People of the Revolution and the USSR

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1884–1938 ✕ Executed

The "Soviet Rockefeller" who rebuilt Baku oil and organized the Soviet gold rush

In 1924, on an Azneft trip authorized by Krasin, he mixed equipment purchases with a personal appeal: at 90, John D. Rockefeller listened, then unexpectedly agreed to a guarantee letter. After tea he took Serebrovsky on a brisk half-hour walk through his forest park.

A mechanical engineer turned revolutionary, Serebrovsky rebuilt the war-ravaged Baku oil fields with American drilling technology, laying the foundation for Soviet petroleum production. From 1928 he headed Glavzoloto, the state gold-mining trust, where he imported Alaskan techniques and recruited American engineers like John Littlepage to expand gold output: bullion that financed machinery imports for industrialization. As deputy People's Commissar of Heavy Industry he oversaw Soviet heavy industry until his arrest on 23 September 1937, execution on 10 February 1938 after conviction by the Military Collegium of the USSR Supreme Court, and posthumous rehabilitation on 19 May 1956.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1884–1938 ✕ Executed (some sources say 1940 in prison)

From October Revolution Politburo member to the Enlightenment Commissar who led the fight against illiteracy

Elected to the Political Bureau on 10 (23) October 1917 and to the Party Center directing the armed uprising on 16 (29) October. In the Petrograd Military-Revolutionary Committee he directed the seizure of the city's railway stations on 24–25 October and headed the VRK field staff.

Born into a merchant family in the Russian Empire, he joined the party in 1903 and, as a member of the 1917 Politburo, was one of the leaders of the Petrograd Military-Revolutionary Committee that prepared the October Revolution. A Left Communist in 1918 who opposed the Brest-Litovsk peace, he belonged to the Democratic Centralists in 1921–22, joined Trotsky in 1923, then broke with him and became a zealous adherent of Stalin. As head of the Red Army Political Directorate from 1924 he directed a large-scale purge of commissars formerly aligned with Trotsky; as People's Commissar for Education (1929–1937) he led the introduction of universal compulsory primary education and the mass literacy campaign. Removed in October 1937 and expelled from the Central Committee that December, he was shot on 1 August 1938 and rehabilitated on 14 March 1956.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1884–1941 ✕ Executed

The finance commissar who passed from Cheka to the Left Opposition

In the prison train, Valentina Polyakova confronted her: 'Your false testimony got my husband shot.' Yakovleva answered: 'It was Yezhov's order. They kept me awake fifteen days and nights — I lost control and signed.'

An Old Bolshevik who led the Petrograd Cheka during the revolution, she was also a leader of the Left Opposition in 1924–26. After serving as the Russian republic’s finance commissar, she was arrested in 1937, given a long prison sentence, and shot in the 1941 mass execution at Oryol prison.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1884–1965 ○ Natural causes

Bolshevik jurist who joined the party in 1902 and became an architect of Soviet legislation

In October 1917, as chairman of the Saratov Soviet, he proclaimed the establishment of Soviet power from the city's Conservatory and led the Red Guard detachments.

A Bolshevik revolutionary who joined the RSDLP in 1902, Antonov-Saratovsky led the establishment of Soviet power in Saratov as chairman of the Saratov Soviet in 1917 and served as People's Commissar of Internal Affairs of Ukraine in 1920–1921. From 1923 to 1938 he simultaneously chaired the Commission for Legislative Assumptions under the USSR Council of People's Commissars and sat on the USSR Supreme Court, becoming a principal architect of the Soviet judicial and legislative framework and serving as a judge at the Shakhty trial, the Menshevik trial, and the Industrial Party trial. He authored the revolutionary memoirs Under the Banner of Proletarian Struggle (1925) and The Red Year (1927).

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1885–1918 ✕ Executed

The first Korean communist, who gave her life bridging the Russian Revolution and Korean liberation

On September 16, 1918, dragged before Ataman Kalmykov's White Cossacks to be shot, her final cry: 'Freedom and independence for Korea!'

Born to Korean migrants in Siberia, she joined the Bolsheviks in 1916, becoming the first Korean communist. Dispatched to the Far East on Lenin's orders, she served as Commissar of Foreign Affairs for the Khabarovsk Soviet, co-founded the Korean Socialist Party with Yi Tong-hwi, and organized Korean Red Guard units against White and Japanese forces before her execution in 1918 at 33, a symbolic figure bridging the Russian Revolution and the Korean independence struggle.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1885–1919 ○ Illness

The organizer who linked party and state after October

On 5 January 1918, as the Constituent Assembly prepared to convene, Sverdlov pushed aside the elderly SR deputy who rose to open proceedings and declared the meeting open himself — in the name of the Central Executive Committee, not the Assembly.

As chairman of both the Secretariat and the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, he knit together the practical machinery of early Bolshevik power. He turned Lenin's political decisions into votes, appointments and institutional operation: an unrivaled organizer who directed the October rising, dissolved the Constituent Assembly, steered the first Soviet constitution, launched the Comintern, and was decisive in ratifying Brest-Litovsk. More than twelve years of prison and exile forged the party network and field instinct that became his weapons. When he died of Spanish flu at 34, Lenin wrote 'the pillar upon which the entire party stood has collapsed'; his absence is widely seen as enabling Stalin's concentration of power.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1885–1925 ○ Died in surgery; cause disputed

Civil War front commander and Red Army reformer

From his hospital bed before the 1925 operation he wrote to his wife Sofya Alekseevna: "There will be a new consultation on Saturday. I am afraid they may refuse the operation."

Revolutionary and Soviet military leader, born in 1885 at Pishpek in Russian Turkestan (now Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan) and died in Moscow in 1925. He entered the St Petersburg Polytechnic in 1904 and joined the RSDLP; wounded at the Bloody Sunday demonstration, he led the Ivanovo-Voznesensk textile general strike and took part in the December 1905 armed uprising in Moscow. Arrested in 1907 and sentenced to katorga, he was condemned to death twice, in 1909 and 1910, before both sentences were commuted to hard labour and Siberian exile; he escaped in 1916 and commanded the militia in Minsk in 1917. In the Civil War he defeated Kolchak on the Eastern Front and Wrangel on the Southern Front, took Crimea, drove the 1924 military reform, and became chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council in January 1925.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1885–1925 ✕ Air crash

First chief of Soviet foreign intelligence: eight months that laid the INO foundation

When Mogilevsky took over as the first INO chief in 1921, he inherited a handful of operatives and a shabby Moscow office. Eight months later, the first Soviet foreign intelligence residencies were planted across Europe and the Middle East.

Born to a Jewish merchant family in Pavlograd, he joined the RSDLP at eighteen and became a professional revolutionary. Arrested in 1904, he fled to Switzerland, met Lenin in Geneva, and joined the Bolshevik faction on Lenin's recommendation. In 1919 he was assigned to the Cheka, working in the Moscow Cheka and the Special Department. In August 1921 he became the first chief of the GPU Foreign Department (INO): the founding leadership of what would become the KGB First Chief Directorate and later the SVR. In 1922 he was transferred as GPU plenipotentiary and chairman for Transcaucasia, directing intelligence networks against Turkey and Iran and taking part in the suppression of the 1924 August Uprising in Georgia, for which he received the Order of the Red Banner. He died in March 1925 when his aircraft exploded in mid-air near Tiflis under circumstances that were never determined.

Communist Party of Finland (SKP) Soviet communism 1885–1936 ○ Died of illness before execution

Petrograd Finnish Bolshevik who helped Lenin escape to Finland in 1917 and sat on the Red Guards’ three-man command in 1918

Born in Kronstadt in 1885 to a Petersburg Finnish working family, he worked in St Petersburg as a turner among other jobs and joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1903, siding with the Bolsheviks. He organised Lenin’s escape to Finland in the summer of 1917 and guarded him around the October Revolution. Over the winter of 1917–1918 he and his brother Jukka procured arms for the Finnish Red Guards; when Haapalainen was dismissed on 20 March 1918 he formed a three-man command with Evert Eloranta and Adolf Taimi, then took over the Lempäälä front. After the defeat he rose to corps commander in the Red Army and quarrelled with Kuusinen and Manner in the Communist Party of Finland, which dropped him from its Central Committee in 1927. Expelled from the army for alcoholism in 1935 and sentenced to death, he died of tuberculosis in 1936 before the sentence was carried out.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1885–1938 ✕ Executed

Architect of revolutionary legal consciousness, consumed by the Great Terror

In May 1918, when the courtroom stirred at a death sentence passed after the death penalty had been abolished, Krylenko said: "Executions have been abolished. But Shchastny is not being executed; he is being shot."

Born in the village of Bekhteyevo in Smolensk Governorate to a peasant family, he joined the Bolsheviks in 1904 while studying history and literature at St Petersburg University, where he was known as 'Comrade Abram'. After the February Revolution he chaired his regiment's and division's committees and then the 11th Army committee, and in November 1917 he became the first Soviet Supreme Commander-in-Chief, opening armistice talks with Germany. From 1918 he passed through the revolutionary tribunals, prosecution and justice commissariats, casting law as an instrument of class struggle and leading the 1922 SR, 1928 Shakhty, 1930 Industrial Party and 1931 Menshevik trials. Arrested on 31 January 1938 on charges of links to Bukharin's Right organisation and wrecking in the justice organs, he was sentenced to death after a twenty-minute trial, shot on 29 July 1938 and rehabilitated in 1955.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1885–1949 ○ Natural causes

From party control to the art museum: an icon-painter Bolshevik

At 11 he left his village to apprentice as a painter; at 16 he was painting icons under a master. Twenty years later, those same hands held the cadre lists of the party's central apparatus.

Born to a peasant family in Vladimir province, he was apprenticed at age 11 and mastered icon painting before joining the Bolsheviks in 1905 at twenty. After the Civil War he led the party organization in the Ivanovo-Voznesensk region; in 1923 he rose to head the Organizational-Instruction Department of the Central Committee, managing the cadre-appointment line during Stalin's early consolidation of the party machine and serving as a candidate member of the Orgburo. He then spent fifteen years in the Central Control Commission and Party Control Commission, including through the apparatus purges of the Great Terror, and after a brief removal from duty in 1939 became director of the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, a post he held until his retirement in 1944.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1885–1951 ○ Natural causes

From 1st Cavalry Army commissar to the purge's personnel executioner

"Motor warfare, mechanisation, aviation and chemistry were invented by military specialists. For now, the main thing is the little horse. The decisive role in the coming war will be played by the cavalry."

A Bolshevik since 1904, he rose from tailor to professional revolutionary. Together with Budyonny and Voroshilov, he co-founded the 1st Cavalry Army and served on its Revolutionary Military Council, emerging as a Civil War hero. Appointed Deputy People's Commissar of Defence and head of the Command and Leadership Personnel Directorate in 1937, he became a central executioner of the Great Purge, spearheading the investigation into an 'illegal fascist conspiracy' among officers in the Kiev Military District. During World War II, as head of Glavupraform he oversaw all Red Army formation and manpower, though his dogmatic insistence on cavalry over mechanisation drew sharp postwar criticism.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1885–1960 ○ Natural causes

A social democrat who changed course between revolution and economics

At the Northern Front, he reported to Kerensky the reality that soldiers no longer wanted the offensive.

Vladimir Voitinsky was a Russian revolutionary and economist who explored both the labor movement and theories of markets. After Bolshevik work during the 1905 Revolution and exile in Siberia, he moved toward the Mensheviks in 1917 and sought cooperation between the soviets and the Provisional Government. As commissar of the Northern Front, he helped prepare the June Offensive but then confronted soldiers exhausted by war and unwilling to obey orders, exposing the limits of revolutionary military authority. After October he lived in exile and became an international labor and economic researcher who argued for democratic social reform.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1886–1921 ✕ Killed in action

Civil War commander who helped defend Tsaritsyn and establish Soviet power in Ukraine

Captured by Makhno, he pulled out a letter from his anarchist brother Artem urging him that 'it was not too late' — but Makhno shot him anyway.

Born in 1886 to a Ukrainian peasant family in Ekaterinoslav Governorate, he joined the Bolsheviks in 1904 as a worker at the Lugansk locomotive factory. During the 1905 Revolution he led armed worker detachments; after 1917 he helped establish Soviet power in the Donbas alongside Kliment Voroshilov, fought White forces and German occupiers, and cooperated with Stalin and Voroshilov in the defense of Tsaritsyn. As special plenipotentiary of the 1st Cavalry Army and commander of the 14th Cavalry Division, he fought in the Polish-Soviet War and against Wrangel before being killed in a Makhnovist ambush on 3 January 1921. Twice posthumously awarded the Order of the Red Banner, he was immortalized in Vsevolod Ivanov's novel and the 1942 film Alexander Parkhomenko, entering the pantheon of Soviet Civil War heroes.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1886–1925 ✕ Killed in crash

Lenin's periphery-builder who brought Soviet power to Belarus and Armenia

When news of the October Revolution reached Minsk, Myasnikov immediately formed and led a Military Revolutionary Committee, and Soviet power was established there without bloodshed.

An Armenian Bolshevik born to a merchant family in Nakhichevan-on-Don. He joined the RSDLP in 1906 and was administratively exiled to Baku for illegal literature, where Shaumyan influenced him. In 1917 he led the Western Front Bolsheviks in Minsk and played the leading role in establishing Soviet power there. He chaired the Byelorussian SSR Central Executive Committee in February 1919, then from May 1921 headed the Armenian SSR Council of People's Commissars, building Soviet Armenia's state institutions and economy. From 1922 he chaired the Transcaucasian SFSR Union Council and served as first secretary of the Transcaucasian Kraikom. He wrote on Marxist-Leninist theory and Armenian literature. On 22 March 1925 his aircraft caught fire and crashed near Tiflis, killing him alongside Atarbekov and Mogilevsky; the cause of the fire was never established.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1886–1934 ✕ Assassinated

The Leningrad organizer whose murder became the pretext for the Great Terror

In his first year in Leningrad in 1926, Kirov toured the factories and spoke at more than 180 workers' meetings.

A revolutionary and Soviet politician who joined the RSDLP in Tomsk in 1904 and took part in the 1905 Revolution; his birth surname was Kostrikov. He led the rebuilding of the Baku oilfields as First Secretary of the Azerbaijan Communist Party in 1921, took over the Leningrad party in 1926 and became a full Politburo member in 1930. In the Civil War he commanded the defence of Astrakhan and crushed anti-Bolshevik and workers' risings there with large-scale shootings, and in 1933 he sat on the Leningrad oblast 'troika' with power to pass death sentences in counter-revolutionary cases. On 1 December 1934 he was shot and killed at the Smolny in Leningrad by Leonid Nikolaev, and his death became the pretext for the Great Terror.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1886–1937 ✕ Gunshot death, attributed to suicide

Commander of the industrial front: he pulled the trigger himself

Around his fiftieth birthday in October 1936, shaken by news of his brother Papulia's arrest, he refused to attend the celebration held in his honour at Pyatigorsk; his wife Zinaida went alone.

An Old Bolshevik who joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1903, he was elected to the Central Committee at the Prague conference of 1912 and became a full Politburo member in 1930. He directed the Sovietization of the Caucasus and the creation of the Transcaucasian Federation, headed the Central Control Commission and Rabkrin in 1926–30 and the Supreme Economic Council in 1930–32, then led the First and Second Five-Year Plans as People's Commissar of Heavy Industry from 1932. At the commissariat he opposed mass repression in his own branch and shielded his cadres; he died in Moscow on 18 February 1937, with the official announcement giving heart failure as the cause. The purge of his deputies and relatives, and the circumstances of his death, are recorded alongside competing accounts of how he died.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1886–1937 ✕ Executed

The Right Opposition's institutional anchor in Moscow

19 October 1928. At the joint plenum of the Moscow Committee and Moscow Control Commission, Stalin personally delivered the keynote report on the 'right danger.' Uglanov was removed as Moscow first secretary the following month.

Born on 5 (17) December 1886 into a Russian peasant family in the village of Feodoritskoye, Yaroslavl Governorate. He worked in St Petersburg, took part in the 1905–07 revolution, joined the RSDLP as a Bolshevik in 1907, was conscripted again in 1914 and demobilized in 1916 after a wound. Leading the Moscow party organization from 1924 to 1928, he became one of the party's most powerful figures; as CC secretary and candidate Politburo member he worked with Ryutin to smash the Left Opposition in Moscow. In 1928 he became a leader of the Right Opposition against forced collectivization and breakneck industrialization, but was removed as Moscow first secretary that November and served as People's Commissar of Labour until 1930. Expelled in the 1932 Ryutin affair and arrested again on 23 August 1936, he was sentenced to death on 31 May 1937 and shot that day; he was rehabilitated in 1989.