People of the Revolution and the USSR

GlossaryRussian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP)

Pyotr Berngardovich Struve

Пётр Бернгардович Струве

From Marxism through liberalism to conservative anti-Bolshevism: the thinker who traced the arc of a Russian intelligentsia

Vasily Shulgin recalled asking him: “So you too should have been crushed?” Struve, trembling his white beard, rose and shouted: “Yes! Me first! The moment a revolutionary raises his head — whack! — a rifle butt to the skull!”

A thinker who moved from legal Marxism through liberal activism, co-founding the Union of Liberation and contributing to Vekhi (1909), to becoming a White ideologue. He wrote the first RSDLP Manifesto (1898) and sustained anti-Bolshevik scholarship in emigration.

Career timeline
  • 1894Critical Notes on Russia's Economic Development, leading legal Marxist
  • 1898Drafted the Manifesto of the 1st RSDLP Congress
  • 1902–1905Edited Osvobozhdenie; co-founded the Union of Liberation
  • 1905–1915Kadet CC member; contributor to Vekhi (1909)
  • 1907Deputy to the Second State Duma (Petersburg)
  • 1917Full Academician; Director of Economic Dept, MFA
  • 1918–1920White ideologue; foreign relations for Denikin and Wrangel
  • 1921–1944Émigré editor and scholar, Vozrozhdenie and other journals

Roman Vatslavovich Malinovsky

Роман Вацлавович Малиновский

Bolshevik Central Committee member and Duma leader who was the Okhrana's best-paid spy

At a Bolshevik fundraising ball in February 1913, Stalin — wearing a suit and silk cravat lent by Malinovsky — was arrested while Malinovsky was talking to him; Malinovsky shouted he would free him.

A Polish-born labour organiser who rose to the Bolshevik Central Committee and leadership of the party's Duma faction (1912), Malinovsky was simultaneously the Okhrana's highest-paid secret agent, codenamed 'Portnoi' (the Tailor). Having won Lenin's deep trust, he penetrated the party leadership and enabled the arrests of Ordzhonikidze, Sverdlov, and Stalin, while deepening the Bolshevik-Menshevik split on police instructions. Forced to resign in 1914, he returned to Soviet Russia in 1918, was convicted by the Supreme Tribunal, and executed by firing squad in the Kremlin. His exposure deepened the culture of conspiratorial mistrust within the Bolsheviks, contributing to the paranoid logic that later fuelled the Great Terror.

Career timeline
  • 1901–1905Served in Izmailovsky Guards Regiment
  • 1906–1909Secretary, St. Petersburg Metalworkers Union
  • 1910Recruited as Okhrana secret agent 'Portnoi'
  • 1912Elected to Bolshevik Central Committee at Prague Conference
  • 1912–1914Bolshevik deputy, Fourth State Duma; faction leader
  • 1914.05Forced resignation; fled abroad
  • 1914–1918POW in German prison camp
  • 1918.11Returned; sentenced to death by Supreme Tribunal; shot