People of the Revolution and the USSR

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Imperial establishment and White movement 1876–1918 ✕ Executed

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.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Imperial establishment and White movement 1879–1967 ○ Natural causes

A polemicist who turned from revolutionary internationalism to wartime patriotism

In July 1917, he placed the material alleging Lenin was a German agent in Zhivoe Slovo.

Grigory Alexinsky rose as a Bolshevik activist and Second Duma deputy during the 1905 revolutionary period, but the pressures of war and revolution drove him sharply toward social patriotism. In 1917 he joined Plekhanov’s Yedinstvo group, attacked the Bolsheviks, and helped place Ensign Yermolenko’s inadequate testimony into the public claim that Lenin was a German agent. The exposure strengthened anti-Bolshevik politics among soldiers and in the soviets, while revealing the path by which a revolutionary became an émigré opponent of Bolshevism.

Soviet Union Imperial establishment and White movement 1901–1946 ✕ Executed

Hero of the Battle of Moscow who defected to lead the Nazi-backed Russian Liberation Army

June 1942: with his 2nd Shock Army encircled, Vlasov was offered escape by plane. He refused, hid in German-occupied territory with his men, and was betrayed by a local farmer ten days later.

Andrey Vlasov was a Red Army lieutenant general hailed as a "defender of Moscow" for leading the 20th Army in the capital's defense, who after his capture in the 1942 Lyuban operation defected to Nazi Germany. As leader of the Russian Liberation Army (ROA) and the Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia (KONR), he advanced an anti-Stalinist program for a democratic Russia, codified in the 1944 Prague Manifesto with its pledges of national self-determination and basic freedoms. The Nazis used him chiefly as a propaganda weapon, but in the war's final days the ROA's 1st Division joined the Prague uprising against the Germans. Captured by Soviet forces after the war, he was hanged for treason following a secret trial; his legacy remains fiercely contested in Russian historiography and memory politics.