diplomacy was that peace is indivisible. The sources do not fix a single occasion: the League of Nations plenum speech whose title explicitly takes up the indivisibility of peace is dated 1 July 1936.

Russian revolutionary and Soviet diplomat. Born in 1876 in Białystok, Grodno Governorate of the Russian Empire (today Poland), into a Jewish merchant family, as Meir-Henoch Wallach. As People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs in 1930–1939 he championed collective security; in May 1939 Stalin dismissed him and installed Molotov. During the Great Purge he publicly endorsed the purges and the campaign against the Trotskyites, and, sitting on the committee that decided the fate of Bukharin and Rykov, voted to expel and try them but not to execute them. In 1940 the NKVD planned his secret killing; it was not carried out. After the German invasion he returned to service as Deputy People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs and was Soviet ambassador to the United States in 1941–1943, concurrently envoy to Cuba. He died in Moscow on 31 December 1951 and was buried at Novodevichy Cemetery.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1882–1955 ○ Natural causes

From tsarist artillery officer to Stalin's first ambassador to Washington: a Russian nobleman who crossed revolution and diplomacy

At a White House reception, Roosevelt declared: 'If Mr. Troyanovsky says, looking at the moon, that this is the sun, I personally, gentlemen, will believe him.'

Alexander Troyanovsky was the first Soviet plenipotentiary to the United States, appointed in 1933 upon the establishment of diplomatic relations, and the architect of early cooperative ties with the Roosevelt administration. Born to hereditary nobility, trained as a tsarist artillery officer, he joined the Bolsheviks in 1904, broke with them for the Mensheviks in 1914, served on the Menshevik Central Committee and in the Constituent Assembly, then joined the Bolshevik Party in 1923 and entered Stalin's foreign-trade and diplomatic apparatus. As plenipotentiary to Japan (1927–1933) and then Washington, he negotiated the 1935 US–Soviet trade agreement and repeatedly urged Stalin to pursue rapprochement with America against Nazi Germany. His son Oleg Troyanovsky later served as Soviet Permanent Representative to the UN, founding one of the Soviet era's most durable diplomatic dynasties.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1884–1975 ○ Natural causes

From Menshevik to Soviet envoy to the British Empire: a convert and survivor who stood at the center of world-war diplomacy

In November 1918 he wrote to the Menshevik Central Committee that he was "fortunate to have the great honor of taking part in the last heroic-desperate attempt of democracy to save the revolution." Two years later he joined the Bolsheviks.

A Soviet diplomat and historian who crossed from Menshevism to Bolshevism. As ambassador to Britain for eleven years from 1932, he served as a central channel of wartime Allied diplomacy and signed the Maisky–Sikorski agreement restoring Soviet-Polish relations. After the war, as Deputy People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs, he took part in the Yalta and Potsdam conferences and led the commission on German reparations. His London diplomatic diary is regarded as an unparalleled source on the inner workings of interwar and wartime Soviet diplomacy.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1890–1986 ○ Natural causes

“Stone-arse”: the man who never changed his mind

His wife Polina Zhemchuzhina was arrested for treason in December 1948 and forced into divorce, and was released only after Stalin's death in 1953. Throughout, Molotov is said to have had dinner set for two every evening. 'She suffered because of me,' he said later.

An Old Bolshevik who joined the RSDLP in 1906 and was arrested and internally exiled twice before 1917. A full Politburo member from 1926, he became premier in 1930, overseeing collectivisation and the Great Purge; in 1939 he signed the Nazi–Soviet pact. As deputy chair of the State Defence Committee he attended the Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam conferences, and he initiated the 'Molotov Plan' against the Marshall Plan. In 1957 he failed to oust Khrushchev; sources date his expulsion to 1961 or 1962. Readmitted in 1984, he died in 1986.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1892–1939 → Died

From Volga flotilla commander to exile critic: the diplomat who wrote Stalin an open letter

December 1918, aboard the destroyer Spartak — disguised as an Estonian sailor and hidden among potato sacks, he was exposed when it turned out he didn't speak a word of Estonian.

Bolshevik naval commander of the Volga and Baltic fleets during the Civil War. As a Soviet diplomat he refused recall in 1938 and defected, publishing his 'Open Letter to Stalin' in 1939, a public denunciation of the Great Purge.