People of the Revolution and the USSR

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1883–1947 ○ Arrested 1940, posthumously rehabilitated

Vyborg worker-Bolshevik who handed Lenin his party card

On the night of 3 April 1917 at the Finland Station, representing the Vyborg district committee, he handed Lenin, just back from exile, party membership card No. 600.

A veteran of the 1905 Sormovo barricade fighting who studied at Lenin's Longjumeau party school in 1911, Chugurin was, alongside Kayurov and Pavlov, one of the Vyborg Bolshevik nucleus that drove the February 1917 street actions from the Women's Day strikes into armed insurrection. He personally handed Lenin party card No. 600 at the Finland Station upon his return from exile, served on the Vyborg district uprising headquarters during October, and later headed the political department of the 5th Army and held posts in the Cheka presidium. Arrested on fabricated charges in 1940, he emerged from the camps ill and worked as a tinsmith until his death; he was rehabilitated posthumously.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1884–1938 ✕ Executed

The "Soviet Rockefeller" who rebuilt Baku oil and organized the Soviet gold rush

In 1924, on an Azneft trip authorized by Krasin, he mixed equipment purchases with a personal appeal: at 90, John D. Rockefeller listened, then unexpectedly agreed to a guarantee letter. After tea he took Serebrovsky on a brisk half-hour walk through his forest park.

A mechanical engineer turned revolutionary, Serebrovsky rebuilt the war-ravaged Baku oil fields with American drilling technology, laying the foundation for Soviet petroleum production. From 1928 he headed Glavzoloto, the state gold-mining trust, where he imported Alaskan techniques and recruited American engineers like John Littlepage to expand gold output: bullion that financed machinery imports for industrialization. As deputy People's Commissar of Heavy Industry he oversaw Soviet heavy industry until his arrest on 23 September 1937, execution on 10 February 1938 after conviction by the Military Collegium of the USSR Supreme Court, and posthumous rehabilitation on 19 May 1956.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1887–1937 ✕ Executed

First People's Commissar of Posts and Telegraphs who later built Rostselmash, flagship of Soviet agricultural machinery

In June 1918 at Novorossiysk, as Commissar of the Black Sea Fleet, he ordered the fleet scuttled rather than surrendered to the Germans, instructing sailors: "Moscow will radio orders to sail to Sevastopol for diplomatic reasons — do not count that radio as an order."

Nikolai Glebov-Avilov was a Bolshevik revolutionary from 1904 who ran underground printshops during the 1905 Revolution. After October 1917 he became the first People's Commissar of Posts and Telegraphs in the inaugural Sovnarkom, then served as VTsSPS secretary and chairman of the Petrograd Trade Union Council, emerging as a central figure in Bolshevik trade union politics. At the Fourteenth Party Congress in 1925 he led the Leningrad Opposition alongside Grigory Zinoviev and was removed; he later became first director of Rostselmash (1929–1936), building the Soviet Union's flagship agricultural machinery plant. Arrested in the Great Purge, he was executed in 1937 and rehabilitated in 1956.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1898–1940 ○ Pneumonia

The chief designer who birthed the T-34 and died of pneumonia at 41

March 1940: he personally drove two unfinished T-34 prototypes 750 km through the snow to the Kremlin, started the engines before Stalin, and collapsed with pneumonia after the return journey.

A Soviet tank designer born to a peasant family, he began as a confectionery apprentice and only turned to engineering at 30. At the Kharkov Locomotive Plant he led modernization of the BT series of light tanks, then pushed the purely tracked A-32 project through, a design that matured into the T-34. In March 1940 he personally drove two unfinished prototypes 750 km through snow from Kharkov to Moscow, presenting them to Stalin at the Kremlin. The ordeal gave him pneumonia; he died at 41, nine months before the German invasion. His T-34 became the backbone of Soviet armored forces throughout the war.