People of the Revolution and the USSR

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1886–1937 ✕ Gunshot death, attributed to suicide

Commander of the industrial front: he pulled the trigger himself

Around his fiftieth birthday in October 1936, shaken by news of his brother Papulia's arrest, he refused to attend the celebration held in his honour at Pyatigorsk; his wife Zinaida went alone.

An Old Bolshevik who joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1903, he was elected to the Central Committee at the Prague conference of 1912 and became a full Politburo member in 1930. He directed the Sovietization of the Caucasus and the creation of the Transcaucasian Federation, headed the Central Control Commission and Rabkrin in 1926–30 and the Supreme Economic Council in 1930–32, then led the First and Second Five-Year Plans as People's Commissar of Heavy Industry from 1932. At the commissariat he opposed mass repression in his own branch and shielded his cadres; he died in Moscow on 18 February 1937, with the official announcement giving heart failure as the cause. The purge of his deputies and relatives, and the circumstances of his death, are recorded alongside competing accounts of how he died.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1887–1937 ✕ Executed

First People's Commissar of Posts and Telegraphs who later built Rostselmash, flagship of Soviet agricultural machinery

In June 1918 at Novorossiysk, as Commissar of the Black Sea Fleet, he ordered the fleet scuttled rather than surrendered to the Germans, instructing sailors: "Moscow will radio orders to sail to Sevastopol for diplomatic reasons — do not count that radio as an order."

Nikolai Glebov-Avilov was a Bolshevik revolutionary from 1904 who ran underground printshops during the 1905 Revolution. After October 1917 he became the first People's Commissar of Posts and Telegraphs in the inaugural Sovnarkom, then served as VTsSPS secretary and chairman of the Petrograd Trade Union Council, emerging as a central figure in Bolshevik trade union politics. At the Fourteenth Party Congress in 1925 he led the Leningrad Opposition alongside Grigory Zinoviev and was removed; he later became first director of Rostselmash (1929–1936), building the Soviet Union's flagship agricultural machinery plant. Arrested in the Great Purge, he was executed in 1937 and rehabilitated in 1956.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1888–1941 ✕ Suicide

Builder of Soviet defence industry in the shadow of his brother Lazar

1 July 1941, Mikoyan's office. Confronted with a confession extracted by torture, he stepped outside to wait — and shot himself in the lavatory before they could arrest him.

A Bolshevik metalworker, he rose through Ordzhonikidze's heavy-industry apparatus to become People's Commissar for Defence Industry (1937–1939) and Aviation Industry (1939–1940), building the organizational framework of Soviet military production during the Great Purge. Elder brother of Lazar Kaganovich, he was notorious for a loud, lecturing style and dependence on talented deputies; dismissed in 1940, he shot himself in the lavatory of Mikoyan's office just after the German invasion, when Vannikov under torture falsely implicated him.