People of the Revolution and the USSR

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1889–1960 ○ Died in custody

Azerbaijan's people's commissar of internal affairs in the mass operations, arrested in the Beria case

As Azerbaijan's people's commissar of internal affairs in 1937–1938, he served on the special troika and took part in the Great Purge. Arrested in the Beria case in 1953, he died in custody.

Born into a peasant family in Kapana, Kutaisi province, to an Armenian father and a Georgian mother (Topuridze was her maiden name), he was a Menshevik in 1905–1910 and joined the Bolsheviks in 1918. From 1920 he served in the Azerbaijani Cheka; from 1934 he headed the Azerbaijani GPU and NKVD, and as people's commissar of internal affairs in 1937–1938 he sat on the special troika. From April 1938 he ran the NKVD's administrative and economic directorate, and in 1947–1953 he was deputy chairman of Azerbaijan's Council of Ministers. Arrested in July 1953 in the Beria case, he was committed to a psychiatric hospital and died in August 1960 before the investigation ended.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1889–1969 ○ Natural causes

The only woman on the Orgburo and Secretariat, who led the Zhenotdel at its peak

At a 1927 international conference, she called out her own party's economists: "the tendency still prevails to look upon woman labour as of smaller value."

A textile worker turned revolutionary who led the Zhenotdel (Women's Department) at its peak, driving women's entry into industrial labour. She was the only woman to serve on the Orgburo and Secretariat (1926–1930).

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1890–1918 ✕ Suicide

MRC commissar who twice entered the Winter Palace to parley and talked its defenders into walking away

Inside the Winter Palace, Palchinsky ordered his arrest. The cadets protested: 'His detention damages our honour. We guaranteed his safety.' The commissar walked free, and soon the cadets walked out too.

A Jewish youth from Ekaterinoslav who joined the revolutionary movement at fifteen, Chudnovsky followed Trotsky through emigration in Paris and New York, returning via the Mezhraiontsy to the Bolsheviks in May 1917. As an MRC commissar during the October insurrection, he twice entered the Winter Palace to parley (arrested the first time by Palchinsky, then freed at the cadets' insistence), and his promise of safe passage to those who would lay down their arms persuaded waves of defenders to quit the building before the final entry. Appointed extraordinary commissar of the South-Western Front, he fought German occupation forces and the Ukrainian Central Rada; captured and sentenced to death by the Rada in December 1917, he was freed by Soviet troops entering Kiev, but died surrounded near Liubotyn in April 1918; accounts differ on whether he fell fighting or shot himself.

Soviet Union state institutions 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 state institutions Soviet communism 1890–1937 ✕ Executed

One of the eight Tukhachevsky-trial defendants; his confession under torture started the chain reaction that consumed the Red Army

"Although I was arrested on the 15th and the very next day declared I belonged to an anti-Soviet organization, until today I have tried to minimize my role and conceal the most essential facts." (interrogation, May 19, 1937)

Born in Pinsk to a Jewish carpenter, he rose from a WWI private and Civil War division commander to the Red Army elite. As head of the Command Personnel Directorate from 1934, he controlled officer appointments across the armed forces, working closely with Tukhachevsky, whom he accompanied to Reichswehr maneuvers in Germany in 1932. Arrested on May 15, 1937, a week before Tukhachevsky, he named over forty fellow commanders under torture as participants in the "military-Trotskyist conspiracy"; his confession ignited the chain reaction of the Great Purge. On June 12 he was sentenced to death by a closed military tribunal and shot that same day alongside Tukhachevsky and six others.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1890–1937 ✕ Executed

Worker-Bolshevik premier of the Russian Republic destroyed by the state he helped industrialize

Arrested on 27 June 1937 while still performing his duties — seized during a session of the very Central Committee plenum that had just expelled him.

An Old Bolshevik who joined the party at fourteen as a factory worker, Sulimov rose through the Ural party apparatus to become Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the RSFSR (1930–1937), overseeing the republic's industrialization during the first two five-year plans. A member of the Central Committee (1923–1937) and the OrgBuro (1927–1930), he was among the highest-ranking Bolsheviks of worker origin to lead a Soviet government. Arrested during the June 1937 Central Committee Plenum immediately after Vyacheslav Molotov accused him of political disloyalty, he was tried for wrecking, espionage, and participation in an anti-Soviet terrorist organization of the Right, and executed on 27 November 1937. He was posthumously rehabilitated in 1956, and the city of Cherkessk bore his name, Sulimov, from 1934 to 1937.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1890–1937 ✕ Executed

Right Oppositionist who authored the 'Ryutin Platform': the last organized intra-party call to remove Stalin

At his September 1932 OGPU interrogation: "No inspirers stood, nor stand, behind me. I myself was the inspirer of the organization, I stood at its head, I alone wrote the entire platform and appeal." — Taking sole responsibility to shield his comrades.

Born to a peasant family near Irkutsk, Ryutin joined the Bolsheviks in 1917, chaired the Harbin Soviet, served as party secretary in Irkutsk and Dagestan, and became a candidate CC member in 1927. After witnessing forced collectivization's devastation, he turned to the Right Opposition and in 1932 authored the 200-page 'Ryutin Platform,' calling for Stalin's removal and a return to inner-party democracy: the last organized intra-party challenge. Arrested in 1932, he was retried in 1937, sentenced in 25 minutes, and shot that day. Rehabilitated in 1988.

Soviet Union state institutions 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.

Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) Soviet communism 1890–1938 ✕ Executed

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.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1890–1938 ✕ Executed

From Ukrainian Borotbist to People's Commissar of Finance: the man who funded the Five-Year Plans

When Grinko was arrested as an 'enemy of the people' in 1937, the 1-, 3-, and 5-ruble notes bearing his signature became a political embarrassment. Authorities rushed out replacement notes with identical designs — minus his name — and resolved never to print any official's signature on Soviet banknotes again.

A Ukrainian revolutionary from Kharkov Governorate who led the left-SR Borotbist party before joining the Bolsheviks in 1920. After serving as Ukraine's education commissar and Gosplan chairman, he moved to Moscow in 1926 as deputy head of the USSR State Planning Committee and deputy commissar for agriculture. Appointed People's Commissar of Finance in October 1930, he mobilized resources for rapid industrialization and restructured fiscal institutions during the first two Five-Year Plans. His signature on Soviet ruble notes made him one of the most visible economic officials in the country. Arrested during the Great Terror, he was a defendant in the Third Moscow Trial and was shot in 1938. Posthumously rehabilitated in 1959.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1890–1938 ○ Illness

The agrarian Marxist who theorized War Communism

In The Heroic Period he wrote: 'At bottom it was by no means the delusion of individuals or a class; it was — albeit not in pure form — an anticipation of the future, a breakthrough of that future into the present.'

A Soviet Marxist economist who analyzed War Communism as an anticipatory breakthrough toward socialism. A Gosplan presidium member, he critiqued Chayanov's family-labour school and championed a three-tier peasant class schema, providing theoretical foundations for collectivization.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1890–1938 ✕ Died in prison

“Order of the Red Banner No. 1”: Civil War hero and one of the first five marshals, extinguished in Lefortovo

Uniting scattered Red detachments, he fought his way across 1,500 km of the Urals in 54 days. For this immortal campaign Comrade Blyukher is awarded the Order of the Red Banner No. 1. — VTsIK decree, 28 September 1918

A peasant's son from Yaroslavl, he earned the Red Army's first Order of the Red Banner for his epic 1,500-kilometre Ural raid in 1918. Under Frunze he broke through the Perekop defences to expel Wrangel from Crimea, then as C-in-C of the Far Eastern Republic crushed the last White offensive at Volochayevka. As Sun Yat-sen's chief military advisor 'General Galin' he designed the Northern Expedition; he later commanded the Special Far Eastern Army, routing Manchu forces in the 1929 CER conflict. One of the first five Marshals in 1935, he defended the Soviet Far East against Japanese expansion, but was arrested after the costly Lake Khasan battle and died in Lubyanka. Rehabilitated 1956.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1890–1940 ✕ Executed

Architect of terror in Siberia, recanted his confession under torture

"Choose: the pen or the rubber truncheon." He took the pen, falsely confessed, then wrote to Stalin recanting it all.

Born to a Latvian farmhand, Eikhe joined the Social Democracy at fifteen in 1905. After years as a miner and stoker in Britain, he returned to Russia and, with Stalin's backing, ruled Siberia as its de facto master, driving brutal collectivisation and dekulakisation. A candidate Politburo member from 1935, he sat on an NKVD troika during the Great Terror, signing thousands of summary death sentences. Arrested in 1938, he was beaten with rubber truncheons until an eye was destroyed, yet refused to confess to espionage. In a famous letter to Stalin he repudiated his forced confession. Shot in 1940, Khrushchev cited him in the 1956 Secret Speech and he was posthumously rehabilitated.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1890–1946 ✕ Probable suicide

Poet and doctor whom Zhdanov forced on Estonia as puppet prime minister in June 1940, and who led the petition to join the Soviet Union

Born to a farming family near Viljandi, he studied medicine in Kiev and served as a military physician in the First World War and the Estonian War of Independence. He became a well-known poet and radical socialist under the pen name Johannes Barbarus. After the Soviet occupation of June 1940, Andrei Zhdanov forced President Konstantin Päts to appoint him prime minister of a communist-dominated puppet government, and he headed the delegation that delivered the petition to join the Soviet Union. He then chaired the Estonian SSR Supreme Soviet’s presidium, fled to Soviet Russia when the Germans came in 1941, and after returning in 1944 was investigated by the NKVD over his role in the War of Independence. He died in the presidential residence in Kadriorg, Tallinn, in November 1946, most probably by suicide, though murder has also been suggested.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1890–1946 ✕ Murdered

Pioneer of Ukrainian national communism, the original 'Shumskyism'

In April 1926, Shumsky met Stalin privately in Moscow for over two hours, demanding Kaganovich's replacement by Ukrainian Vlas Chubar and accelerated Ukrainization. Stalin's resulting Politburo letter condemned 'Shumskyism' as nationalist deviation — a watershed in the suppression of Ukrainian national communism.

A symbol of Ukrainian national communism and the prototype of 'Shumskyism': the demand for substantive republican autonomy against Moscow's centralism. A Borotbist who rose to the CP(b)U Politburo, he drove the de-Russification of Ukraine's cities and proletariat and the promotion of Ukrainian cadres as People's Commissar of Education (1924–1927). His 1926 confrontation with Stalin led to his condemnation for 'nationalist deviation' and removal from all posts; his name became shorthand for the suppression of Ukrainian autonomy within the Soviet system. Arrested in 1933, he endured the Solovki camps and Krasnoyarsk exile before the NKVD murdered him upon release in 1946; rehabilitated in 1958.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1890–1950 ✕ Executed

Stalin's artillery chief from Tsaritsyn: Marshal who blocked the T-34, KV-1 and Katyusha

What the hell do we need rocket artillery for? The main thing is the horse-drawn gun.

A Stalin favourite since the Battle of Tsaritsyn, Kulik headed the Red Army's artillery directorate from 1937 to 1941, where his extreme conservatism led him to block the T-34 and KV-1 tanks, Katyusha rockets, and submachine guns, the very weapons that later saved the Soviet Union. His disastrous field commands in the Winter War and against Germany brought court-martial, demotion from Marshal to major-general in 1942, and eventual execution for treason in 1950.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1890–1952 ✕ Executed

A Yiddish poet who gave voice to Soviet Jewish culture

In “Etele,” Kvitko mourned Jewish victims of the Nazis through Yiddish language and Jewish memory.

Leib Kvitko was a Soviet Jewish poet who wrote in Yiddish, producing both poetry and influential children’s literature while bringing revolutionary and Jewish experience into the same literary world. During the war he worked with the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and edited its newspaper, Eynikayt, giving poetic form to reports and memories of the Nazi murder of Jews. After the war, the state’s turn against Jewish cultural institutions made that earlier public role dangerous: arrested in the JAC case, he was executed in 1952 and rehabilitated in 1955.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1890–1986 ○ Natural causes

“Stone-arse”: the man who never changed his mind

His wife Polina Zhemchuzhina was arrested for treason in December 1948 and forced into divorce, and was released only after Stalin's death in 1953. Throughout, Molotov is said to have had dinner set for two every evening. 'She suffered because of me,' he said later.

An Old Bolshevik who joined the RSDLP in 1906 and was arrested and internally exiled twice before 1917. A full Politburo member from 1926, he became premier in 1930, overseeing collectivisation and the Great Purge; in 1939 he signed the Nazi–Soviet pact. As deputy chair of the State Defence Committee he attended the Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam conferences, and he initiated the 'Molotov Plan' against the Marshall Plan. In 1957 he failed to oust Khrushchev; sources date his expulsion to 1961 or 1962. Readmitted in 1984, he died in 1986.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1891–1918 ✕ Assassinated

Petrograd's press commissar whose assassination helped trigger the Red Terror

“Comrades, do you think I am looking at my watch? No — I am looking at the clock of humanity, the clock of the world revolution.”

Petrograd's Commissar for Press and Propaganda and a magnetic crowd orator who built the Bolshevik censorship apparatus and founded Krasnaya Gazeta. Shot dead by an SR militant on 20 June 1918, his assassination, alongside Uritsky's murder and the attempt on Lenin, became the spark for the full-scale Red Terror.