People of the Revolution and the USSR

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1878–1918 ✕ Executed

The 'Caucasian Lenin', Marxist theorist of the national question and leader of the Baku Commune

As the Baku Commune crumbled, a comrade's wife urged him to flee first. Shaumyan answered: "What will the workers say to me? It would be a disgrace to flee first."

Pioneer of Armenian Marxism and leader of the Caucasus Bolsheviks. Born to a Tiflis merchant family, he studied at Riga Polytechnic and Berlin University, organizing Armenia's first Marxist circle in 1899. He translated the Communist Manifesto into Armenian, pioneered Armenian Marxist literary criticism, and was elected a candidate CC member at the 1912 Prague Conference. In 1918 he chaired the Baku Council of People's Commissars, the 'Baku Commune', and famously debated Lenin by correspondence on the national question. Captured and shot with the 26 Baku Commissars in September 1918, he became a Bolshevik martyr.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1886–1925 ✕ Killed in crash

Lenin's periphery-builder who brought Soviet power to Belarus and Armenia

When news of the October Revolution reached Minsk, Myasnikov immediately formed and led a Military Revolutionary Committee, and Soviet power was established there without bloodshed.

An Armenian Bolshevik born to a merchant family in Nakhichevan-on-Don. He joined the RSDLP in 1906 and was administratively exiled to Baku for illegal literature, where Shaumyan influenced him. In 1917 he led the Western Front Bolsheviks in Minsk and played the leading role in establishing Soviet power there. He chaired the Byelorussian SSR Central Executive Committee in February 1919, then from May 1921 headed the Armenian SSR Council of People's Commissars, building Soviet Armenia's state institutions and economy. From 1922 he chaired the Transcaucasian SFSR Union Council and served as first secretary of the Transcaucasian Kraikom. He wrote on Marxist-Leninist theory and Armenian literature. On 22 March 1925 his aircraft caught fire and crashed near Tiflis, killing him alongside Atarbekov and Mogilevsky; the cause of the fire was never established.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1889–1937 ✕ Executed

Author of the 1919 Karakhan Manifesto that renounced Tsarist unequal treaties with China

Karakhan became doyen of the Beijing diplomatic corps in 1925. The Bolshevik who scorned bourgeois manners nonetheless rode in a gilded six-horse coach, clad in evening clothes and white kid gloves, to present his credentials. Time magazine called him: "A Bolshevik who can wear white gloves gracefully."

Born into an Armenian lawyer's family in Tiflis, he joined the RSDLP at 15 in 1904, initially as a Menshevik. Siding with the Bolsheviks in 1917, he served as secretary of the Soviet delegation at Brest-Litovsk and became Deputy People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs. In 1919 he drafted and issued the 'Karakhan Manifesto' renouncing all Tsarist unequal treaties and privileges in China, a foundational document of Soviet Asia policy. As ambassador to China he concluded the 1924 Sino-Soviet agreement, and later served as ambassador to Turkey. Arrested in the Great Purge of 1937 on charges of a 'pro-fascist conspiracy,' he was shot and posthumously rehabilitated in 1956.