People of the Revolution and the USSR

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1890–1950 ○ Died

The radiochemist who led the Radium Institute and laid the institutional foundations of Soviet nuclear physics

On 1 December 1921, in his Petrograd laboratory, Khlopin personally obtained the Soviet Union's first high-activity radium preparation.

One of the founders of Soviet radiochemistry, he produced the country's first domestic radium in 1921 and formulated the law of microcomponent distribution between phases (Khlopin's law) in 1924. Succeeding Vernadsky as director of the Radium Institute, he installed Europe's first cyclotron there in 1937, creating the experimental basis for fission research. In June 1940 he and Vernadsky submitted a memorandum on the uranium problem that led to the creation of the Uranium Committee on 30 July, with Khlopin as its first chairman, placing him at the center of pre-war nuclear research coordination. After the war his institute developed the plutonium separation technology that made the 1949 test possible.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1890–1986 ○ Natural causes

“Stone-arse”: the man who never changed his mind

His wife Polina Zhemchuzhina was arrested for treason in December 1948 and forced into divorce, and was released only after Stalin's death in 1953. Throughout, Molotov is said to have had dinner set for two every evening. 'She suffered because of me,' he said later.

An Old Bolshevik who joined the RSDLP in 1906 and was arrested and internally exiled twice before 1917. A full Politburo member from 1926, he became premier in 1930, overseeing collectivisation and the Great Purge; in 1939 he signed the Nazi–Soviet pact. As deputy chair of the State Defence Committee he attended the Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam conferences, and he initiated the 'Molotov Plan' against the Marshall Plan. In 1957 he failed to oust Khrushchev; sources date his expulsion to 1961 or 1962. Readmitted in 1984, he died in 1986.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1891–1918 ✕ Assassinated

Petrograd's press commissar whose assassination helped trigger the Red Terror

“Comrades, do you think I am looking at my watch? No — I am looking at the clock of humanity, the clock of the world revolution.”

Petrograd's Commissar for Press and Propaganda and a magnetic crowd orator who built the Bolshevik censorship apparatus and founded Krasnaya Gazeta. Shot dead by an SR militant on 20 June 1918, his assassination, alongside Uritsky's murder and the attempt on Lenin, became the spark for the full-scale Red Terror.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1891–1920 ○ Typhus

The Left SR figurehead chairman of the MRC, lending a non-Bolshevik face to the Bolshevik insurrection while Trotsky directed operations

On the night of 21 October 1917 Lazimir, as MRC chairman, went with Sadovsky and Mekhonoshin to military district headquarters to claim supreme authority over the garrison; Colonel Polkovnikov refused, saying he did not recognise their commissars and would arrest them if they broke the law.

A feldsher at the Petrograd military hospital who turned to SR agitation among soldiers, Pavel Lazimir rose after the February Revolution to chair the soldiers' section of the Petrograd Soviet. In October 1917 the Bolsheviks installed him, a Left SR, as chairman of the newly created Military Revolutionary Committee to give the body a non-Bolshevik front; the real direction came from Trotsky, while Lazimir himself drafted the MRC's founding statute. He joined the Bolsheviks in 1918 and served on the Revolutionary Military Council of the Southern Front, organizing supply and sanitation, before dying of typhus in 1920 at twenty-nine.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1891–1937 ✕ Executed

Co-founder of Soviet intelligence & counterintelligence; brain of Operation Trust

In 1925, as Sidney Reilly was surrounded by GPU agents at a Moscow safe house, Artuzov is said to have watched the entire operation unfold from the next room.

He founded the Cheka's counterintelligence arm (KRO) and designed Operation Trust, which neutralized White émigré networks. As head of foreign intelligence (INO) from 1931, he expanded illegal networks abroad. Arrested and shot during the Great Purge in 1937.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1891–1937 ✕ Executed

The Marxist legal philosopher who argued the legal form corresponds to commodity exchange: the most radical critic of Soviet law from within

In November 1936 he was appointed Deputy People's Commissar of Justice. On 20 January 1937, barely two months later, the NKVD arrested him at the pinnacle of the Soviet legal system he had theorized — the Marxist jurist who had argued law would wither away now stood before the most direct form of state power.

The most important Marxist legal theorist of the twentieth century. In his 1924 work The General Theory of Law and Marxism, he argued that the legal form derives from the commodity-exchange relation and, following Marxist premises, will wither away together with the state under communism. With Pyotr Stuchka he co-founded the law section of the Communist Academy (1922) and later became its vice-president and director of the Institute of Soviet Construction and Law. Appointed Deputy People's Commissar of Justice in 1936, he clashed openly with Andrey Vyshinsky's doctrine of 'proletarian law.' Arrested in January 1937 and executed that September, he was posthumously rehabilitated in 1956. His commodity-form theory remains widely studied in critical legal theory worldwide.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1891–1938 ✕ Executed

NKVD chief who signed the Romanov execution and joined the Left Opposition

"Inform Sverdlov the whole family have shared the same fate as the head. Officially the family will die at the evacuation." — coded telegram to Lenin's secretary after the Romanov execution, 17 July 1918

A Bolshevik who rose to prominence in the Urals, he signed the Ural Soviet's decision to execute Nicholas II and the Romanov family in 1918 as its chairman. As People's Commissar of Internal Affairs of the RSFSR (1923–1927), succeeding Dzerzhinsky, he oversaw Soviet police and penal administration. He joined the Left Opposition by signing the Declaration of 46 in 1923, was expelled from the party in 1927, recanted in 1930, but was arrested during the Great Purge and executed in 1938.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1891–1938 ✕ Executed

The NKVD chief who expanded the Gulag and became a purge defendant

In April 1937, Yagoda was dismissed as NKVD commissar. When Stalin summoned him, Yezhov was already seated. 'You are four years late,' Stalin said. Accounts of Yagoda's last words at his execution diverge: one version says he shouted 'Long live Comrade Stalin!', another that he met death in silence. Either way, the architect of the Gulag had become a Gulag defendant.

A practical power inside OGPU and NKVD, he oversaw forced-labour projects such as the White Sea-Baltic Canal and was the architect of the Gulag system. As the first NKVD commissar, he consolidated the security organs. He opened the first purge phase after Kirov's murder, but Stalin replaced him with Yezhov for not purging enough. He became a defendant in the Third Moscow Trial and was shot.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1891–1938 ✕ Executed

The commissar who ran agriculture through the second Five-Year Plan, from grain procurement to VDNKh

On February 17, 1935, at the Congress of Collective-Farm Shock Workers, Chernov proposed 'an All-Union Agricultural Exhibition in Moscow in 1937.' Stalin and Molotov signed the decree organizing it that same day — the birth of what would become VDNKh.

Born to a weaver's family, he began as a Menshevik in 1909 and joined the Bolsheviks in 1920. Rising through the grain procurement apparatus, he succeeded Yakov Yakovlev as People's Commissar for Agriculture in 1934 and guided the second Five-Year Plan's agricultural policy, strengthening the kolkhoz system's technical base. In 1935 he proposed the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition (VDNKh) and chaired its organizing committee, while also leading the drafting of the Model Charter of the Agricultural Artel. Arrested in 1937, he was tried with the Twenty-One, sentenced to death, and executed in 1938. Rehabilitated in 1988.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1891–1939 ✕ Shot in

The economic administrator who led Ukraine's government for 11 years, caught between Stalin's demands and the famine

In June 1932 Chubar reported to Stalin and Molotov that "tens of thousands of malnourished, starving and swollen people" were dying of famine "in every village", and asked for grain relief. Stalin replied that "Chubar is mistaken ... Ukraine has been given more than it should get".

An economic administrator born to a poor Ukrainian peasant family in Fedorivka, he joined the RSDLP in 1907. From 1923 he chaired the Ukrainian SSR's Council of People's Commissars for eleven years, driving industrialisation and collectivisation, and in June 1932 he reported the famine to Stalin and Molotov and requested emergency grain. He also bore responsibility for enforcing collectivisation and the 1932–33 famine, and in 2010 the Kyiv Court of Appeal ruled him one of the organisers of the Holodomor. A full Politburo member from 1935, he was arrested in 1938 and shot the next year, then rehabilitated in 1955.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1891–1940 ○ Died

Bolshevik chairman of the Turkestan Sovnarkom in 1917–1918 who crushed the Kokand Autonomy and attacked Bukhara

Born in Uralsk in 1891, he worked as a railway clerk in Orenburg and Tashkent. He joined the Bolsheviks in 1917, sat on the executive committee of the Tashkent Soviet, was elected to the All-Russian Central Executive Committee at the Second Congress of Soviets and helped organise the armed rising in Tashkent in November. As chairman of the Turkestan Sovnarkom from November 1917 to November 1918 he rejected a coalition, declaring that Muslims could not be admitted to the supreme organ of power, and put down by force the bids for autonomy in Ashgabat and Kokand. In March 1918 he tried with the Young Bukharans to overthrow the Emir of Bukhara and had to retreat. He chaired the Far Eastern Council of the National Economy in 1923–1928, later worked as an architect and died in Moscow in 1940.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1891–1940 ✕ Executed

Architect of the Shakhty case and boss of the North Caucasus

Stalin in 1938: "Yevdokimov came twice demanding Sholokhov's arrest for talking with ex-White Guards. I told him: you understand nothing of politics or life."

A Chekist of the civil-war generation, Yevdokimov made his name through field violence, commanding mass executions of surrendered Wrangel troops. Posted to the North Caucasus as OGPU plenipotentiary in 1923, he built a regional power base and designed the 1928 Shakhty case (the first major show trial of technical specialists), personally directing the extraction of confessions. As chief of the OGPU Secret-Operational Directorate from 1929, he was hostile to Yagoda and remained outside the security organs during Yagoda's tenure, having moved to party work in 1934. Under Yezhov he supplied the central NKVD with North Caucasus cadres and regained influence, but fell with Yezhov, was shot in 1940, and rehabilitated in 1956.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1891–1942 ✕ Air crash

The prisoner who gave the Red Air Force its finest tactical bomber: Pe-2, born in a sharashka

In the spring of 1940, Petlyakov watched the test flight of his Pe-2 from the roof of his prison workshop. He was still an inmate.

The right hand of Andrei Tupolev who designed the wings of the TB-1, TB-3 heavy bombers and the ANT-20 Maxim Gorky. Arrested with Tupolev in 1937 on fabricated sabotage charges, he continued designing inside an NKVD sharashka. When Lavrentiy Beria ordered his high-altitude VI-100 fighter converted into a dive bomber, Petlyakov delivered the Pe-2 in 45 days: a machine that became the Red Air Force's most important tactical bomber throughout the Great Patriotic War. Released in 1940, awarded the Stalin Prize (1st class) in 1941, he died the following year when the Pe-2 carrying him to Moscow for production talks crashed near Arzamas.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1891–1951 ○ Myocardial infarction

The physicist-administrator who led the Academy of Sciences through the early atomic age

“Besides scientific aspirations and absorption in thought, a talent for administration was also characteristic of Newton… A great deal of administrative and practical activity had torn him away from his scientific work.” — Vavilov's 1945 biography of Newton, a passage that reads as a self-portrait.

Soviet optical physicist and scientific administrator, the founder of the Soviet school of physical optics. He pioneered luminescence research and in 1934 co-discovered the Vavilov-Cherenkov effect with Pavel Cherenkov, laying the groundwork for Cherenkov's later Nobel Prize in Physics. As director of the Lebedev Physical Institute (FIAN) from 1934 until his death, he built it into the USSR's largest physics research center; elected President of the Academy of Sciences in 1945, he led Soviet science administratively through the early atomic age. A four-time Stalin Prize winner and chief editor of the second edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, he was also the younger brother of geneticist Nikolai Vavilov (and had to maintain his position and shield physics even as his brother was arrested and perished under Lysenko's persecution).

Soviet communism 1891–1956 ○ Natural causes

Founder of Constructivism, pioneer of Soviet design, advertising, and photography

In 1921, he exhibited three monochrome canvases — yellow, red, blue — and declared: 'I have reduced painting to its logical end.' He put down the brush and turned to production art.

Soviet painter, designer, and photographer. As a founder of Constructivism, he moved from abstract painting to 'production art,' establishing the foundations of Soviet design and photography. His radical-angle photography and posters with Mayakovsky revolutionized the visual culture of the revolutionary era.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1891–1956 ○ Died of illness

Mathematician who mastered the Arctic through science and built Glavsevmorput

Every evening on the ice floe he lectured on philosophy, mathematics, and geography. Coughing blood from tuberculosis, he refused to leave until every one of his 104 castaways was safe. In two months, not one person broke discipline.

Mathematician, Arctic explorer, and state administrator. Born in Mogilev to a German-Latvian family, he founded the Moscow algebraic school through his work in group theory. In 1932 his icebreaker Sibiryakov achieved the first single-season transit of the Northern Sea Route; in 1934, after the Chelyuskin sank, he led 104 survivors through two months on a drifting ice floe. As head of Glavsevmorput he directed Soviet Arctic development, and in his later years proposed the influential cosmogonic hypothesis that the Solar System's planets formed through cold accretion of a dust cloud.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1891–1973 ○ Natural causes

The army general who survived Kolyma, took Berlin, and testified to Stalin-era repression

Told of the wartime case in which he had timber shipped out in defiance of a ban to supply pit props for the Donbas mines, Stalin is reported to have said 'Only the grave will correct Gorbatov' and then closed the matter because no personal gain was involved.

Born in 1891 into a peasant family in Pakhotino, Vladimir Governorate, he entered the Imperial Russian Army in 1912 and in World War I won two Crosses of St. George, rising to senior non-commissioned officer. He joined the Red Army in 1919 and in the Civil War commanded a cavalry regiment and a Bashkir cavalry brigade; removed from his post in 1937 and arrested in 1938, he was tortured yet refused to admit guilt. Convicted in May 1939 and sentenced to 15 years at the Kolyma camp, he was released in March 1941, then led the 3rd Army from 1943 to the war's end and became commandant of Berlin in 1945. He later commanded the Airborne Forces and the Baltic Military District and became General of the Army in 1955; his 1964 Novy Mir memoir made him one of the first Soviet state figures to describe the Great Terror in detail.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1891–1973 ○ Natural causes

Lenin's duty secretary, recorder of his final dictations

In 1963, at age 72, Volodicheva told Yuri Karyakin: "Comrade Lenin was very hard to decipher, and Comrade Stalin — so easy..."

Lenin's duty secretary (1918–1924), she took dictation of his last works, including 'The Question of Nationalities or Autonomisation' on 30–31 December 1922. On 5 March 1923 she recorded and delivered Lenin's note asking Trotsky to defend the Georgian cause at the congress. She later burned an early typed copy of the Testament on Stalin's orders.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1892–1925 ✕ Suspicious drowning

Trotsky's Carnot: the Red Army's administrative brain, erased by Stalinism

Trotsky wrote in his memoirs: 'I chose Sklyansky as my deputy. I never had any occasion to regret it afterwards. If anyone could be compared with Lazare Carnot of the French Revolution, it is Sklyansky.'

One of the de facto founders of the Red Army and Trotsky's most trusted deputy. A Kiev University medical graduate and Bolshevik since 1913, at just 26 he became Deputy Chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council and Deputy War Commissar, running the Red Army's entire administrative and operational machinery from Moscow while Trotsky roamed the Civil War fronts. Trotsky ranked him with Lazare Carnot, the military organizer of the French Revolution. Dismissed in 1924 during Stalin's rise and demoted to a textile trust, he drowned under suspicious circumstances in Long Lake, New York, the following year. His name was systematically erased from Soviet military history under Stalin.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1892–1933 ✕ Air crash

Principal architect of the Soviet Air Force and aviation industry

On 2 August 1930 at Voronezh airfield, Baranov ordered the first combat drop of armed paratroopers — "demonstrate the drop of a group of armed parachutists for sabotage actions on 'enemy' territory" — the day considered the birth of the Soviet Airborne Forces (VDV).

One of the main creators of the Soviet Air Force, Baranov commanded the VVS from 1924 to 1931, building its organizational and industrial foundations. From 1932, as Deputy People's Commissar for Heavy Industry and head of the aviation industry under Ordzhonikidze, he drove the expansion of aircraft and engine production that would sustain Soviet air power through World War II. On 2 August 1930 he initiated the first combat paratrooper drop near Voronezh, the founding event of the Soviet Airborne Forces (VDV). He also signed the agreement establishing the secret Lipetsk German aviation school and backed early rocket research through GIRD as well as stratospheric balloon flights. He and his wife died in a plane crash in 1933; his ashes are interred in the Kremlin Wall.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1892–1937 ✕ Suicide

Architect of Byelorussian Soviet statehood who turned the gun on himself

On 16 June 1937, publicly denounced at the Party congress for insufficiently purging 'enemies of the people,' Chervyakov returned to his office during the recess and shot himself. Officials attributed it to 'family reasons.'

He signed the 1919 manifesto proclaiming the Byelorussian SSR and served as its first head of government and state (1920–1937). A USSR Central Executive Committee co-chairman, he championed Belarusisation and founded the Belarusian State University. He shot himself in 1937 amid the Great Purge after Party censure.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1892–1937 ✕ Executed

The master of the Ukrainian security apparatus

On 7 July 1937, he went to Khabarovsk station to greet his replacement Genrikh Lyushkov and was arrested on the spot on a warrant signed by Yezhov. On 27 November — his 45th birthday — he was shot under the 'special procedure.'

Head of the Ukrainian GPU and NKVD (1923–1937) and the dominant figure in republican security. He directed repression during the Holodomor, sat on a Politburo troika with capital-punishment authority, and orchestrated fabricated nationalist cases. Commissar of State Security 1st Rank (1935); arrested and executed in 1937.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1892–1938 ✕ Suicide

Yezhov's personnel chief who purged 14,000 Chekists

At Yezhov's dacha in summer 1938, he told fellow Chekists: "If I see things are bad, I'll shoot myself." That November, an hour before his train to Moscow, he did.

Bolshevik Chekist and Yezhov protégé. As NKVD Personnel chief (1936), purged 14,000 Yagoda-era operatives and led the Bukharin case. Leningrad NKVD chief when Yezhov fell. He shot himself in 1938.