People of the Revolution and the USSR

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1864–1941 ○ Natural causes

From Warsaw boy patriot to Comintern old revolutionary: the Pole who returned in the sealed train

“As a six-year-old boy I dreamed of becoming a rebel leader and freeing Poland from the 'Muscovites' and 'Swabians'.” — from his memoirs Za 50 Let

A Polish revolutionary who endured twenty years of tsarist prisons and Siberian exile, emerging as a gold-medal ethnographer of Siberia's indigenous peoples. He led the anti-Piłsudski split of the Polish Socialist Party into its internationalist left wing, then joined the Bolsheviks on Lenin's sealed train. He helped found the International Red Aid (MOPR), built the Soviet radio broadcasting system, and spent nearly sixty years on the front lines of revolutionary struggle, outliving the Great Purge to die of natural causes at 77.

Communist Party of Germany (KPD) Soviet communism 1866–1925 ○ Illness

A Pole who passed through the German and Russian revolutions and tried to bring revolution home

As the Red Army prepared to march on Warsaw in 1920, he joined Radek in repeatedly urging Lenin to halt — warning him not to overestimate the revolutionary consciousness of the Polish worker.

Co-founder of Polish communism, he established the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland (SDKPiL) in 1893 together with Rosa Luxemburg and Leo Jogiches. Active in the German SPD's left wing, he helped build the Spartacus League and the German Communist Party, and after the Russian Revolution joined the Bolsheviks, becoming one of Lenin's close advisers on agrarian policy. During the Polish-Soviet War of 1920 he served as chairman of the Polish Provisional Revolutionary Committee, and later became the first chairman of International Red Aid (MOPR) and first rector of the Communist University of the National Minorities of the West.

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 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 1879–1938 ✕ Executed

From Cheka deputy to civil aviation: the revolution's all-weather organizer

At his Military Collegium trial on 28 July 1938 he retracted the confession extracted from him, stating he had never belonged to the 'Polish Military Organisation', but the hearing lasted about twenty minutes and ended in a death sentence.

Born into a Jewish petty-bourgeois family in Mława, then in the Płock Governorate of the Russian Empire, he trained as an electrical engineer at the Higher Technical Courses in Warsaw and joined the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL) in 1900. Sources agree he was arrested repeatedly between 1902 and 1913 and spent years in Tsarist prisons and Siberian exile, but they differ on the number of arrests, recording six in some accounts and seven in others. In 1917 he sat on the Irkutsk Soviet as a Bolshevik, served on the Petrograd Soviet executive and the Military Revolutionary Committee during the October uprising, and was elected to the Constituent Assembly. From 1921 he was deputy chairman of the Cheka and later the GPU, and from 1925 to 1930 deputy chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council; arrested in 1937, he was shot in 1938 and rehabilitated in 1956.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1882–1937 ✕ Executed

The Polish nobleman turned internationalist who became the first Soviet leader of Kazakhstan

In November 1917, at Smolny, he mentioned to Menzhinsky that he had studied finance at the University of London. Menzhinsky sat up and declared: 'In that case we'll make you manager of the State Bank.' Thus he became the first People's Commissar of the Soviet State Bank.

A Polish nobleman turned Bolshevik who joined the SDKPiL under Rosa Luxemburg's influence and served on its main board during the 1905 Revolution. Appointed the first People's Commissar of the State Bank after the October Revolution, he later became Stalin's deputy at Narkomnats, helping institutionalize Soviet nationality policy. In 1919 he was named first chairman of the Kirghiz (Kazakh) Revolutionary Committee, de facto the first Soviet leader of Kazakhstan, and went on to serve as the USSR's first plenipotentiary to Mexico and as a Comintern and Profintern activist. Executed in the Great Purge of 1937 and posthumously rehabilitated in 1955.

Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL) Soviet communism 1882–1968 ○ Natural causes

Polish Social Democrat who forged an independent revolutionary path from the SDKPiL underground to the Comintern

In June 1911 she gave birth to her son Jan in Warsaw's Pawiak prison and lived with him in her cell for eight months.

Born into a Polish-Jewish family in Warsaw and trained at the Warsaw Conservatory, Sofia Dzerzhinskaya joined the SDKPiL in 1904 and became a core cadre of the Polish revolutionary movement alongside Rosa Luxemburg and Leo Jogiches. Despite repeated arrests and Siberian exile, she continued underground newspaper publishing and exile organizing in Kraków, then served with the Soviet diplomatic mission in Bern (1918) before settling in Moscow. From 1939 to 1943 she handled Polish affairs on the Comintern Executive Committee, directed Radio Kościuszko broadcasting communist messages into occupied Poland during World War II, and received the Order of Lenin three times.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1883–1954 ○ Natural causes

Stalin's Moscow-trial prosecutor who later carried hardline Soviet diplomacy to the UN

At the UN General Assembly on 18 September 1947, then only Deputy Foreign Minister, Vyshinsky denounced the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan for using relief "as an instrument of political pressure."

Born in Odessa into a Polish szlachta (gentry) family, he moved to Baku as a child and joined the Menshevik wing of the RSDLP in 1903; arrested twice in 1906–1907 and sentenced by a Tiflis court in 1908 to a year in Bailov prison, where he met Stalin. He graduated from Kiev University in 1913, practiced law, and joined the Bolsheviks in 1920. He was RSFSR prosecutor (1931), Deputy Procurator (1933) and Procurator of the USSR (1935–1939), and served as state prosecutor in all three Moscow processes of 1936–1938. From May 1939 he was Deputy Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars, and from 1940 to 1946 First Deputy People's Commissar of Foreign Affairs; he effectively directed the Soviet delegation at Nuremberg. As Minister of Foreign Affairs (1949–1953) and then permanent representative to the UN (1953–1954), he died of a heart attack in New York on 22 November 1954.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1889–1939 ✕ Executed

The Ukrainian party boss who denied the famine, felled by Stalin's bullet

On 26 April 1932, as famine spread in Ukraine, Kosior wrote to Stalin: "We do have isolated cases and even individual starving villages, but this is only the result of local bungling. All talk of 'famine' in Ukraine must be categorically rejected."

Born on 18 November 1889 (6 November O.S.) in Węgrów, Kingdom of Poland, Russian Empire, to a family of factory workers, he joined the party in 1907 and, after underground work in the Donbas and Kiev, took part in founding the Communist Party of Ukraine. Leading the Ukrainian party from 1928 to 1938, he drove collectivisation and industrialisation; he became a full Politburo member in 1930. He is criticised for reports denying the 1932-33 famine, yet also petitioned for relief. Arrested in May 1938, sentenced and shot on 26 February 1939, he was rehabilitated on 14 March 1956; in 2010 a Ukrainian court recognised him as one of the organisers of the 1932-33 famine.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1890–1937 ✕ Executed

The Soviet trade representative who sent Republican Spain's gold to Moscow

Stashevsky proposed to finance minister Negrín the idea of opening 'a current account in gold' in Moscow, and persuaded him it could be used to buy arms and raw materials.

A Soviet intelligence officer and trade official from the SDKPiL. He ran the joint INO–GRU residency in Berlin as one of the key figures of early Soviet military intelligence, later headed Torgsin and served in the People's Commissariat for Foreign Trade before being posted to Republican Spain as trade representative in 1936. In Spain he negotiated arms sales and managed the financial side of Operation X; he has been identified as the man who persuaded Juan Negrín to deposit the Bank of Spain's gold reserves in Moscow. Recalled in June 1937 and shot two months later, he was rehabilitated in 1956.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1890–1937 ✕ Executed

Dzerzhinsky's Polish comrade, a Cheka founding pillar who defied Yagoda's fabrications

On 26 September 1926, an 18-year-old unemployed youth from Kharkov, Anatoly Truba, walked into Messing's office at the Leningrad OGPU and opened fire with a revolver. Messing ducked under his desk and survived; Truba was shot soon after.

Born into a Jewish musician's family in Warsaw, he joined the Social Democracy of Poland in 1908, earning the trust of Felix Dzerzhinsky and Józef Unszlicht. He rose to chairman of the Moscow Cheka (1921) and head of the Petrograd–Leningrad Cheka-OGPU (1921–1929). In 1929 he became 2nd Deputy Chairman of the OGPU and chief of its Foreign Department (INO), leading Soviet intelligence between Mikhail Trilisser and Artur Artuzov. He openly opposed Genrikh Yagoda's fabricated 'Vesna' case and was dismissed in 1931, pushed into economic diplomacy and shot in 1937 on charges of Polish espionage.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1892–1940 ✕ Executed

Stalin's brother-in-law who chaired the Moscow troika

Arriving in Crimea on 19 January 1921, Redens set up independent city Chekas in Simferopol, Sevastopol, and Kerch, each with the right to pass death sentences, reporting directly to him. These bodies carried out the mass purges of remaining Wrangel forces and 'class enemies.'

A Pole from Łomża, Redens joined the Cheka in 1918 and, as chairman of the Crimean Cheka during the Civil War, directed mass reprisals against the remnants of Wrangel's army. He became Stalin's brother-in-law through marriage to Anna Alliluyeva, sister of Stalin's second wife Nadezhda. As head of the NKVD directorate for Moscow Region from 1933, he oversaw security in the capital and, during the Great Terror, chaired the Moscow troika under NKVD Order No. 00447, presiding over mass death sentences carried out at Butovo and Kommunarka. Arrested in late 1938 on charges of spying for Poland, he was shot in February 1940.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1895–1926 ○ Typhoid

The revolution's Valkyrie. Poet, scout, and the first woman commissar of the Naval General Staff

Disguised as a peasant woman, she infiltrated White-held Kazan — was arrested by a Japanese intelligence officer, then slipped through a door and vanished. —Trotsky, My Life

Emerging from the Silver Age circles of Petersburg, she became the Bolsheviks' most distinctive literary witness, transforming from an Acmeist poet into a pioneer of revolutionary documentary writing built on first-hand immersion in the events she recorded. As the first woman commissar of the Naval General Staff, a Comintern agent during the 1923 Hamburg uprising, and a member of the Soviet diplomatic mission to Afghanistan, she turned every assignment into literature. She died of typhoid in 1926 at thirty, having burned through a lifetime of action in a single decade.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1898–1937 ✕ Executed

Second Soviet ambassador to Spain, recalled and shot barely three months after taking the post

Kollontai wrote in her diary in Mexico, 1927: 'I wonder how I can work when I only have two senior staff members: Gaikis and myself. We do our own ciphering. We are terribly isolated.'

Born in Warsaw in 1898 to a Jewish family, Gaikis was active in Polish socialist parties before joining the Bolsheviks in 1917. After serving as Chicherin's secretary, first secretary in Mexico, and consul-general in Istanbul, he was posted to Madrid in 1936 as counsellor to the Soviet embassy and succeeded Marcel Rosenberg as ambassador in February 1937. Barely three months later he was recalled to Moscow, arrested on arrival, and shot on 21 August 1937 on charges of 'betrayal of the Fatherland'; he was posthumously rehabilitated in 1955. His execution left the Soviet embassy in Spain effectively vacant for the remainder of the Civil War, with no ambassador appointed again until after Franco's death.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1902–1973 ○ Died

A Polish-born Soviet general who commanded the suppression of the Poznań uprising

On 28 June 1956, arriving in Poznań around 2 p.m., he at once ordered troops to take control of the situation before the security headquarters.

Born into a Polish peasant family in Podolia, Ukraine, and illiterate until eighteen, he was drafted into the Red Army and rose to become a Soviet general. At the end of the Second World War he commanded the Polish First Army in the battle for Berlin and was made a Hero of the Soviet Union. After the war he stayed on in the high command of the Polish army as a Soviet overseer, and in June 1956, as deputy defence minister, directed the military suppression of the Poznań workers' protest on the ground.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1908–1979 ○ Natural causes

Chief designer of the KV and IS heavy tanks, builder of Tankograd

A fellow designer said of him: 'Kotin won't sleep at night if he hasn't hooked someone.' His tanks bore the names Kirov, Voroshilov, and Stalin.

A giant of Soviet heavy-tank design: the engineer-administrator who gave the Red Army the KV series, the IS (Iosif Stalin) heavy tanks, and the SU-152 and ISU-152 self-propelled guns. Appointed chief designer at the Kirov Plant in 1937 at just 29, he began by upgrading the T-28, then, drawing lessons from Spain, turned to developing heavily armoured breakthrough tanks. After the German invasion he served as Deputy People's Commissar for the Tank Industry while personally directing the evacuation of factories from Leningrad to Chelyabinsk, forging the vast 'Tankograd' complex that produced 18,000 tanks and SPGs during the war. After 1945 he designed the PT-76 amphibious tank, the T-10 heavy tank, and the K-700 tractor, before capping his career as Deputy Minister of Defence Industry in 1968.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1914–1984 ○ Natural causes

The missile designer who overtook Korolev under Khrushchev's patronage, then faded when his patron fell

On March 8, 1958, Chelomey hired Nikita Khrushchev's son Sergei as an engineer at OKB-52. With that single hire, he gained a direct line to the Soviet leader — and over the next six years, backed by Khrushchev's patronage, he rose to the pinnacle of the Soviet space program, surpassing even Korolev.

A leading Soviet rocket and spacecraft designer, he headed OKB-52 (later NPO Mashinostroyeniya) and created the Proton launch vehicle, the UR-100 ICBM, the Almaz military space stations, and the TKS spacecraft. He chaired the Council of Chief Designers from 1961, succeeding Korolev (aided by Khrushchev's patronage, since Khrushchev's son Sergei worked under him). After Khrushchev's ouster, Ustinov sidelined him, and by 1981 his space programs were shut down. The Proton rocket still flies today; the UR-100 was the most mass-deployed ICBM in Soviet history.