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.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1865–1937 ○ Natural causes

The American colonel who brought General Electric turbines and dam-building expertise to the Soviet Union's showcase construction site

At the 1932 Dneprostroi dedication: "The practical experience of American methods thus acquired will be a lever in raising the living standards of this country."

A self-taught dam engineer, Hugh Lincoln Cooper made his name by taming the Horseshoe Rapids at Niagara (1907) and spanning the Mississippi at Keokuk (1913), rising to become America's foremost hydroelectric builder. In 1926 the Soviet government invited him as chief consultant for Dneprostroi; he supplied General Electric turbines, supervised every phase of construction, and delivered Europe's largest power station eight months ahead of schedule in 1932. That September the USSR awarded Cooper and five other American engineers the Order of the Red Banner of Labour, the first time the decoration went to a foreigner. He remained an anti-communist all his life, but without his dam there would have been no flagship achievement for the First Five-Year Plan.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1881–1938 ✕ Executed by shooting

Finnish socialist who was Red Finland’s commissar of finance and later headed the government of Soviet Karelia

Born in Kuopio in 1881, the statistician and economist took his doctorate in 1909 with a thesis on crofting and became the Social Democrats’ agrarian expert. He sat in the Diet for the party from 1908 to 1917, was its vice chairman, and in November 1917 co-wrote “We demand” with Kuusinen. In the civil war he was Commissar of Finance of the People’s Delegation, led the talks for the 1 March treaty with Soviet Russia and signed it, and organised the defence of Viipuri at the end. Escaping to Sweden, he headed the Stockholm bureau of the Communist Party of Finland and in 1920 reported to Lenin on Karelian autonomy. As chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of Soviet Karelia in 1923–1935 he pursued Finnicisation, was condemned for “nationalist chauvinism” and removed, and was shot in Moscow in 1938.

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.