People of the Revolution and the USSR

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1868–1940 ○ Natural causes (died in Kyiv)

Bolshevik agrarian policymaker: first Agriculture Commissar, later VP of Ukraine's Academy of Sciences

In October 1905 he led multi-thousand revolutionary meetings in Kyiv, and after the 17 October Manifesto the crowd wrecked the City Duma building. His 18 October 1905 balcony speech became a charge in his 1908–09 trial; he fled to Finland and was later exiled to Siberia.

Born 20 August (O.S.)/1 September 1868 in Lubny, Poltava Governorate; died 2 December 1940 in Kyiv. His grandfather emigrated from Württemberg in 1818; his father was a carpenter; his mother came from impoverished Polish landowner nobility. The family took Russian subjecthood in 1882, and he took it himself at university. He joined a Social-Democratic student circle in Bern in 1891 and was a delegate to the 5th RSDLP Congress (London, 1907). In November 1917 he became RSFSR People's Commissar for Agriculture, then People's Commissar for Food (December 1917 – February 1918), enforcing the grain monopoly and requisitioning. Removed as Tambov Governorate Executive Committee chairman in 1920–21 for failing against the Tambov rebels, he later served as People's Commissar for Land Affairs of the Ukrainian SSR (1927–29) and vice-president of Ukraine's Academy of Sciences (1931–38).

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1875–1937 ✕ Executed

First Commissar for Food, purged for his NEP-era agrarian Marxism

In 1917, should our party have begun with 'war communism,' or could it have proceeded from what in 1921 would be called the 'new economic policy'? I held the latter opinion even then.

Born in Smolensk, the son of a land surveyor, into a family of ethnic Polish origin with insurgent traditions. He joined the Moscow 'Workers' Union' in 1895 and organized Smolensk's first social-democratic circle, and was elected to the RSDLP Central Committee at the 5th Congress in 1907. After the October Revolution he became the first People's Commissar for Food Supply; he resigned over the proposed broad coalition but continued his duties until December. As Deputy People's Commissar of Agriculture from 1922 to 1928 he interpreted NEP as accumulating funds through 'strong' peasant farms, and protected the economist N. D. Kondratiev. Arrested on 11 June 1937, he was convicted in the trial of the so-called 'Moscow Centre' on 20 September 1937, sentenced to death and shot the same day; he was rehabilitated in 1956. Some accounts give his death as 1940.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1877–1938 ✕ Executed

The peasant's son who ran the Krestintern and rose from NEP agriculture to the party Secretariat

Born a peasant's son who herded cattle as a boy and taught himself to read, this Old Bolshevik became simultaneously RSFSR Agriculture Commissar and General Secretary of the Peasant International — the face of Bolshevik peasant policy on the eve of collectivization.

An Old Bolshevik who joined the League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class in 1896, Smirnov spent five years in tsarist prisons and exile. After serving as chairman of the Bogorodsk Soviet and a delegate to the Constituent Assembly in 1917, he became Deputy Food Commissar during the Civil War, then RSFSR Agriculture Commissar and General Secretary of the Krestintern from 1923: simultaneously directing Soviet agricultural policy under NEP and the Comintern's international peasant work. Promoted to CC Secretary and Orgburo member in 1928, he reached the top tier of party leadership before his association with the Smirnov–Eismont–Tolmachyov opposition group led to his expulsion in 1934 and execution in the Great Purge.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1895–1938 ✕ Executed

First USSR People's Commissar for Health, a founder of Soviet preventive medicine

Memoirists report that at the June 1937 plenum he criticised the NKVD and Beria, but the sessions were not stenographed, so the wording of his remarks is not documentarily confirmed.

Born on 20 October (Old Style) 1895 in Ekaterinoslav into a Jewish blacksmith's family; English-language scholarship gives only 1 November 1895. He joined the Bolsheviks in 1913, founded the newspaper Kommunar in Tula and led its city and provincial soviets and Military Revolutionary Committee, and was sent to Azerbaijan in 1920. He led agricultural cooperatives and Kolkhozsentr and drove collectivisation, though in 1925 he opposed barring kulaks from co-operatives. At the June 1937 plenum he criticised the NKVD and submitted material on Beria; he was arrested on 25 June and shot on 10 February 1938, and rehabilitated in 1955.