People of the Revolution and the USSR

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1899–1937 ✕ Executed

Marxist philosopher who went from Stalin's Hegel tutor to Right Opposition conspirator

When Stalin failed to grasp Hegelian dialectics, the hot-tempered Latvian philosopher grabbed his pupil by the lapels in his Kremlin office and shook him. After a lesson, he told a friend: 'Koba will do things that will put the trials of Dreyfus and Beilis in the shade.'

A Latvian Marxist philosopher who, after graduating in the first cohort of the Institute of Red Professors, gave Stalin private tutorials in Hegelian dialectics and helped institutionalize Soviet philosophy. He broke with Stalin in 1928 to join Bukharin's Right Opposition, was exiled in the 1932 'Union of Marxists-Leninists' case, briefly rehabilitated, then executed in 1937.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1899–1938 ✕ Executed

The organiser who turned rocket research into a state institution

On 2 November 1937, Kleymenov was arrested after the detention of Georgy Langemak, the institute's chief engineer.

Ivan Kleymenov was a military engineer and administrator who organised the Soviet Union's early rocket work. Linking the Gas Dynamics Laboratory with the Reactive Scientific Research Institute, he helped bring research into the defence system and supported solid-propellant rockets that fed into the later Katyusha programme. The institution he built was then shattered by the Great Purge, which arrested its leading specialists and ended with Kleymenov's execution. He was fully rehabilitated in 1955 and posthumously named a Hero of Socialist Labor in 1991.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1899–1970 ○ Natural causes

Creator of the Kuleshov Effect, the father of Soviet montage theory who proved editing, not the shot, creates meaning

“We make pictures — Kuleshov made cinematography.” — tribute penned by his students in the preface to his 1929 book The Art of Cinema (My Experience)

Soviet film director, theorist, and educator. He proved the psychological principle of montage through the 'Kuleshov Effect' and founded the world's first film school (VGIK) in 1919, laying the theoretical foundation for the Soviet montage school that produced Eisenstein and Pudovkin.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1900–1982 ○ Natural causes

The only defector from Stalin's Secretariat, chronicler of Politburo secrets

At the Central Committee meeting of 26 October 1923, Lenin offered Trotsky the role of his heir, and Trotsky refused because he was Jewish. The man taking notes was Politburo secretary Boris Bazhanov.

A technical secretary of the Bolshevik party, he served as Stalin's personal assistant and Secretary of the Politburo from 1923 to 1925, taking notes at every Politburo meeting. He witnessed firsthand the inner workings of the party leadership during the power struggle following Lenin's death, and after defecting from the USSR in 1928, published his memoirs in Paris — the first detailed Western exposé of the Stalin regime's decision-making structure and consolidation of power. The only member of Stalin's Secretariat ever to defect, his memoirs remain a vital primary source on the inner life of the early Soviet leadership.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1901–1932 ✕ Suicide

A Bolshevik woman who worked in Lenin's secretariat, married Stalin, and pursued her own political independence

At Voroshilov's dinner on the night of November 8, 1932, Stalin threw an orange peel at her and shouted 'Hey!'; Alliluyeva shot back 'I am not your "Hey"!' and walked out — hours later she was dead by her own hand.

The youngest daughter of an Old Bolshevik family — her father Sergei Alliluyev hid Lenin during the July Days of 1917, her godfather was Avel Yenukidze — she joined the party in 1918, worked in Lenin's secretariat under Lydia Fotieva, then in the Department of Agitation and Propaganda. In 1929 she entered the Industrial Academy to study synthetic fibre engineering, becoming a party-cell colleague of Nikita Khrushchev. Her marriage to Stalin placed her at the center of Kremlin power, but the tension between her aspiration to be an independent political actor and the role of a leader's wife defined her short life, which ended by her own hand in 1932 at age 31.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1902–1938 ✕ Executed

The boy commissar who built the Komsomol into the party's youth-training apparatus

After stepping down as Komsomol chief, he signed on a freighter under a false name and toured Germany, Britain, Belgium, Portugal, and Turkey — his fellow deckhands never guessed they were scrubbing decks with a candidate member of the Central Committee.

Son of a village priest, he founded a youth communist cell at his Smolensk school at sixteen. In 1922 he became the first chairman of the All-Union Pioneer Organization, and from 1924 to 1928, as Komsomol General Secretary, he built the schools for peasant youth and factory apprenticeship schools that turned the Komsomol into the party's cadre-training apparatus. His emphasis on broad education was backed by Krupskaya and Lunacharsky. After his leadership he toured Europe disguised as a merchant sailor, then worked in Transcaucasian party organs and railway political departments, earning the Order of Lenin in 1936. Arrested during the Great Purge, he was shot in 1938 and posthumously rehabilitated in 1955.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1902–1939 ✕ Executed

Cheka-bred intelligence officer who led the GRU during the Great Purge and saved Sorge's Tokyo station

In 1918, the sixteen-year-old Gendin wrote: "I greedily watched everything around me, strove to make sense of events, persistently questioned everyone I could. By early 1918 I had firmly determined that my place was in the ranks of the Revolution."

Semyon Grigoryevich Gendin was a Soviet military intelligence commander who rose through Cheka, OGPU, and NKVD counterintelligence before becoming acting head of the Red Army's GRU in September 1937. He joined the Red Army and Bolshevik Party at sixteen during the Civil War, then built a career as a Cheka investigator, taking part in Operation Syndicate-2 to capture Boris Savinkov and later holding senior posts in OGPU counterintelligence and the NKVD's Special and Secret-Political departments. As acting GRU chief at the height of the Great Purge, his most consequential act was blocking the order to liquidate Richard Sorge's Tokyo residency, preserving the intelligence line that would confirm Japan's strategic intentions on the eve of the German-Soviet war. Arrested in October 1938, he was executed in February 1939 and posthumously rehabilitated in 1957.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1902–1942 ✕ Killed in crash

Co-author with Ilf of The Twelve Chairs, satirist who captured NEP-era Soviet life and later edited Ogonyok magazine

Last lines of his Sevastopol dispatch, found in his field bag after the crash: 'Perhaps the city will hold out after all. I've grown used to believing in miracles.'

With Ilya Ilf, Petrov wrote the seminal Soviet satirical novels The Twelve Chairs (1928) and The Little Golden Calf (1931), creating the iconic rogue-hero Ostap Bender, a con man whose wit exposed the absurdities of NEP-era Soviet society. Born Yevgeny Katayev, the younger brother of writer Valentin Katayev, he drew on his experience as an Odessa criminal investigator to bring an unvarnished reporter's eye to his fiction. In 1935 he and Ilf drove across America, producing the travelogue One-Storied America, and after Ilf's death from tuberculosis in 1937 he revived the magazine Ogonyok as its editor. During the German-Soviet war he served as a front-line correspondent; returning from besieged Sevastopol in July 1942, his plane crashed and he was killed.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1904–1936 ○ Illness

Author of How the Steel Was Tempered, paragon of socialist realism

Life is given to us but once. So live that, dying, you can say: all my life, all my strength were given to the finest cause in the world — the fight for the liberation of humankind.

Bolshevik activist from age 13, Red Army cavalryman in Kotovsky's brigade, and Komsomol organizer, Nikolai Ostrovsky wrote How the Steel Was Tempered (1932–1934) after ankylosing spondylitis left him blind and paralyzed at 25. Dictating to volunteer secretaries through a writing frame, he produced a semi-autobiographical novel whose protagonist Pavel Korchagin became the moral template for generations of Soviet, Chinese, and Korean communists. With 36.4 million copies sold, it remains the best-selling book in the Russian language and one of the best-selling books of all time. Awarded the Order of Lenin in 1935, Ostrovsky died at 32, his life itself a testament to the revolutionary will his novel celebrated.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1907–1960 ○ Natural causes

An experimental physicist who explored fission and nuclear isomerism

In 1935, studying bromine's radioactivity, he and the Kurchatov brothers and Mysovsky discovered nuclear isomerism.

Lev Rusinov was a Soviet physicist who expanded the experimental foundations of nuclear physics at the Leningrad Physico-Technical Institute. In 1939, working with Georgy Flerov, he demonstrated that uranium fission releases more than two neutrons per event, a result central to understanding the conditions for a chain reaction. He also investigated nuclear isomerism and the interaction of neutrons and gamma rays with nuclei, and after the war led reactor construction and the organization of nuclear research in Leningrad.