People of the Revolution and the USSR

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1887–1938 ✕ Executed

First chairman of VSNKh; theorist of the Left Communists and of Democratic Centralism

Sent in November 1917 to break the sabotage of State Bank officials, he became the bank's first manager and obtained the keys to its vaults and cash for the Sovnarkom, moving to the chairmanship of VSNKh on 23 December.

Born in Kursk province into a small-landed noble family, he studied law at Moscow University and joined the Bolsheviks in 1907. Appointed a commissioner of the State Bank in November 1917 after the October Revolution, he secured the keys to its vaults and its funds, and in December became the first chairman of the Supreme Economic Council (VSNKh). A theoretical leader of the Left Communist group that opposed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in 1918, he co-led the Democratic Centralism group in 1920-21, which demanded open discussion and the representation of minority views in the party. He later served as deputy chairman of Gosplan and head of the Central Statistical Administration, was arrested in 1937, executed on 1 September 1938 and rehabilitated in 1957.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1887–1943 ○ Died in prison

The geneticist who built the world's largest seed bank and stood against Lysenko

“We shall go into the pyre, we shall burn, but we shall not retreat from our convictions.” — Leningrad, 1939, as Lysenko's persecution reached its peak.

Russian and Soviet geneticist and botanist. He discovered the law of homologous series in hereditary variation, developed the theory of centers of origin of cultivated plants, and built the world's largest seed collection: over 250,000 samples gathered across some 180 expeditions worldwide. As the first president of the All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences (VASKhNIL) and longtime director of the Institute of Plant Industry (VIR), he led Soviet agricultural science, until his open opposition to Lysenko's pseudoscience provoked his arrest on fabricated charges in 1940. He died of dystrophy in Saratov prison in 1943 and was posthumously rehabilitated in 1955.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1887–1967 ○ Natural causes

The Soviet Union's greatest partisan commander, who raided all the way to the Carpathians

"The flames lit up the slopes of the Carpathians… it was as bright as day at night, and the roar of burning oil drowned out even the engines of the German planes that never gave us rest." — Kovpak recalling the 1943 Bytkiv oilfield raid.

A Soviet partisan commander from Ukraine. He organized a unit at Putivl in 1941 and led it on daring raids thousands of kilometers behind German lines, all the way to the Carpathians, earning the title Hero of the Soviet Union twice.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1888–1927 ✕ Assassinated

Bolshevik diplomat who took part in the decision to execute Nicholas II: gunned down in Warsaw

7 June 1927, Warsaw Central Station. Voykov was meeting Arkady Rosengolts when White émigré youth Boris Kowerda rushed forward and fired his pistol. Upon arrest, Kowerda declared: "I avenged Russia, for millions of people."

Voykov, born into a Ukrainian peasant family, was a Bolshevik revolutionary and Soviet diplomat who joined the RSDLP as a teenager. As Commissar of Supply for the Ural Soviet in 1918, he took part in the special session that decided the execution of Nicholas II and his family, and signed orders for sulfuric acid used to destroy the bodies. From 1924 he served as Soviet Polpred to Poland, conducting diplomatic work in Warsaw until June 1927, when he was shot and killed by Boris Kowerda, a young White émigré. His assassination became a flashpoint in Soviet-Polish relations; in retaliation, the Soviet government extrajudicially executed twenty former imperial aristocrats in Moscow.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1888–1928 ✕ Executed

Crimean Tatar national communist who pressed Crimean Tatar interests as head of the Crimean ASSR and was executed

Born in 1888 into a merchant family in Bakhchysarai, he worked from the age of 14 at the newspaper Terciman, where Ismail Gasprinsky tutored him. He took part in the 1905 revolution and lived in the Ottoman Empire in 1909–1912. In 1916 he chaired a Crimean Tatar labour union, and in 1917 he was a Qurultay delegate and led the left wing of Milliy Firqa. He joined the Bolsheviks in 1918 and served in the Cheka special department on the Caucasus front in 1919–1920. From December 1920 he called for Crimea to be recognised as a famine region, and in 1921–1924 he was People’s Commissar of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection of the Crimean ASSR. As chairman of the Crimean Central Executive Committee from 1924 he opposed Jewish resettlement, but in 1928 he was executed on charges linked to a murder case; he was rehabilitated in 1990.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1888–1935 ○ Natural causes

Planning official of the first Five-Year Plans

On 25 January 1935, after chairing meetings all morning, he returned home pale and refused his housekeeper's offer to call a doctor, retiring to his room. When the Kremlin physician arrived, Kuibyshev was already dead of a coronary thrombosis.

Born the son of a tsarist officer, he joined the Social Democratic Party at sixteen and endured eight arrests and exiles in the Bolshevik underground. During the Civil War he served on the Revolutionary Military Councils of the 1st and 4th Armies; afterwards he chaired Rabkrin, the Supreme Economic Council, and Gosplan, becoming the architect and executor of Stalin's industrialization drive. A Politburo member from 1927, he oversaw the full span of economic policy and became a loyal symbol of Soviet industrialization whose name was bestowed on cities and factories after his death.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1888–1937 ✕ Executed

The agrarian economist who uncovered the moral logic of peasant economy

In Essays on the Theory of Labor Economy (1912-1913) he wrote: "Every labour economy has a limit to its output, which is determined by the proportion between the annual labour and the degree of satisfaction of the needs of the farming family."

Russian and Soviet agrarian economist, born in Moscow on 17 (29) January 1888 and killed on 3 October 1937 at Alma-Ata, who founded the theory of the labor-consumer balance of the peasant family farm. His Essays on the Theory of Labor Economy (1912-1913) argued that the peasant family farm works for a living rather than for profit, and read the degree of its self-exploitation as set by consumption needs against the drudgery of labor. Attribution of the term 'moral economy' to him comes from Russian-language biography, while English-language scholarship usually credits the concept to E. P. Thompson. Criticized from 1926 as petty-bourgeois and anti-Marxist, he was arrested in July 1930 in the fabricated 'Toiling Peasant Party' case, sentenced to five years, and, after his exile was extended in 1935, was shot on 3 October 1937.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1888–1937 ✕ Executed

First People's Commissar for Justice, Gosplan deputy chairman, and victim of the Great Purge

On October 24-25, 1917, he was in the Smolny Institute helping direct the armed uprising; within days, at 29, he became the Soviet government's first People's Commissar for Justice.

Born into a noble family in Saratov, he joined the Bolsheviks in 1903 and took part in the 1905 revolution. After the October Revolution he was appointed the first People's Commissar for Justice in the original Sovnarkom, then served in the Supreme Economic Council (VSNKh), led economic bodies in Siberia and the Urals, chaired the Oil Syndicate (Neftesindikat) and Donugol, and became deputy chairman of Gosplan. Within the party he sat on the Central Committee from the Sixth Congress (1917) onward; in 1918 he was a 'Left Communist' opposing the Brest-Litovsk Treaty before later backing Stalin. Arrested in 1937 on false charges, he was sentenced to death and shot; rehabilitated in 1956.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1888–1937 ✕ Executed

Founder of the Soviet Procuracy, caught between state security and socialist legality

Bukharin's widow recalled: 'A man of unyielding will and crystal honesty — he began putting the OGPU in order and very soon found himself unwelcome.'

A son of the St. Petersburg poor who joined the Bolsheviks in 1907, Ivan Akulov was a career revolutionary who rose through underground work, Civil War front committees, and party leadership posts across the Urals, Siberia, Crimea, and Ukraine. When the USSR Procuracy was created in 1933, he became its first Procurator, building the institutional framework of 'socialist legality' and carving out an independent prosecutorial space in the tense terrain between criminal justice and the state security apparatus. He was implicated in the emergency laws enacted after Kirov's murder, and in 1937 he was himself consumed by the repressive machinery he had helped construct.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1888–1937 ✕ Executed

Revolutionary-turned-banker who led Gosbank through collectivization

In 1919 he led armed detachments through the villages of Belarus, forcibly seizing grain from the peasantry. Eighteen years later the system he helped build shot him as a 'wrecker.'

Born to a Jewish merchant family in Siberia, he joined the Socialist Revolutionary Party in 1904 and switched to the Bolsheviks in July 1917. During the October Revolution he served as head of the Minsk garrison and on the Military Revolutionary Committee of the Western Front; during the Civil War he was food commissar in Belarus and Lithuania-Belarus, becoming one of the organizers of forced grain requisitioning expeditions. From 1930 to 1934 he chaired the USSR State Bank while serving simultaneously as Deputy People's Commissar of Finance, overseeing the credit reform of 1930–1932 that accompanied collectivization. He then led the People's Commissariat of Grain and Livestock Sovkhozes from 1934 until his arrest during the Great Terror; he was shot in November 1937.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1888–1937 ✕ Executed

Bolshevik industrial administrator who rose from the Cheka to chair VSNKh RSFSR

In 1936 Lobov received the Order of Lenin for his commissariat's overfulfillment of the production plan. One year later the same party arrested him for 'anti-Soviet terrorist' activity; he was sentenced and shot on the same day, 30 October 1937.

Son of a forester in Smolensk, he worked as a labourer and draftsman before joining the Bolsheviks in 1913. During the Civil War he chaired the Petrograd, Saratov and Bashkir Chekas, becoming an early cadre of the Soviet security organs. Under NEP he managed the fuel and oil syndicate, then became chairman of VSNKh RSFSR in 1926, laying the administrative basis for industrialization. As People's Commissar for Timber Industry from 1932, he oversaw lumber supply for the Five-Year Plans and received the Order of Lenin in 1936. Arrested in June 1937, he was shot on 30 October 1937 and rehabilitated in 1956.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1888–1938 ✕ Executed

Chairman of the All-Ukrainian Cheka and theorist of class-based Red Terror

“We are annihilating the bourgeoisie as a class. The first question we must ask is: what class does the accused belong to, what is his origin, upbringing and profession? These must determine his fate.” — Red Terror journal, 1 November 1918

A Soviet revolutionary and writer of Latvian origin, born Jānis Sudrabs. From July to November 1918 he chaired the Cheka and Military Tribunal of the 5th Army on the Eastern Front, and from 1919 to 1921 he chaired the All-Ukrainian Cheka while personally directing the Kiev Cheka. On 1 November 1918 the Kazan journal Krasny Terror carried his article "We are annihilating the bourgeoisie as a class," which held that class origin, upbringing and profession alone should decide a suspect's fate, the clearest theoretical statement of class-based Red Terror. The sources record a reputation for personal cruelty, corroborated by the Denikin commission's materials on the All-Ukrainian Cheka and by Lācis's own statements.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1888–1938 ✕ Executed

Ukrainian Soviet state-builder and scholar-politician, revolutionary bureaucrat across education, party, and control

As counting commission chair at the 17th Party Congress in 1934, he reported to Kaganovich that many ballots were cast against Stalin; according to his son Dmytro's testimony, he regarded this as signing his own death sentence.

A founding-generation Bolshevik Ukrainian statesman who helped create the CP(B)U and served as Chairman of the All-Ukrainian Central Executive Committee. He led the delegation of the Ukrainian People's Republic of Soviets at the Brest-Litovsk peace talks and signed the treaty establishing the USSR. Twice People's Commissar of Education (1922–1924, 1933–1938), he succeeded Mykola Skrypnyk in 1933 and implemented the rollback of Ukrainization. As the first editor-in-chief of the Ukrainian Soviet Encyclopedia and a full member of the Academy of Sciences, he helped build Soviet Ukraine's scholarly infrastructure. He also served as CC Secretary of the CP(B)U and head of Workers' and Peasants' Inspection. Arrested in a cinema with his family in November 1937, he was sentenced after a 20-minute trial to a term meaning death and shot the same day; rehabilitated in 1956.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1888–1939 ○ Heart attack

Educator who raised street children through labour and self-rule: one of UNESCO's four great 20th-c. pedagogues

"As much demand of the person as possible and as much respect for him" — Makarenko's principle

Founder of Soviet pedagogy. He built the 'Makarenko system': rehabilitating post-Civil-War street children through collective labour and self-government at the Gorky Colony and Dzerzhinsky Commune. His fictionalised account, The Pedagogical Poem, became a world classic of educational literature. In 1988 UNESCO named him one of four defining 20th-century pedagogues.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1888–1939 ✕ Killed in prison in

The finance commissar of NEP stabilization

At the 14th Party Congress in December 1925, before 1,306 delegates, Sokolnikov took the rostrum to demand Stalin's removal as General Secretary and the continuation of NEP. He was the only speaker to demand this from the rostrum. The move failed to win a majority.

Bolshevik leader killed in prison under Stalin. Born Grigory Brilliant, he took a law degree and a doctorate in economics at the Sorbonne and was fluent in six languages. After the October Revolution he oversaw bank nationalization and signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, and in the Civil War commanded the 8th Army that completed the defeat of Denikin. As Finance Commissar he directed the 1922–1924 monetary reform, stabilizing the ruble with the gold-backed chervonets. He advocated hard financial policy and gradual socialist construction, opposing forced industrialization and collectivization, and at the 14th Party Congress of 1925 demanded Stalin's resignation as General Secretary.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1888–1941 ✕ Suicide

Builder of Soviet defence industry in the shadow of his brother Lazar

1 July 1941, Mikoyan's office. Confronted with a confession extracted by torture, he stepped outside to wait — and shot himself in the lavatory before they could arrest him.

A Bolshevik metalworker, he rose through Ordzhonikidze's heavy-industry apparatus to become People's Commissar for Defence Industry (1937–1939) and Aviation Industry (1939–1940), building the organizational framework of Soviet military production during the Great Purge. Elder brother of Lazar Kaganovich, he was notorious for a loud, lecturing style and dependence on talented deputies; dismissed in 1940, he shot himself in the lavatory of Mikoyan's office just after the German invasion, when Vannikov under torture falsely implicated him.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1888–1961 ○ Natural causes

Chairman of the USSR Supreme Court through the Great Terror and war

Solzhenitsyn recorded that Golyakov "knew the work of Tolstoi, Korolenko, and Chekhov." The chairman who approved every death sentence in the USSR left as his final work a singular book: "Court and Law in Fiction."

A peasant conscript who fought in WWI, joined the Bolsheviks in 1918, and rose through Civil War military tribunals to become Chairman of the USSR Supreme Court in 1938. For a decade spanning the Great Terror, World War II, and postwar reconstruction, he headed the entire Soviet judicial apparatus and served on the secret Politburo commission that approved every death sentence, giving legal form to the purges. Yet archival materials show he sought to maximize rehabilitations during periods of relative 'legality,' and as director of the All-Union Institute of Legal Sciences he authored over seventy scholarly works, including the singular 'Court and Law in Fiction' (1959).

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1888–1970 ○ Natural causes

Formal head of state in late Stalinism

On 9 January 1905, 16-year-old factory worker Nikolai Shvernik witnessed the 'Bloody Sunday' shootings before the Winter Palace. That autumn he joined the Bolsheviks.

A Petersburg worker who joined the Bolsheviks at 17, he built the Soviet trade-union system as First Secretary of the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions for 14 years. He succeeded Kalinin as Chairman of the Supreme Soviet Presidium in 1946, though real power lay with Stalin and the Politburo. During the war he directed industrial evacuation and the Nazi atrocities investigation commission; after Stalin's death he worked with Khrushchev as head of the Party Control Committee, overseeing the rehabilitation of victims of political repression.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1888–1972 ○ Natural causes

"Ugly planes don't fly." The father of Soviet metal aviation.

Shown a model, Tupolev pronounced: "It's ugly. Ugly planes don't fly." The maxim became his lifelong creed — "Only beautiful airplanes fly well."

A student of Zhukovsky who built the world's first all-metal aircraft design bureau. Over 100 types flowed from his KB: the TB-1, TB-3, SB, and Tu-2 defined Soviet military aviation, while his all-metal stressed-skin philosophy reshaped the industry. Arrested in 1937 on charges of espionage, he designed the Tu-2 inside an NKVD sharashka. After the war came the Tu-16, the Tu-104 (the USSR's first jet airliner), the Tu-114, and the Tu-144, the world's first supersonic passenger aircraft. He mentored Korolev, Sukhoi, Petlyakov, Lavochkin, and Mil, a whole generation of Soviet aerospace. Three-time Hero of Socialist Labor, he died a natural death in 1972.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1889–1937 ✕ Executed

Author of the 1919 Karakhan Manifesto that renounced Tsarist unequal treaties with China

Karakhan became doyen of the Beijing diplomatic corps in 1925. The Bolshevik who scorned bourgeois manners nonetheless rode in a gilded six-horse coach, clad in evening clothes and white kid gloves, to present his credentials. Time magazine called him: "A Bolshevik who can wear white gloves gracefully."

Born into an Armenian lawyer's family in Tiflis, he joined the RSDLP at 15 in 1904, initially as a Menshevik. Siding with the Bolsheviks in 1917, he served as secretary of the Soviet delegation at Brest-Litovsk and became Deputy People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs. In 1919 he drafted and issued the 'Karakhan Manifesto' renouncing all Tsarist unequal treaties and privileges in China, a foundational document of Soviet Asia policy. As ambassador to China he concluded the 1924 Sino-Soviet agreement, and later served as ambassador to Turkey. Arrested in the Great Purge of 1937 on charges of a 'pro-fascist conspiracy,' he was shot and posthumously rehabilitated in 1956.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1889–1938 ✕ Executed

Bolshevik who built the Soviet Air Force and ran foreign trade

After the Arcos raid of 12 May 1927 in London, Rozengolts submitted a seven-page protest memorandum denying military espionage, but on 24 May Prime Minister Baldwin disclosed the seized documents to Parliament, and on 25 May Britain severed diplomatic relations and expelled him.

A Bolshevik from 1905, when he joined at 16, he became a Civil War political commissar, helped take Kazan and served against Kolchak. He headed the Soviet Air Force from 1922 to 1924, then spent 1925–1927 in London as chargé d'affaires through the Arcos raid and the break in Anglo-Soviet relations. Returning home, he broke with the opposition and joined the Stalinist apparatus. People's Commissar of Foreign Trade from 1930 to 1937, he was dismissed, arrested, sentenced to death in the 1938 Trial of the Twenty-One and shot.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1889–1938 ✕ Executed

The quiet architect of the Red Army who confronted Stalin at Tsaritsyn as Trotsky's man

In January 1918, during the Brest-Litovsk peace negotiations, Mekhonoshin told a party meeting chaired by Lenin: 'We have no real fighting force. The front is bare. We cannot fight.'

Konstantin Mekhonoshin was a core military organizer in the founding era of the Red Army, who prepared the October armed uprising as a member of the Petrograd Military Revolutionary Committee and then, as Deputy People's Commissar for Military Affairs, built the skeleton of the new Red Army alongside Podvoisky and Sklyansky. As a member of the Republic's Revolutionary Military Council he served on multiple fronts, and in 1918 at Tsaritsyn he backed Trotsky's appointed Southern Front commander against Stalin and Voroshilov's independent line, playing a decisive role in their removal. After the Civil War he headed Vsevobuch, laying the foundations of the Soviet physical culture and sports system, before moving through Gosplan, Osoaviakhim, and the Institute of Oceanography; arrested in 1937 and shot the following year, he was rehabilitated in 1956.