Bolshevik historian who became Soviet Russia's first ambassador to Persia after thirty years of exile in Britain
Lenin wrote him in July 1920: "About your journey to Russia, I am in two minds. You are so very important for the work in London. Let them deport you: we shall see if they dare to do so."
A Bolshevik who spent thirty years in British exile. As the first Soviet ambassador to Persia (1921), he abolished Tsarist unequal treaties and later founded the Institute of World Economy and World Politics. A Marxist historian of the British labour movement and imperialism, he became a full member of the Academy of Sciences.
Career timeline
- 1891Left the Russian Empire for political reasons, emigrated to Britain
- 1895–1911Joined the Social Democratic Federation; executive committee member 1901–1906
- 1901Joined RSDLP; aligned with the Bolshevik faction
- 1911–1920Led left wing of British Socialist Party, maintained anti-war position; contributed to The Call
- 1914–1918Worked as Russian translator and interpreter at the British Foreign Office and War Office
- 1920Helped found the Communist Party of Great Britain; returned to Soviet Russia
- 1921–1923Plenipotentiary Representative of RSFSR in Persia; concluded Soviet-Iranian treaty
- 1923–1930Member of NKID Collegium; executive editor of International Life
- 1924–1925Founding director of the Institute of World Economy and World Politics
- 1927–1945Member of main editorial board, Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1st edition)
- 1939Elected full member (Academician) of the USSR Academy of Sciences
- 1945–1946Awarded Order of Lenin (1945), Order of the Red Banner of Labour (1946)
The Bolshevik elder called 'conscience of the party': jurist who confronted the Prosecutor General during the Great Terror
"I have known Trifonov for thirty years as a real Bolshevik — and you I know as a Menshevik!" — to Vyshinsky, 1938, defending an arrested comrade.
Bolshevik jurist (RSDLP from 1898). As architect of the party ethics system in the Central Control Commission, he was called 'the conscience of the party.' In 1937 he publicly denounced Vyshinsky for fabricating cases and was forcibly committed to a psychiatric hospital, where he died.
Career timeline
- 1898Joined the RSDLP
- 1903–1905Arrested in Ekaterinoslav for an underground press; 6-year sentence, released early in 1905
- 1905–1917Exile in Tyumen, Turinsk and Narym; published the first illegal newspaper Tyumensky Rabochy
- 1917Moscow party committee; editorial board of Sotsial-Demokrat and Pravda
- 1920–1934Member and Presidium member (1923–1934) of the Central Control Commission; built party ethics and discipline
- 1921–1934Judge of the RSFSR and USSR Supreme Courts; head of Rabkrin legal department
- 1935–1938.02Deputy Prosecutor of the USSR under Vyshinsky; Chairman of the Judicial Collegium of the Supreme Court
- 1938.02–1945Forcibly committed to a psychiatric clinic after denouncing Vyshinsky; later archivist at the Museum of Peoples
From Comintern underground courier to its organizational backbone, then devoured by the machine he built
At the June 1937 Central Committee plenum, when the resolution to grant NKVD chief Nikolai Yezhov emergency powers was tabled, Piatnitsky rose and said: "At this rate we will shoot the entire party." Silence fell over the hall. He was expelled from the plenum on 25 June.
An Old Bolshevik born to a poor Jewish tailor's family who taught himself to read. A virtuoso of the underground, he built Iskra's clandestine cross-border distribution network. Then, as Comintern secretary for twelve years, he became the organizational backbone of the International, managing liaison, finances, and cadre for communist parties worldwide. At the June 1937 Central Committee plenum he openly opposed granting the NKVD emergency powers; arrested a month later, he was tortured for a year and shot in July 1938. Rehabilitated in 1956.
Career timeline
- 1898–1902Built Iskra's clandestine courier network; operated as 'Freitag'
- 1903–1908Joined Bolsheviks; Odessa and Moscow committees; 1905 revolution
- 1914–1917Arrested, exiled to Yenisei province; returned to Moscow after Feb. Revolution
- 1917Moscow Party Committee, combat party centre; led railway Red Guard unit
- 1921–1923Member, ECCI
- 1923–1935Comintern Secretary — liaison, finance, and cadre placement for all parties
- 1935–1937Head, CC VKP(b) Administrative-Political Department
- 1937.06Spoke against NKVD emergency powers at CC plenum; expelled, arrested
The Saint-Just of the avant-garde, theorist of production art
«Only by jumping out of art will you understand it» — in the final note to his 1924 book on Nathan Altman, Arvatov distilled into a single sentence his methodological leap from formal analysis to social fact.
A Proletkult theorist and co-founder of LEF, he championed 'production art' — merging art with industry — and laid the foundation for Constructivist aesthetics. A frontline concussion forced him to stop writing by the late 1920s; he took his own life in 1940.
Career timeline
- 1912Began literary activity in Warsaw
- 1917SR party member, deputy chair of Tula Gubernia Committee, delegate to the 1st Congress of Soviets and Constituent Assembly
- 1919Joined RKP(b); served as commissar on the Polish front during the Civil War
- 1920–1923Proletkult theorist, INKhUK researcher, co-founded LEF and contributed to its journal
- 1923–1926Published *Art and Class* (1923) and *Art and Production* (1926); formulated the formal-sociological method and elaborated production art theory
- 1927–1930Published *Sociological Poetics* (1928) and *On Agitation and Production Art* (1930); worsening post-concussion illness curtailed his work
- 1940Died by suicide in Moscow after a long struggle with mental illness
