People of the Revolution and the USSR

Russian White movement Imperial establishment and White movement 1867–1939 ✕ Executed

Baltic German tsarist general who commanded the White Northern Army and was kidnapped by the NKVD in Paris

I feel neither anger nor vengeance toward them; they are just pitiful grey folk who can be incited to anything.

A Baltic German aristocrat and tsarist lieutenant general who rose to corps command in the First World War. During the Civil War he served as head of the Arkhangelsk Northern Government and commander-in-chief of the White Northern Army, fighting the Bolsheviks with British and American interventionist support; when the Allies withdrew in autumn 1919, he carried on alone before evacuating to Norway in February 1920. In exile he became chairman of the Russian All-Military Union (ROVS), leading anti-Soviet émigré activity until 1937, when NKVD agent Nikolai Skoblin lured him into a trap in Paris. Drugged, locked in a steamer trunk, and smuggled to Moscow, he was shot in an NKVD prison in May 1939.

Russian Empire state institutions Imperial establishment and White movement 1868–1918 ✕ Executed

The last Tsar, who believed autocracy was a duty from God

On the night of 2 March 1917, after signing the act of abdication, Nicholas II wrote in his diary: "At one in the morning I left Pskov with a heavy feeling of what I had lived through. All around there is treason, cowardice, and deceit!"

After the shootings of 1905, and even after taking personal command in 1915 and with it the blame for defeat, he held autocracy to be a trust from God that could not be yielded by an inch. In February 1917, when no army would fire for him, three hundred years of Romanov rule ended in a week; in July 1918 he was shot with his family in a cellar in Yekaterinburg.

Russian Empire state institutions Imperial establishment and White movement 1868–1930 ○ Died

The last tsarist agriculture minister, whose grain requisition ignited the bread crisis that sparked the February Revolution

On 17 February 1917 he defended the grain requisition from the Duma rostrum and was met with cold contempt from the opposition. Five days later, the women standing before Petrograd's bread shops began the revolution.

The last Minister of Agriculture of the Russian Empire, he signed the grain requisition decree (prodrazvyorstka) on 29 November 1916 and at the end of January 1917 limited Petrograd's flour supply to 35,000 poods per day. This triggered bread shortages and queue panic, becoming the immediate spark of the February Revolution. An able official who had been a principal architect of the Stolypin agrarian reform, he was a reformer who grasped the wrong tools against wartime transport collapse and galloping inflation.

Russian Empire state institutions Imperial establishment and White movement 1869–1916 ✕ Murdered

The Siberian “holy man” who reached the imperial bedchamber

November 1, 1905. Nicholas II wrote in his diary: "At 4 o'clock we went to Sergiyevka. We drank tea with Militsa and Stana. We made the acquaintance of a man of God — Grigori from Tobolsk province."

A Siberian peasant mystic. His ability to calm the heir's haemophilia won the Empress's absolute trust, and during the war he swayed ministerial appointments. Murdered in December 1916 by aristocrats hoping to save the monarchy. The dynasty collapsed two months later.

Russian Empire state institutions Imperial establishment and White movement 1869–1947 ✕ Executed

The White ataman who built a Don Cossack anti-Bolshevik state, collaborated with the Nazis, and was a Nobel Prize-nominated novelist

November 1917: captured by Trotsky after his 700 Cossacks failed to take Petrograd, he was paroled on a promise never to fight the Soviet regime — and fled the next day to the Don to join the anti-Bolshevik struggle.

A lieutenant general of the Imperial Russian Army from a Don Cossack military dynasty, he was one of the architects of the Lutsk breakthrough during the Brusilov Offensive in 1916. Elected Ataman of the Don Cossack Host in May 1918, he built the Don Republic as an independent anti-Bolshevik state with German backing, insisting on Don autonomy even as he clashed with Denikin over unified White command. In exile he became a prolific novelist and memoirist, author of over twenty books, including the epic From Double Eagle to the Red Flag, and a Nobel Prize in Literature nominee in 1926. During World War II he headed the Cossack Central Office under the Nazi regime, organizing Cossack units to fight the Soviet Union; handed over by British forces in 1945, he was tried and executed in Moscow in 1947.

Russian Empire state institutions Imperial establishment and White movement 1870–1918 ✕ Killed in action

The general who offered Russia a “strong hand”

November 1914, a night assault at Takosány: Kornilov leads the charge, captures 1,200 prisoners — and the Austrian general Raft, who says, "Kornilov is not a man, he is a force of nature."

A Cossack soldier’s son risen to commander-in-chief. In August 1917 he sent a cavalry corps against the Soviet, and railwaymen and agitators dissolved it before it arrived. Leading the White Volunteer Army in the early civil war, he was killed by a shell before Yekaterinodar in 1918.

Imperial establishment and White movement 1870–1920 ○ Typhus

The far-right monarchist who hurled water glasses in the Duma and shot Rasputin

In his November 19, 1916 Duma speech: "While Rasputin is alive, we cannot win." Prince Felix Yusupov approached him immediately afterwards and proposed the assassination conspiracy.

The leading far-right monarchist politician of late Imperial Russia, who co-founded the Black Hundreds and the Union of the Archangel Michael. As a deputy to the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th State Dumas, he was notorious for antisemitic, anti-parliamentary speeches and physical antics on the chamber floor. In December 1916, convinced that eliminating the court's 'dark forces' would save the monarchy, he joined the Rasputin conspiracy and personally fired his pistol at the fleeing starets. After the revolution he led an underground anti-Bolshevik organization, was arrested and amnestied, and died of typhus in Novorossiysk while serving the White movement.

Russian Empire state institutions Imperial establishment and White movement 1871–1917 ✕ Suicide

Imperial Russian cavalry general who led Kornilov's march on Petrograd

On 31 August 1917 (O.S.; 13 September N.S.), offered surrender of his powers before Kerensky, Krymov concluded he had been trapped and shot himself with a revolver; he died of the wound in the Nikolaevsky military hospital. This suicide is the official account; other explanations are also recorded.

Aleksandr Krymov was a cavalry general of the Imperial Russian Army. Born into a noble family of the Warsaw Governorate, he graduated from the Pskov Cadet Corps and the Pavlovsk Military School, then from the Nicholas General Staff Academy in 1902, and commanded cavalry units in the Russo-Japanese War and the First World War, gaining a reputation as a decisive commander. In April 1917 he took command of the 3rd Cavalry Corps, and in August he led its march on Petrograd during the Kornilov affair, which was halted by railway workers and wavering soldiers. After meeting Kerensky he shot himself and died in the Nikolaevsky military hospital. The official account of suicide is accompanied by other explanations of his death, and assessments of the affair itself are disputed.

Russian White movement Imperial establishment and White movement 1871–1961 ○ 10 years in camps; posthumously rehabilitated

The artillery general who led Kolchak's drive to the Volga and was broken by Frunze's counterstroke

On 7 July 1915, when his 12th Infantry Division broke under superior enemy pressure, Hanzhin personally led a reserve battalion into the gap and stopped the retreating troops.

An artillery officer of Orenburg Cossack stock who distinguished himself as a gunnery commander in the Russo-Japanese War and the Brusilov Offensive of the First World War. During the Civil War he raised the Ural Corps for the Siberian Whites and, as commander of Kolchak's Western Army, achieved the strategic breakthrough of March 1919 that drove within 30 km of the Volga, only for his overextended front to be struck by Frunze's Southern Group counteroffensive at Buguruslan and Bugulma. After his dismissal he served as Kolchak's last Minister of War, then lived in exile in China until SMERSH arrested him in 1945; he served ten years in the camps and was posthumously rehabilitated.

Russian Empire state institutions Imperial establishment and White movement 1872–1918 ✕ Executed

The last Empress, whose reliance on Rasputin helped doom the dynasty

When told of Nicholas's abdication, Alexandra said only: 'Dieu donne que cela sauve la Russie!' — 'God grant that this may save Russia!'

Granddaughter of Queen Victoria, Alexandra became Empress of Russia in 1894 and guided Nicholas II with an unshakeable conviction that autocratic power was a divine trust that could not be compromised. Desperate to save her hemophiliac son Alexei, she fell under the sway of Grigori Rasputin, and during World War I (with Nicholas at the front as supreme commander) she dismissed and replaced ministers on Rasputin's counsel, effectively directing domestic policy. Her German birth, her reliance on Rasputin, and her refusal of political reform earned her public hatred and accelerated the collapse of the Romanov dynasty. On 17 July 1918 she was shot by Bolsheviks in the cellar of the Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg, alongside her husband and five children.

Russian Empire state institutions Imperial establishment and White movement 1872–1947 ○ Heart attack

The White commander who drove the largest anti-Bolshevik army to within 400 km of Moscow

1899: graduated top of his class from the General Staff Academy but was unfairly struck from the list. When told to withdraw his complaint in exchange for a quiet appointment, he answered: "I am not asking for favors, but only claiming that which is due me by right."

A lieutenant general of the Imperial Russian Army who fought in the Russo-Japanese War and led the 'Iron Brigade' at the spearhead of the Brusilov Offensive in World War I. After Kornilov's death in 1918 he took command of the Volunteer Army and, as Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of South Russia, led the White movement's largest force, advancing to Oryol in the summer of 1919 and bringing the Soviet regime closer to collapse than at any other point in the civil war. His rigid slogan of 'a united and indivisible Russia' alienated national minorities and the peasantry, while the anti-Jewish pogroms his forces failed to suppress destroyed the movement's international standing. In exile he wrote the five-volume Russian Turmoil, a foundational primary source on the revolution and civil war.