People of the Revolution and the USSR

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1889–1938 ✕ Executed

The industrial builder Lenin trusted; first People's Commissar for Defence Industry

On 1 October 1921 Lenin sent Rukhimovich, then Donetsk Gubernial Executive Committee chairman and manager of the Donugol and Khimugol trusts, a letter on the leasing out of small and medium Donbas mines.

Born in 1889 in the Rostov region to a worker's family, Rukhimovich entered the Social-Democratic movement in 1904 and was active in the Jewish Social-Democratic Workers' Party, the Bund. After emigration from 1906 to 1909 he worked in Ukraine, joined the party in 1913 and was mobilized into the army in 1914. As Donetsk Gubernial Executive Committee chairman and then Donugol Trust manager in the 1920s he directed emergency measures to restore Donbas coal extraction, later developed Kuzbass coal and served as Deputy Commissar for Heavy Industry. On 8 December 1936 he became first People's Commissar of the new Defence Industry Commissariat, was removed on 15 October 1937, shot the following year and rehabilitated in 1956.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1889–1938 ✕ Executed

The first People's Commissar for Naval Affairs, whose Baltic sailors tipped the scales in October 1917

November 1, 1917, Gatchina Palace. Dybenko, having surrounded Kerensky-Krasnov's forces with thousands of armed sailors, addressed the Cossack delegation: "Hand over your general. Soviet power guarantees you safe passage home." By morning, General Krasnov was under arrest and Kerensky had fled in disguise. In one week, the fate of the revolution had been sealed.

Born to a Ukrainian peasant family in Chernigov, he became a Baltic Fleet sailor and joined the Bolshevik underground. Elected chairman of Tsentrobalt in April 1917, he funnelled thousands of armed sailors from Helsingfors and Kronstadt into Petrograd during the October Revolution, tipping the balance, arresting General Krasnov, and dispersing the Constituent Assembly. He captured Crimea and liberated Tsaritsyn during the Civil War, then helped crush the Kronstadt and Tambov rebellions. His marriage to Alexandra Kollontai made them the revolution's most celebrated couple.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1889–1938 ✕ Shot in

The Latvian Bolshevik who built Soviet military intelligence and was consumed by the purges

When the secret residents' conference in Denmark was uncovered in February 1935 and four senior officers of the central apparatus were seized at once, Berzin submitted his resignation.

Born in 1889 into a Latvian farm-labourer family, born Pēteris Ķuzis, and executed in 1938. He joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1905, led guerrilla activity in Latvia, and after serving a katorga sentence for killing a policeman escaped from Siberian exile in 1914. Deputy People's Commissar of Internal Affairs of Soviet Latvia in 1919 and in Red Army intelligence from 1920, he headed the Fourth (Intelligence) Directorate from 1924 to 1935 and built the Soviet military-intelligence system. Chief military adviser to the Spanish Republic in 1936, he returned as intelligence chief in 1937, was arrested that November and executed on 29 July 1938; rehabilitated in 1956.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1889–1939 ✕ Executed

The Gulag's first chief and builder of Belomor

At the Belomor site in 1932, Kogan told Mikoyan: "'Zaklyuchenny' insults, 'lagernik' is dull — I've coined 'kanaloarmeyets,' canal-army soldier." Mikoyan approved; the abbreviation 'zek' was born from his term.

The son of a wealthy Jewish merchant in Siberia, Kogan began as an anarcho-communist and was sentenced to death in 1908 for armed robbery, commuted to hard labour. Joining the Bolsheviks in 1918, he rose through the Cheka and border troops. In 1930 he became the first chief of the newly created Gulag, where he was instrumental in institutionalizing the Soviet forced-labour system. From 1931 he directed the White Sea–Baltic Canal project, mobilizing roughly 170,000 prisoners to complete the 227-km waterway in under two years, at a cost of tens of thousands of lives. Tied to the Yagoda network, he was arrested in 1938, shot in 1939, and rehabilitated in 1956.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1889–1939 ✕ Died under interrogation

Yezhov’s intimate who rose to deputy commissar and died under interrogation

Arrested in December 1938, he was dead under interrogation within a month, one of the five names Yezhov's own deposition listed as accomplices.

Born to a peasant family in Tambov province, he joined the Bolsheviks in 1918 and came up through military commissar and district administrative posts before working in the Moscow city administration. Under Yezhov he became chief of the NKVD Administrative-Economic Directorate in July 1937, was promoted within weeks to deputy commissar of internal affairs, and in December 1937 moved on to serve as People's Commissar of the Timber Industry until October 1938. He held the rank of major of state security and the Order of the Red Star, and was married to Yezhov's secretary Serafima Ryzhova. Arrested in December 1938 after Yezhov's fall, he was one of the names Yezhov's own deposition listed as members of his conspiratorial group. He died on 19 January 1939 under interrogation conducted with unlawful methods, and was rehabilitated in 1955.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1889–1941 ✕ Executed

The deputy commissar who ran the Soviet police

Dismissed from the OGPU in 1931 for protesting Yagoda's "Vesna" frame-up, he returned under Yezhov to organize the troikas of the Great Terror.

A Cheka veteran, he became chief of the Soviet militia in 1934 and Yezhov's deputy at the NKVD in 1936, where he organized the regional troikas that issued mass death sentences during the Great Terror. Arrested in 1939, he was shot in 1941 and has never been rehabilitated.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1889–1942 ○ Stomach cancer

RSFSR Finance Commissar who commissioned the Narkomfin Building and authored the Sotsgorod linear-city concept

On the night of the October Revolution, Milyutin's detachment launched a frontal assault from the Arch of the General Staff onto the barricades around the Alexander Column——and was the first to cross that line.

Nikolai Milyutin was a Bolshevik revolutionary who participated in the storming of the Winter Palace, later serving as RSFSR People's Commissar of Finance (1924–1929). In that role he commissioned Moisei Ginzburg's Narkomfin Building, a landmark of Soviet Constructivist architecture, and in 1930 published Sotsgorod, his influential treatise advancing the linear-city concept for socialist urban planning. He edited the journal Sovetskaya arkhitektura (1931–1934) and continued to develop Marxist theories of settlement while holding educational and cultural posts through the 1930s. Though he survived the Great Purge, reportedly sleeping with a pistol under his pillow, Milyutin died of stomach cancer in 1942, leaving a legacy that bridged revolutionary state-building and avant-garde architectural thought.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1889–1951 ○ Stroke

Presiding judge of the Moscow show trials, Stalin's 'judicial guillotine'

To an Estonian lawyer he had just condemned to death, Ulrikh smiled and said: "So your profession came in handy after all!"

Chairman of the Military Collegium of the USSR Supreme Court (1926–1948) and the judicial face of the Stalin-era Great Purge. Born in Riga to a Baltic German revolutionary father and a Russian noble mother, he joined the Bolsheviks in 1910 and began his Cheka career in 1918. He presided over the Moscow show trials of Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, and Tukhachevsky (1936–1938), directing a body that handed down over 30,000 death sentences in two years. After the war he presided over the trials of Nazi collaborators Vlasov and Krasnov, and the leaders of the Polish Underground State. Reporting directly to Stalin outside the ordinary judicial hierarchy, he embodied a parallel justice system designed for political repression. Removed in 1948, he died of a stroke in 1951.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1889–1953 ○ Natural causes

From Stalin's personal secretary to the Red Army's purge enforcer, nicknamed 'the Inquisitor of the Red Army'

According to former USSR Health Minister Ye. I. Smirnov, when he proposed to Stalin in 1949 that Mekhlis head a government commission, Stalin burst out laughing, wiping away tears, saying words to the effect that Mekhlis was suited to destroying and wrecking things, not to constructive work.

Born in Odessa into a Jewish family, he worked as a clerk and tutor before joining the Zionist workers' party Poale Zion (1907–1910). He entered the Communist Party in 1918 and did Red Army political work; in 1922–1926 he was in effect Stalin's personal secretary. As Pravda editor-in-chief from 1930 to November 1937 he incited the campaign against 'enemies of the people'. From December 1937 to September 1940, as Deputy People's Commissar of Defence and head of the Main Political Directorate, he helped organise the mass purge of the officer corps. His interference on the Crimean Front contributed to the Kerch catastrophe of 1942 and he was demoted two ranks, but his ranks were later restored and he became a colonel-general (1944). He served as USSR Minister of State Control (1946–1950) and died of heart disease in 1953.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1889–1960 ○ Died in custody

Azerbaijan's people's commissar of internal affairs in the mass operations, arrested in the Beria case

As Azerbaijan's people's commissar of internal affairs in 1937–1938, he served on the special troika and took part in the Great Purge. Arrested in the Beria case in 1953, he died in custody.

Born into a peasant family in Kapana, Kutaisi province, to an Armenian father and a Georgian mother (Topuridze was her maiden name), he was a Menshevik in 1905–1910 and joined the Bolsheviks in 1918. From 1920 he served in the Azerbaijani Cheka; from 1934 he headed the Azerbaijani GPU and NKVD, and as people's commissar of internal affairs in 1937–1938 he sat on the special troika. From April 1938 he ran the NKVD's administrative and economic directorate, and in 1947–1953 he was deputy chairman of Azerbaijan's Council of Ministers. Arrested in July 1953 in the Beria case, he was committed to a psychiatric hospital and died in August 1960 before the investigation ended.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1890–1918 ✕ Suicide

MRC commissar who twice entered the Winter Palace to parley and talked its defenders into walking away

Inside the Winter Palace, Palchinsky ordered his arrest. The cadets protested: 'His detention damages our honour. We guaranteed his safety.' The commissar walked free, and soon the cadets walked out too.

A Jewish youth from Ekaterinoslav who joined the revolutionary movement at fifteen, Chudnovsky followed Trotsky through emigration in Paris and New York, returning via the Mezhraiontsy to the Bolsheviks in May 1917. As an MRC commissar during the October insurrection, he twice entered the Winter Palace to parley (arrested the first time by Palchinsky, then freed at the cadets' insistence), and his promise of safe passage to those who would lay down their arms persuaded waves of defenders to quit the building before the final entry. Appointed extraordinary commissar of the South-Western Front, he fought German occupation forces and the Ukrainian Central Rada; captured and sentenced to death by the Rada in December 1917, he was freed by Soviet troops entering Kiev, but died surrounded near Liubotyn in April 1918; accounts differ on whether he fell fighting or shot himself.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1890–1937 ✕ Executed

The Soviet trade representative who sent Republican Spain's gold to Moscow

Stashevsky proposed to finance minister Negrín the idea of opening 'a current account in gold' in Moscow, and persuaded him it could be used to buy arms and raw materials.

A Soviet intelligence officer and trade official from the SDKPiL. He ran the joint INO–GRU residency in Berlin as one of the key figures of early Soviet military intelligence, later headed Torgsin and served in the People's Commissariat for Foreign Trade before being posted to Republican Spain as trade representative in 1936. In Spain he negotiated arms sales and managed the financial side of Operation X; he has been identified as the man who persuaded Juan Negrín to deposit the Bank of Spain's gold reserves in Moscow. Recalled in June 1937 and shot two months later, he was rehabilitated in 1956.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1890–1937 ✕ Executed

One of the eight Tukhachevsky-trial defendants; his confession under torture started the chain reaction that consumed the Red Army

"Although I was arrested on the 15th and the very next day declared I belonged to an anti-Soviet organization, until today I have tried to minimize my role and conceal the most essential facts." (interrogation, May 19, 1937)

Born in Pinsk to a Jewish carpenter, he rose from a WWI private and Civil War division commander to the Red Army elite. As head of the Command Personnel Directorate from 1934, he controlled officer appointments across the armed forces, working closely with Tukhachevsky, whom he accompanied to Reichswehr maneuvers in Germany in 1932. Arrested on May 15, 1937, a week before Tukhachevsky, he named over forty fellow commanders under torture as participants in the "military-Trotskyist conspiracy"; his confession ignited the chain reaction of the Great Purge. On June 12 he was sentenced to death by a closed military tribunal and shot that same day alongside Tukhachevsky and six others.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1890–1937 ✕ Executed

Worker-Bolshevik premier of the Russian Republic destroyed by the state he helped industrialize

Arrested on 27 June 1937 while still performing his duties — seized during a session of the very Central Committee plenum that had just expelled him.

An Old Bolshevik who joined the party at fourteen as a factory worker, Sulimov rose through the Ural party apparatus to become Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the RSFSR (1930–1937), overseeing the republic's industrialization during the first two five-year plans. A member of the Central Committee (1923–1937) and the OrgBuro (1927–1930), he was among the highest-ranking Bolsheviks of worker origin to lead a Soviet government. Arrested during the June 1937 Central Committee Plenum immediately after Vyacheslav Molotov accused him of political disloyalty, he was tried for wrecking, espionage, and participation in an anti-Soviet terrorist organization of the Right, and executed on 27 November 1937. He was posthumously rehabilitated in 1956, and the city of Cherkessk bore his name, Sulimov, from 1934 to 1937.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1890–1937 ✕ Executed

Dzerzhinsky's Polish comrade, a Cheka founding pillar who defied Yagoda's fabrications

On 26 September 1926, an 18-year-old unemployed youth from Kharkov, Anatoly Truba, walked into Messing's office at the Leningrad OGPU and opened fire with a revolver. Messing ducked under his desk and survived; Truba was shot soon after.

Born into a Jewish musician's family in Warsaw, he joined the Social Democracy of Poland in 1908, earning the trust of Felix Dzerzhinsky and Józef Unszlicht. He rose to chairman of the Moscow Cheka (1921) and head of the Petrograd–Leningrad Cheka-OGPU (1921–1929). In 1929 he became 2nd Deputy Chairman of the OGPU and chief of its Foreign Department (INO), leading Soviet intelligence between Mikhail Trilisser and Artur Artuzov. He openly opposed Genrikh Yagoda's fabricated 'Vesna' case and was dismissed in 1931, pushed into economic diplomacy and shot in 1937 on charges of Polish espionage.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1890–1938 ✕ Executed

From Ukrainian Borotbist to People's Commissar of Finance: the man who funded the Five-Year Plans

When Grinko was arrested as an 'enemy of the people' in 1937, the 1-, 3-, and 5-ruble notes bearing his signature became a political embarrassment. Authorities rushed out replacement notes with identical designs — minus his name — and resolved never to print any official's signature on Soviet banknotes again.

A Ukrainian revolutionary from Kharkov Governorate who led the left-SR Borotbist party before joining the Bolsheviks in 1920. After serving as Ukraine's education commissar and Gosplan chairman, he moved to Moscow in 1926 as deputy head of the USSR State Planning Committee and deputy commissar for agriculture. Appointed People's Commissar of Finance in October 1930, he mobilized resources for rapid industrialization and restructured fiscal institutions during the first two Five-Year Plans. His signature on Soviet ruble notes made him one of the most visible economic officials in the country. Arrested during the Great Terror, he was a defendant in the Third Moscow Trial and was shot in 1938. Posthumously rehabilitated in 1959.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1890–1938 ○ Illness

The agrarian Marxist who theorized War Communism

In The Heroic Period he wrote: 'At bottom it was by no means the delusion of individuals or a class; it was — albeit not in pure form — an anticipation of the future, a breakthrough of that future into the present.'

A Soviet Marxist economist who analyzed War Communism as an anticipatory breakthrough toward socialism. A Gosplan presidium member, he critiqued Chayanov's family-labour school and championed a three-tier peasant class schema, providing theoretical foundations for collectivization.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1890–1938 ✕ Died in prison

“Order of the Red Banner No. 1”: Civil War hero and one of the first five marshals, extinguished in Lefortovo

Uniting scattered Red detachments, he fought his way across 1,500 km of the Urals in 54 days. For this immortal campaign Comrade Blyukher is awarded the Order of the Red Banner No. 1. — VTsIK decree, 28 September 1918

A peasant's son from Yaroslavl, he earned the Red Army's first Order of the Red Banner for his epic 1,500-kilometre Ural raid in 1918. Under Frunze he broke through the Perekop defences to expel Wrangel from Crimea, then as C-in-C of the Far Eastern Republic crushed the last White offensive at Volochayevka. As Sun Yat-sen's chief military advisor 'General Galin' he designed the Northern Expedition; he later commanded the Special Far Eastern Army, routing Manchu forces in the 1929 CER conflict. One of the first five Marshals in 1935, he defended the Soviet Far East against Japanese expansion, but was arrested after the costly Lake Khasan battle and died in Lubyanka. Rehabilitated 1956.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1890–1940 ✕ Executed

Architect of terror in Siberia, recanted his confession under torture

"Choose: the pen or the rubber truncheon." He took the pen, falsely confessed, then wrote to Stalin recanting it all.

Born to a Latvian farmhand, Eikhe joined the Social Democracy at fifteen in 1905. After years as a miner and stoker in Britain, he returned to Russia and, with Stalin's backing, ruled Siberia as its de facto master, driving brutal collectivisation and dekulakisation. A candidate Politburo member from 1935, he sat on an NKVD troika during the Great Terror, signing thousands of summary death sentences. Arrested in 1938, he was beaten with rubber truncheons until an eye was destroyed, yet refused to confess to espionage. In a famous letter to Stalin he repudiated his forced confession. Shot in 1940, Khrushchev cited him in the 1956 Secret Speech and he was posthumously rehabilitated.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1890–1946 ✕ Probable suicide

Poet and doctor whom Zhdanov forced on Estonia as puppet prime minister in June 1940, and who led the petition to join the Soviet Union

Born to a farming family near Viljandi, he studied medicine in Kiev and served as a military physician in the First World War and the Estonian War of Independence. He became a well-known poet and radical socialist under the pen name Johannes Barbarus. After the Soviet occupation of June 1940, Andrei Zhdanov forced President Konstantin Päts to appoint him prime minister of a communist-dominated puppet government, and he headed the delegation that delivered the petition to join the Soviet Union. He then chaired the Estonian SSR Supreme Soviet’s presidium, fled to Soviet Russia when the Germans came in 1941, and after returning in 1944 was investigated by the NKVD over his role in the War of Independence. He died in the presidential residence in Kadriorg, Tallinn, in November 1946, most probably by suicide, though murder has also been suggested.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1890–1946 ✕ Murdered

Pioneer of Ukrainian national communism, the original 'Shumskyism'

In April 1926, Shumsky met Stalin privately in Moscow for over two hours, demanding Kaganovich's replacement by Ukrainian Vlas Chubar and accelerated Ukrainization. Stalin's resulting Politburo letter condemned 'Shumskyism' as nationalist deviation — a watershed in the suppression of Ukrainian national communism.

A symbol of Ukrainian national communism and the prototype of 'Shumskyism': the demand for substantive republican autonomy against Moscow's centralism. A Borotbist who rose to the CP(b)U Politburo, he drove the de-Russification of Ukraine's cities and proletariat and the promotion of Ukrainian cadres as People's Commissar of Education (1924–1927). His 1926 confrontation with Stalin led to his condemnation for 'nationalist deviation' and removal from all posts; his name became shorthand for the suppression of Ukrainian autonomy within the Soviet system. Arrested in 1933, he endured the Solovki camps and Krasnoyarsk exile before the NKVD murdered him upon release in 1946; rehabilitated in 1958.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1890–1950 ✕ Executed

Stalin's artillery chief from Tsaritsyn: Marshal who blocked the T-34, KV-1 and Katyusha

What the hell do we need rocket artillery for? The main thing is the horse-drawn gun.

A Stalin favourite since the Battle of Tsaritsyn, Kulik headed the Red Army's artillery directorate from 1937 to 1941, where his extreme conservatism led him to block the T-34 and KV-1 tanks, Katyusha rockets, and submachine guns, the very weapons that later saved the Soviet Union. His disastrous field commands in the Winter War and against Germany brought court-martial, demotion from Marshal to major-general in 1942, and eventual execution for treason in 1950.