People of the Revolution and the USSR

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1874–1934 ○ Natural causes

Dzerzhinsky’s successor who ran OGPU from a sickbed

On his first day as People's Commissar for Finance, he dragged a sofa into his office, tacked a note saying 'Commissariat of Finance' on it, and lay down. Lenin walked in and found him asleep.

A Polish noble turned Bolshevik, he was a polyglot intellectual who mastered 19 languages and published fiction in Silver Age literary circles. He chaired the OGPU from 1926 to 1934 after Dzerzhinsky's death, overseeing collectivization, the early show trials, and the expansion of the Gulag system. Crippled by a Paris car accident and heart disease, he directed the agency mostly from his sickbed while day-to-day power shifted to Yagoda.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1878–1938 ○ Perforated ulcer

The Cheka executioner who personally shot the last Tsar

I told Nicholas the Soviet of Workers' Deputies had resolved to shoot them. He asked 'What?' and turned toward Alexei — at that moment I shot him and killed him outright.

Born to a Jewish working-class family in Tomsk province, he trained as a watchmaker and joined the Bolsheviks in 1905. As commandant of Ipatiev House in July 1918, he personally directed the execution of Nicholas II and the Romanov family, shooting the Tsar with his Mauser pistol and overseeing the concealment and destruction of the bodies. After the Civil War he served as head of Yekaterinburg Gubernia Cheka and a Moscow district Cheka chief, then from 1921 headed the Gold Department of Gokhran, where he earned a reputation for fighting corruption. He ended his career as director of the Polytechnical Museum in Moscow and died of a perforated ulcer in 1938, shortly after his daughter Rimma was arrested as a Trotskyite during the Great Purge.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1878–1941 ✕ Executed

Old Bolshevik who led the Cheka Special Department, building the Red Terror in the North and the earliest Soviet camp system

“I suffer innocently. Please believe me. Time will testify to the truth.” — from his letter to Andreyev from Lefortovo prison, 1939, read aloud by Khrushchev at the 20th Party Congress Secret Speech in 1956.

A Bolshevik military organiser who became head of the Cheka's Military Section (later the Special Department) in September 1918, he directed the Red Terror across the Northern Front: executing thousands in Arkhangelsk and Vologda, establishing the Kholmogory extermination camp, and closing the Solovetsky Monastery to found one of the earliest Soviet forced-labour camps. His wife Olga's sisters married Nikolai Podvoisky and were the mother of Artur Artuzov, placing Kedrov at the centre of a Chekist family network. After leaving the Cheka in 1921 due to ill health, he drifted through peripheral economic and health posts before his arrest in 1939; acquitted in July 1941, he was shot on Beria's order in Saratov that November.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1883–1938 ✕ Executed

The security viceroy of the Far East

On 11 August 1937, Yezhov forwarded Lyushkov's telegram to Stalin, who scribbled in the margin: 'Deribas will have to be arrested. St.' Molotov and Voroshilov added 'For,' and Deribas was arrested the next day.

An old Bolshevik Chekist who served as OGPU-NKVD plenipotentiary for the Far East from 1929, directing the Maki-Mirage counter-intelligence operation against Japan and forced-labour construction of the BAM. After eight years as the region's 'viceroy,' he was swept up in the Great Purge and shot in 1938.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1884–1926 ○ Natural causes

The Cheka's perpetual number two who built its revolutionary tribunal system

“A man of crystalline purity and selfless devotion to the party… an innate gentleness coexisting with an inexorability cultivated by dangerous work wherever the interests of the revolution demanded it.” — fellow Chekists' tribute, 1926

A Bolshevik from a Smolensk peasant family who entered revolutionary politics as a Moscow textile worker. He joined the Cheka at its founding in December 1917 as Dzerzhinsky's secretary, then served as First Deputy Chairman (1919–1921) and Chairman of the Special Tribunal, directing the suppression of the Left SR uprising, the 'Tactical Center' trial, and the Kronstadt rebellion. Throughout the Civil War he was one of the 'unchanging leadership core of four' alongside Dzerzhinsky, Peters, and Latsis. From 1922 to 1925, as Administrator of Affairs of the Party Central Committee, he assisted Stalin in tightening control of the party apparatus; in his final year he served as Deputy Commissar of Social Security.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1891–1938 ✕ Executed

NKVD chief who signed the Romanov execution and joined the Left Opposition

"Inform Sverdlov the whole family have shared the same fate as the head. Officially the family will die at the evacuation." — coded telegram to Lenin's secretary after the Romanov execution, 17 July 1918

A Bolshevik who rose to prominence in the Urals, he signed the Ural Soviet's decision to execute Nicholas II and the Romanov family in 1918 as its chairman. As People's Commissar of Internal Affairs of the RSFSR (1923–1927), succeeding Dzerzhinsky, he oversaw Soviet police and penal administration. He joined the Left Opposition by signing the Declaration of 46 in 1923, was expelled from the party in 1927, recanted in 1930, but was arrested during the Great Purge and executed in 1938.