People of the Revolution and the USSR

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 Union Soviet communism 1893–1936 ✕ Poisoned

Stalin's closest friend turned Beria's first victim: the red prince of Abkhazia

Stalin's words to Lakoba: 'I am Koba, you are Lakoba.' On the night of December 27, 1936, after dinner at Beria's residence, he collapsed with violent vomiting. His driver testified that Lakoba's last whispered words were: 'Beria killed me.'

Bolshevik leader who governed Soviet Abkhazia from 1922 to 1936, advancing agriculture and Black Sea resort development. Stalin's close friend, he was poisoned by Beria and posthumously rehabilitated.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1894–1955 ✕ Executed

From tsarist officer to Beria's untitled enforcer in state security

On 8 July 1939, aboard an NKVD special railcar from Moscow to Tskhaltubo, Soviet plenipotentiary to China Bovkun-Luganets and his wife were killed and the deaths staged as a car crash; at the 1953 interrogations the testimonies conflicted over who struck the blows.

Born into a poor family at Sachkhere in Georgia, he passed through tsarist army service and prisoner-of-war camps before entering the Georgian Workers'-Peasants' militia in 1921 and moving to the GPU in 1922 on Beria's recommendation. When Beria took him to Moscow in late 1938 as deputy head of the 3rd special department of the central NKVD, he became Beria's personal operative for abductions and secret killings. He sat on the Georgian NKVD special troika from August 1937 to July 1938, taking part in its mass execution decisions during the Great Terror, and was first deputy people's commissar of internal affairs of Georgia in 1941, later deputy interior minister of the republic, with the rank of lieutenant-general. Sentenced to death at the Tbilisi trial of September 1955 and shot on 15 November 1955, he has not been rehabilitated since.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1898–1953 ✕ Executed

He staged Lithuania's annexation and took the declaration of war in Berlin

At 4 a.m. on 22 June 1941 in Berlin, Ribbentrop handed Dekanozov Germany's declaration of war on the USSR; interpreter Erich Sommer recalled that he listened calmly and said he deeply regretted that Hitler and Stalin had never met in person.

Born in Baku in June 1898 and executed in Moscow on 23 December 1953; the official biography records him as Georgian by nationality. From December 1938 to May 1939 he served as deputy head of the NKVD's Main Directorate of State Security, heading both foreign intelligence and counterintelligence, and executed the purges of their final wave. Sent to Lithuania as plenipotentiary in 1940, he installed Justas Paleckis as prime minister, organised the 14 July People's Seimas elections, and completed the annexation within about a month. After the war he held secondary posts including deputy foreign minister and deputy head of the Main Directorate of Soviet Property Abroad; in April 1953 he became Georgian interior minister, was arrested on 30 June, and was shot on 23 December as a member of the 'Beria gang'.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1899–1953 ✕ Executed

The secret-police chief who arrived carrying reforms

Minutes before the test, Beria said, 'Nothing will come of it, Igor.' When the flash rose he rushed to embrace Kurchatov and Khariton, then suspicion surged back and he phoned a Bikini-test observer: 'Haven't we slipped up? Doesn't Kurchatov humbug us?'

Stalin's last secret-police chief and overseer of the atomic bomb project. Born in Merkheuli, Georgia, to a poor peasant family, he joined the Bolsheviks in 1917. Rising through the Transcaucasian security organs, he became NKVD commissar in November 1938, after which the Great Terror's mass operations sharply contracted. He supervised the killing of Trotsky in 1940 and the Katyn shootings of about 22,000 Polish officers and intelligentsia under the 5 March 1940 Politburo decision, and in 1944 personally directed the deportations of the Chechen, Ingush and other peoples. As chairman of the Special Committee from 1945 he ran the atomic project to its first test in 1949. After Stalin's death he was First Deputy Premier and Minister of Internal Affairs in 1953, pushing amnesty and rehabilitation until his arrest on 26 June; sentenced to death and executed on 23 December.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1899–1955 ✕ Executed

He ran the Georgian police apparatus for a decade

Arrested in the 1951 Mingrelian affair, Rapava was thrown into the internal prison he had run for a decade, denied sleep for 160 days, and left naked in handcuffs in an ice-cold cell — the very torture methods he had once ordered his subordinates to use.

A Mingrelian who joined the Cheka in the 1920s, Rapava headed the Georgian NKVD and then the MGB for a decade starting in 1938, serving as the republic's chief security officer throughout the Great Terror and the war years. A close associate of Beria, he built Georgia's interwar security apparatus, but was caught in Stalin's 1951 'Mingrelian affair,' freed after Stalin's death, then re-arrested in July 1953 after Beria's fall and shot in 1955 after a public trial.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1900–1955 ○ Died in prison

"Second Lavrentiy"; Beria's man who ran the Mikhoels killing

On the night of 12 January 1948 Solomon Mikhoels and Golubov were lured to Tsanava's dacha outside Minsk and killed there, the death staged as a road accident; sources differ on the exact date and on how they died.

Born Lavrentiy Dzhandzhgava in 1900 to a poor peasant family in Nakhunavo, Kutaisi province, he joined the party in August 1920. From 1938 to 1951 he led Belorussian state security, organizing mass shootings and deportations in western Belarus; a 1955 case file states that he personally took part in the beating of arrested persons. When Stalin ordered the killing of Mikhoels, Tsanava's dacha became the operation's base, and on the night of 12 January 1948 the actor Solomon Mikhoels and Golubov were killed there. He became USSR deputy minister of state security late in 1951, fell from office the next year, was arrested in April 1953 and died of heart failure in Butyrka prison in October 1955.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1901–1953 ✕ Executed

From running the terror in Georgia to overlord of the Far East

Summoned to Marshal Sokolovsky's office in East Germany, Goglidze was arrested there on 3 July 1953 as two officers stepped in behind him with drawn revolvers. 'His eyes darted about,' a witness recorded, the moment the Beria circle began to fall.

A Georgian border-guard political officer who caught Beria's eye in the Caucasus, Goglidze became NKVD chief of Georgia and chaired its troika, running the Great Terror in the republic. Under Beria's patronage he purged Yezhov's men from the Leningrad NKVD, and in April 1941, as plenipotentiary for Moldavia, he directed the deportation of over 30,000 people from newly annexed Bessarabia. From July 1941 he headed NKVD and MGB organs in Khabarovsk Territory. On 5 March 1953 he became an MVD collegium member and head of its 3rd Directorate, military counter-intelligence. Arrested in East Germany on 3 July 1953, he was shot with Beria on 23 December 1953. In 2002 Russia's Supreme Court military collegium named him an organiser of mass repression and ruled him non-rehabilitable; a reported 2004 rehabilitation is unconfirmed.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1902–1970 ○ Natural causes

The Georgian interior minister who survived the purge

Arrested in April 1952 in the 'Mingrelian affair' — a case aimed at Beria — he was freed by Beria after Stalin's death. When Beria fell and his inner circle was executed, Karanadze alone escaped trial, dismissed only for 'discrediting facts' and dying naturally in 1970.

A Georgian protégé of Beria who headed the NKVD in Crimea and Dagestan before serving as Georgia's interior minister (1943–1952). Arrested in the Mingrelian affair, he was rehabilitated after Stalin's death and alone among Beria's lieutenants escaped execution.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1902–1976 ○ Natural causes

The gatekeeper who held the NKVD secretariat

Summoned from Tbilisi by Beria in December 1938. A month later he was first deputy chief of the NKVD Secretariat; for the next fourteen years, every document of the secret police crossed his desk.

Beria loyalist and party functionary. As NKVD Secretariat chief from 1939 he controlled the commissariat's entire document flow; later deputy interior minister overseeing the camp system. Tried separately from Beria, served a full fifteen-year term and was released in 1968.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1902–1988 ○ Removed 1972

The Georgian boss who ruled nineteen years, and godfathered a shadow economy

Concluding in June 1965 that the exposure of Stalin's crimes had gone too far, Mzhavanadze had the Stalin museum in his birthplace Gori reopened and quoted Stalin: "Our Party is a fortress whose gates open only for tried and true people."

Born in Kutaisi on 7 (20) September 1902 in a worker's family, he began factory work in 1915, entered the Red Army in 1924 and joined the Communist Party in 1927. After graduating from the Leningrad Military-Political Academy in 1937 he served as a military-political commissar, and in the Great Patriotic War sat on the military councils of the 42nd, 2nd Shock and 21st armies. Elected First Secretary of the Georgian Communist Party Central Committee on 20 September 1953, he headed the republic for nineteen years and was a candidate member of the CPSU Politburo from 1957 to 1972. He asked Khrushchev for military force during the 1956 Tbilisi demonstrations, helped prepare Khrushchev's removal in October 1964 and had the Stalin museum in Gori reopened in 1965.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1903–1982 ○ Natural causes

Beria's bodyguard chief, formerly of the internal prison

In 1937, Nadaraya had former Georgian Party secretary Samson Mamulia tied to an interrogation table and beaten for over a week, until Mamulia falsely implicated Sergo Ordzhonikidze — a confession Nadaraya himself made at his 1955 trial.

Born in the village of Sepieti in western Georgia, Nadaraya ran the NKVD internal prison of the Georgian SSR at the height of the 1937 terror, where he was involved in beatings of prisoners and the fabrication of death certificates to conceal torture deaths. In 1939 he became deputy chief of Beria's personal security, followed his patron to Moscow, and by 1953 rose to chief of the detail. Arrested after Beria's fall, he received a ten-year sentence at the 1955 Tbilisi trial and, unlike the six senior defendants, was spared execution. Released from a Mordovian camp in 1965, he died in Moscow in 1982.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1905–1955 ✕ Executed

He drove the Mingrelian affair and then fell himself

As Gagra NKVD chief, he made beatings routine in interrogations, declaring: "Whoever does not beat is himself an enemy of the people!"

Rukhadze rose through Georgia's security organs, and by 1937, as head of the NKVD in Gagra, Abkhazia, he directed mass arrests using "simplified investigation" methods. During the war he served as head of the Special Department of the Transcaucasian Front and chief of SMERSH counter-intelligence before becoming Georgia's state security minister in 1948. In that post he became the driving figure behind the fabricated "Mingrelian affair," aimed at Beria's clients. Yet he fell himself: arrested in November 1952, months before Stalin's death, he was tried in 1955, ironically, as a member of Beria's group, and shot.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1906–1955 ✕ Executed

The Berlin rezident who piped Nazi disinformation to Moscow

In Berlin, Kobulov's prized agent 'Lycéist' was in fact a double agent run by the Gestapo. His reports bypassed NKVD intelligence analysts and went straight through Beria to Stalin's desk, reinforcing the conviction that there was "no risk of a German invasion" in 1941.

The younger brother of Bogdan Kobulov, Amayak rose through the NKVD on the patronage of his brother and Beria. In 1938, at thirty-two, he became acting NKVD chief of Ukraine; the following year he was posted to Berlin as NKVD rezident despite speaking no German and having no operational training. His prize agent 'Lycéist' was in fact a German plant, and through 1940–41 Nazi disinformation flowed through Kobulov into Moscow. He spent the war as security chief of Uzbekistan, then ran the POW administration and served as deputy head of the Gulag. Arrested after Beria's fall in 1953, he was shot in 1955.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1912–1982 ○ Natural causes

The institutional anchor who co-signed every Soviet decree across four heads of state for 25 years

On 23 November 1982, thirteen days after Brezhnev's death, he collapsed and died while attending a session of the Supreme Soviet — breaking a quarter-century of administrative continuity in a single moment.

As Secretary of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet (1957–1982), Georgadze was the administrative linchpin who co-signed every decree of the Soviet state across four formal heads of state under Khrushchev and Brezhnev. Born to a Georgian peasant family and trained as an agricultural engineer, he was severely wounded in the Great Patriotic War. After serving as Second Secretary of the Georgian Communist Party and First Deputy Chairman of the Georgian Council of Ministers, he was called to Moscow, where he embodied institutional continuity in the Presidium for a quarter-century. A candidate member of the CPSU Central Committee (1961–1982), he was the quiet but essential link between party and state apparatus.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1914–1987 ○ Heart attack

The Georgian-born secret father of the Soviet mobile ICBM force

When Gorbachev and Reagan signed the INF Treaty on 8 December 1987 scrapping his 728 RSD-10 Pioneer (SS-20) missiles, Nadiradze had died on 3 September and never knew of it. His Topol (SS-25) remained in service long after the Soviet collapse, retiring only in 2023.

A rocket designer born in Gori, Georgia, who worked at Moscow defence research institutes from 1938 until his death. He joined the party in 1944 and lived as a Soviet citizen. On Sergei Korolev's recommendation he moved to NII-1 in 1958 to head its Special Design Bureau, and led that institute, renamed MITT in 1965, as director and chief designer until 1987 (sources give both 1961 and 1965 as the start). He designed the RT-21 Temp-2S (SS-16), RSD-10 Pioneer (SS-20) and RT-2PM Topol (SS-25), giving the Strategic Rocket Forces a road-mobile solid-fuel capability. Twice Hero of Socialist Labour (1976, 1982), laureate of the Lenin Prize (1966) and the USSR State Prize (1987), full Academician in 1981. He registered over 220 inventions and 100 papers, died of a heart attack on 3 September 1987 and is buried at Novodevichy Cemetery.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1921–1962 ○ Alcoholism

Lieutenant general of aviation and founder of Soviet ice hockey, the leader's son

At his father's funeral in March 1953, a drunken Vasily arrived shouting 'They poisoned him!' Less than two months later he was under arrest.

The younger son of Joseph Stalin, he flew 27 combat missions as a fighter pilot during World War II and rose to lieutenant general of aviation. Appointed commander of the Air Forces of the Moscow Military District in 1948, he served until 1952; his rapid rise, becoming the youngest major-general in the Red Army at 24, owed much to paternal patronage. Yet beyond the role of 'the leader's son,' he was a sports administrator who, as the first chairman of the USSR Ice Hockey Federation, founded the VVS Moscow team and recruited Anatoly Tarasov as its inaugural coach, laying the institutional foundation for Soviet hockey. Arrested on charges of anti-Soviet agitation shortly after his father's death in 1953, he was sentenced to eight years and served time under an assumed name in Vladimir Central Prison.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1928–2003 ○ Natural causes

Philosopher who bridged Soviet planning science and Western systems analysis

His forename "Dzhermen" was composed by his father from the first syllables of the surnames of Felix Dzerzhinsky and Vyacheslav Menzhinsky — the two OGPU chairmen under whom his father served.

Soviet philosopher, sociologist, and management theorist. Son-in-law of Alexei Kosygin, he served as Deputy Chairman of the State Committee for Science and Technology (GKNT) from 1965 to 1985, coordinating Soviet science and technology policy. A member of the Club of Rome and co-founder of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Austria, he was a rare bridge between Soviet planning science and Western systems analysis during the Cold War. In 1976 he founded and directed the All-Union Research Institute for Systems Analysis (VNIISI), known for its relatively free-thinking atmosphere and its incubation of market-oriented reform ideas that fed into perestroika-era economic debates.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1928–2014 ○ Natural causes, died

The Soviet foreign minister who ended the Cold War, then led Georgia

On 20 December 1990 Shevardnadze warned the Congress of People's Deputies that dictatorship was coming, announcing his resignation as foreign minister and his break with the party; some accounts date the speech to 21 December, so the date is disputed.

Born in 1928 at Mamati in Georgia, in a teacher's family. Interior minister of Georgia from 1965, he became the republic's party first secretary in 1972, waging large-scale anti-corruption campaigns and the Abasha experiment. In 1985, despite having no diplomatic experience, he was made Soviet foreign minister and negotiated arms cuts, the Afghan withdrawal and German unification. On 20 December 1990 he resigned, warning that dictatorship was coming. He returned home in 1992 and led Georgia as State Council chairman and president until the 2003 Rose Revolution. He died in Tbilisi on 7 July 2014.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1939–

The Georgian First Secretary who asked Moscow for troops, then resigned after 21 died

Patiashvili later recalled: 'Gorbachev phoned and said, in a tone that left no room for argument: The square must be cleared immediately, and the army will handle it. I understood he knew about the plan and supported it.'

He succeeded Shevardnadze as First Secretary of the Georgian Communist Party in 1985, but dismantled most of his predecessor's reform experiments and drove the opposition underground. In April 1989, facing independence protests sparked by the Abkhaz autonomy dispute, he asked Moscow to send troops and on 8 April convened the republic's Defence Council, which decided to disperse the demonstrators by force. Before dawn the next day, Soviet troops armed with sapper shovels and poison gas descended on unarmed civilians, killing 21; Patiashvili accepted responsibility and resigned within two weeks. He remained in Georgian politics, twice ran for president against Shevardnadze, and supported the 2003 Rose Revolution, though he later criticized Saakashvili.