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.
Career timeline
1905–1916Led armed raiding bands in Bessarabia and Odesa; repeatedly arrested and escaped; sentenced to death 1916, commuted to hard labor
1917Amnestied after February Revolution; served on Romanian Front, awarded George Cross for bravery; joined Left SRs
1918–1919Commanded cavalry in Tiraspol Detachment defending Odesa Soviet Republic; military commissar of Ovidiopol, commander 2nd Brigade, 45th Rifle Division
1920Awarded Order of the Red Banner; joined RCP(b); commanded cavalry brigade on Soviet-Polish front
1921Commander, 17th Cavalry Division of Red Cossacks; wounded suppressing Makhnovist and Antonov uprisings; awarded Honorary Revolutionary Weapon and second Red Banner
1922–1924Commander, 2nd Cavalry Corps; contributed to founding Moldavian ASSR; awarded third Order of the Red Banner
1924–1925Member of USSR Central Executive Committee and Ukrainian/Moldavian CECs; member of Revolutionary Military Council
Author of 'Notes on the Revolution' and agrarian economist in whose apartment the Bolshevik CC voted for armed uprising
"Sukhanov is one of the best representatives of the petty bourgeoisie" — Lenin, Sept 1, 1917
Born Nikolai Gimmer. A founding member of the Petrograd Soviet Executive Committee after the February Revolution, he belonged to the Menshevik-Internationalists, opposing the war and the Provisional Government while arguing for a united socialist coalition. His seven-volume memoir 'Notes on the Revolution' remains one of the most vivid primary sources on 1917. On October 10, 1917, the Bolshevik CC met in his Petrograd apartment and resolved on armed uprising. Sentenced to 10 years at the 1931 Menshevik Trial and shot on false charges in 1940; posthumously rehabilitated.
Career timeline
1903–1905Joined SR Party; arrested 1904 in Taganka Prison; freed Oct 1905, took part in Moscow December armed uprising
1911–1913Exiled 3 years to Arkhangelsk; compiled agricultural census data
1914–1917Editor of 'Sovremennik' and 'Letopis'; anti-war internationalist; Feb 1917 founding member of Petrograd Soviet Executive Committee, launched first 'Izvestiya'
1917–1918Menshevik-Internationalist; editor of 'Novaya Zhizn'; VTsIK member 2nd–4th convocations; expelled June 1918
1919–1923Wrote and published 7-volume memoir 'Notes on the Revolution' (Записки о революции)
1920–1929Left Menshevik Party; worked in trade agencies & Agrarian Institute; Communist Academy member; 1928 speech opposing forced collectivization
1931Sentenced to 10 years at Menshevik Trial; imprisoned in Verkhneuralsk political isolator
1940Sentenced to death June 29; shot same day in Omsk prison
Face of the Left SR Party and peasant tribune: the last revolutionary opposition leader to challenge the Bolsheviks from the left
"I undertook this sentence because my heart was tearing from pain... it was shameful and hard to live, hearing what was happening in the villages after Luzhenovsky." — Trial statement, 1906
A leading woman revolutionary of the Russian movement. Born in Tambov into a non-hereditary noble family, she left gymnasium in 1902 before joining the SRs. In 1906 she assassinated Tambov official Luzhenovsky over his suppression of peasants and became a national hero; her death sentence was commuted to lifetime hard labor at Nerchinsk. Freed by the February Revolution, she became a leader of the Left SR Party and chaired the All-Russian Peasant Congresses, and was nominated for Chair of the Constituent Assembly with Bolshevik support (153 votes to Chernov's 244). She broke with the Bolsheviks in 1918 and joined the Left SR uprising, then endured decades of arrest and exile. Rearrested in Ufa in 1937, she was sentenced to 25 years and shot near Oryol on 11 September 1941; Russian sources record 157 political prisoners executed there.
Career timeline
1905Joined the SR Party and its combat brigade
1906Assassinated Tambov official Luzhenovsky; sentenced to death, commuted to lifetime hard labor at Nerchinsk
1917Freed by February Revolution; Left SR leader, chair of All-Russian Peasant Congresses, VTsIK member
1918.01Nominated by Bolshevik faction for Chair of the Constituent Assembly (153 votes to Chernov's 244)
1918.07Joined Left SR uprising, arrested; sentenced to 1 year, then amnestied
Co-founder and chief theoretician of the Left SR Party: from coalition with the Bolsheviks to the July 1918 uprising
"We, as political actors, at a moment when an event of immense historical significance is taking place, could least of all occupy ourselves with moral characterization. It was clear to us that our place was with the revolution." — First PLSR Congress, November 1917
Co-founder and chief theoretician of the Left SR Party. Entered coalition with the Bolsheviks, then led the July 1918 uprising against the Brest-Litovsk Treaty. After its suppression he endured repeated exile and was executed in 1938.
Career timeline
1904Joined SR combat organization; arrested and exiled to Turukhansk
1907Escaped abroad, émigré activity in Geneva and Paris; graduated Heidelberg law faculty (1911)
1915Attended Zimmerwald Conference; active as anti-war internationalist
1917.04–11Returned to Russia, co-founded PLSR; VTsIK Presidium member, head of International Department
1917.11Elected to Constituent Assembly (Petrograd capital district, SR list no. 9)
1918.04Elected Chairman of the PLSR Central Committee Presidium
1918.07Led opposition to Brest-Litovsk and the July uprising; went underground after suppression
1920–1937Repeated arrests and exile (Chelyabinsk, Tver, Voronezh, Arkhangelsk); worked as an economist
1938Sentenced to death by VKVS; executed 29 August at Kommunarka; posthumously rehabilitated 1992
Left SR who organised the 1918 assassination of the German field marshal Eichhorn in Kiev and spent decades in Soviet prisons and exile
In 1918, she and Boris Donskoy prepared the assassination of German occupation commander Hermann von Eichhorn in Kiev; her attempt to kill Hetman Skoropadskyi failed.
A grandniece of the Decembrist Pyotr Kakhovsky, she joined the SR Maximalists after 1905 and in 1908 was sentenced to hard labour, which she served at Nerchinsk alongside Maria Spiridonova. After the October Revolution she went with the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries and sat on the presidium of the Second Congress of Soviets. When the Left SR leadership resumed terror against the Brest-Litovsk peace in 1918, she and Boris Donskoy prepared the killing of Field Marshal Eichhorn in Kiev; her attempt on Hetman Skoropadskyi failed, and the Germans sentenced her to death but released her in January 1919. From 1921 she passed through Soviet exile, the 1937 "All-Union SR Centre" trial and the Krasnoyarsk camps, was released in 1954 and spent her last years keeping alive the memory of Spiridonova and Izmailovich.
Career timeline
1906–1914SR Maximalist; arrested 1907; hard labour at Nerchinsk
1917–1918Left SR; member of the presidium of the Second Congress of Soviets
1918–1919Left SR combat organisation; organised the Eichhorn assassination; sentenced to death by the Germans, released
1921–1954Arrests and exile; ten years in 1937; Krasnoyarsk camp
First People's Commissar of Justice under Lenin: the Left SR who defended revolutionary legality against the Cheka
"Then why bother with a Commissariat for Justice? Let's call it frankly the Commissariat for Social Extermination!" — to Lenin, protesting a Cheka summary-execution clause, February 1918
Left SR lawyer, first People's Commissar of Justice in Lenin's coalition government. He championed revolutionary legality against the Cheka and resigned over the Brest-Litovsk Treaty. In exile he was a Yiddish writer and territorialist activist.
Career timeline
1906Joined the Socialist-Revolutionary Party while at Moscow University
1908Arrested, exiled to Tobolsk province for 2 years; later earned law master's at Heidelberg
1915Arrested for anti-war work, exiled to Ufa; practiced law and led Ufa Left SRs
1917Elected to Constituent Assembly (Ufa), Left SR Central Committee, executive of All-Russian Council of Peasant Deputies
1917.12–1918.03People's Commissar of Justice: restricted Cheka powers, freed political prisoners, issued Revolutionary Tribunal rules; resigned over Brest-Litovsk
1918Organized partisan detachments in Kursk and Taganrog; detained by Cheka for 4.5 months in 1919
1923Emigrated to Berlin, stripped of Soviet citizenship; co-founded 'Skify' publishing, joined Vienna International
1933–1957Co-founded Freeland League in London, pursued Kimberley Plan; edited Yiddish journal Afn Shvel; died in New York
The man whose name became the rebellion: SR leader of the Tambov 'Antonovshchina,' the largest peasant uprising against Bolshevik rule
'Power was not torn from the hands of the tsarist executioners to be handed over to a handful of executioner-communists' — from a leaflet distributed during the uprising
A Socialist Revolutionary militant who served a twenty-year katorga sentence in the Schlisselburg Fortress under the Tsar for armed expropriations. Freed by the February Revolution, he became chief of the Kirsanov district militia, but the Bolsheviks' grain requisitioning and local repression drove him underground in 1918. In August 1920 he seized leadership of the Tambov peasant uprising, building a partisan army of roughly twenty regiments and an alternative government based on Unions of the Working Peasantry: the revolt was so identified with him that it became known as the 'Antonovshchina.' He was killed in a firefight with GPU forces alongside his brother Dmitri in June 1922.
Career timeline
1905Joined the SR Party; participated in armed expropriations
The SR activist who shot Lenin, believing him a 'traitor to the revolution'
At her Cheka interrogation: 'Today I shot Lenin. I did it on my own. I consider him a traitor to the Revolution. I favoured the Constituent Assembly and am still for it.'
Born into a Jewish teacher's family in Volhynia, Fanny Kaplan took up anarchism at 15 and was arrested at 16 for a bomb plot against the governor of Kiev, earning a life sentence to Siberian hard labour. During eleven years in prison she went blind and partially recovered, and under Maria Spiridonova's influence joined the Socialist Revolutionary Party. Freed by the February Revolution of 1917, she came to see Lenin as a traitor to the revolution after the Bolsheviks dissolved the Constituent Assembly, and on 30 August 1918 fired three shots at him outside Moscow's Michelson factory. The attempt, along with the same-day assassination of Moisei Uritsky, triggered the Red Terror; Kaplan was shot in the Kremlin four days later.
Career timeline
1906Arrested in Kiev for a bomb plot targeting Governor Sukhomlinov
1907–1917Served life sentence at Maltsev and Akatuy prisons, Nerchinsk katorga; went blind and partially recovered
1917Released under Provisional Government amnesty after February Revolution; resumed SR activity
1918.08.30Fired three shots from a Browning pistol at Lenin outside Moscow's Michelson factory, wounding him seriously
1918.09.03Shot in the Kremlin by Pavel Malkov after Cheka interrogation
The revolutionary who ordered the Kremlin shelled, and the proletarian writer who published thirty books
On 24 January 1924, Arosev signed a receipt for the Lenin Institute: 'a glass jar containing the brain, the heart of Ilyich, and the bullet extracted from his body.' 'I am personally responsible for its complete integrity and safekeeping.'
The son of a Kazan tailor, he was recruited into Bolshevism in 1907 by his childhood friend Vyacheslav Molotov. During the October 1917 uprising he sat on the Moscow Military Revolutionary Committee and gave the order to shell the Kremlin; during the Civil War he chaired the Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal of Ukraine, spearheading the Red Terror. In 1934 he became the first chairman of VOKS, building the institutional framework for Soviet cultural diplomacy, after serving as ambassador to Lithuania, Czechoslovakia, and France. A prolific proletarian writer (more than thirty novels, plays, and memoirs), he was noted for an autobiographical style that probed the inner psychology of Party life. But in 1937 he was arrested and shot the following year; rehabilitated in 1956.
Career timeline
1907Joined RSDLP (Bolsheviks)
1917.10Member, Moscow MRC; ordered shelling of the Kremlin
1918Commissar, Glavvozdukhflot (Red Air Fleet)
1920Chairman, Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal of Ukraine
1921–1927Deputy Director, Lenin Institute; Cheka/OGPU; diplomat in France, Sweden
1927–1928USSR Plenipotentiary to Lithuania
1929–1933USSR Plenipotentiary to Czechoslovakia
1934–1937Chairman, VOKS (All-Union Society for Cultural Relations)
The agrarian economist who discovered long economic waves
In 1924, during a government research trip through Germany, Britain, Canada and the United States to study the organisation of agricultural production in developed capitalist countries, he met Pitirim Sorokin, who urged him not to return to the USSR; Kondratiev chose to go home.
Russian and Soviet economist, born on 4 (16) March 1892 in the village of Galuevskaya, Kineshma uyezd, Kostroma guberniya, into a large peasant family as the eldest of ten children. Founder of the theory of long economic cycles known as Kondratiev waves; he joined the Socialist Revolutionary Party in 1905, was arrested in 1906 and imprisoned, and graduated from the Petersburg University law faculty in 1915. In 1917 he was Kerensky's agriculture secretary and Deputy Minister of Food; during NEP he founded the Conjuncture Institute, directed it until 1928, and led the drafting of the 1923–1928 long-term agricultural plan. In 1927 his Critical Notes pointed to the imbalance of the first five-year plan; he was dismissed in April 1928, arrested in 1930, sentenced in 1932 to eight years, and executed on 17 September 1938 by sentence of the Military Collegium of the USSR Supreme Court.
Career timeline
1905–1917Active in the Socialist Revolutionary Party, arrested and imprisoned under the Tsar
1915Graduated from Petersburg University law faculty, published first monograph
1917Kerensky's agriculture secretary, Deputy Minister of Food, Constituent Assembly deputy
1920–1928Founding director of the Conjuncture Institute, researched world economic cycles
1923–1928Led drafting of the first agricultural five-year plan in Narkomzem and Gosplan
1925Published Big Cycles — formalized Kondratiev wave theory
1928–1930Criticized first five-year plan imbalances, dismissed, arrested
The Saint-Just of the avant-garde, theorist of production art
«Only by jumping out of art will you understand it» — in the final note to his 1924 book on Nathan Altman, Arvatov distilled into a single sentence his methodological leap from formal analysis to social fact.
A Proletkult theorist and co-founder of LEF, he championed 'production art' — merging art with industry — and laid the foundation for Constructivist aesthetics. A frontline concussion forced him to stop writing by the late 1920s; he took his own life in 1940.
Career timeline
1912Began literary activity in Warsaw
1917SR party member, deputy chair of Tula Gubernia Committee, delegate to the 1st Congress of Soviets and Constituent Assembly
1919Joined RKP(b); served as commissar on the Polish front during the Civil War
1920–1923Proletkult theorist, INKhUK researcher, co-founded LEF and contributed to its journal
1923–1926Published *Art and Class* (1923) and *Art and Production* (1926); formulated the formal-sociological method and elaborated production art theory
1927–1930Published *Sociological Poetics* (1928) and *On Agitation and Production Art* (1930); worsening post-concussion illness curtailed his work
1940Died by suicide in Moscow after a long struggle with mental illness
Left SR assassin of Mirbach turned OGPU illegal resident, executed for meeting Trotsky
"A man who, amid the crowd, shot the imperial ambassador / Came up to shake my hand / And thank me for my poems." — Nikolai Gumilyov, 'My Readers'
A Jewish revolutionary from Odessa. As a Left SR inside the Cheka, he led the 1918 assassination of German ambassador Mirbach, sparking the Left SR uprising. Amnestied, he became one of the OGPU Foreign Department's first illegal residents, building agent networks in Persia, Palestine, Mongolia, and the Middle East under commercial cover. A flamboyant figure in Moscow literary circles who befriended Mayakovsky and Yesenin, he was arrested and shot in 1929 after secretly meeting Trotsky in Constantinople and agreeing to carry opposition letters into the USSR.
Career timeline
1918.06Cheka Section Chief for Countering International Espionage — placed by Left SR leadership
1918.07.06Assassinated German Ambassador Mirbach with Nikolai Andreev — triggering Left SR uprising
1919.05Amnestied by VTsIK after voluntary surrender; resumed Red Army and Cheka service
1920Sent to Persia — joined Iranian Communist Party, military commissar in Gilan Soviet Republic
1923–1924OGPU illegal resident in Palestine (Jaffa) — network under laundry-business cover
1926–1927OGPU resident in Mongolia and chief instructor of Mongolian State Internal Guard
1928–1929OGPU resident in Middle East — Constantinople, antique Hebrew book-dealer cover
1929.10Secret Trotsky meeting exposed — arrested, sentenced to death by OGPU Collegium
Peasant-born officer who commanded the United Partisan Army of Tambov and chaired the Union of Working Peasantry
Born in the village of Inokovka in Kirsanov district, Tambov province, he was conscripted in 1904 during the Russo-Japanese War and stayed on for extended service in St Petersburg. In the First World War he fought in Galicia, winning the full set of four St George Crosses and four St George Medals; he was commissioned in 1915 and made lieutenant in 1917. After the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk he returned home, worked in the local militia and in 1918 formed a partisan detachment. In June 1920 he took command of the 2nd Insurgent Army and in November of the United Partisan Army of the Tambov region, while also chairing the Union of Working Peasantry. The Russian-language source says he was killed in a clash near the village of Bogoslovka on 28 February 1921; the English-language source places his death around June 1921.
Career timeline
1904Conscripted during the Russo-Japanese War; extended service
1915Commissioned as an officer
1917Lieutenant
1918Formed a partisan detachment at Inokovka
1920Commander of the 2nd Insurgent Army (June); commander of the United Partisan Army of Tambov and chairman of the Union of Working Peasantry (November)
