People of the Revolution and the USSR

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1878–1938 ✕ Executed

'The countryside is against us': the deputy finance commissar who said it to the Politburo

'The countryside, except for a small section of the poor peasants, is against us.' One sentence from Deputy Finance Commissar Frumkin's letter to the Politburo, 15 June 1928. It became the starting pistol for the crackdown on the Right Opposition.

An Old Bolshevik who joined the Bund in 1898 before entering the RSDLP, Frumkin served in the Food Commissariat during the Civil War and as deputy commissar for foreign trade and finance under NEP. In June 1928, at the height of the grain-procurement crisis, he sent a letter to the Politburo declaring that 'the countryside, except for a small section of the poor peasants, is against us': a direct indictment of Stalin's forced-requisition policy and its destruction of the smychka, the worker-peasant alliance. That single letter made him the first man formally accused of the 'Right Deviation,' the opening salvo of Stalin's liquidation of the NEP coalition. Arrested in October 1937, he was shot in July 1938 and rehabilitated in 1956.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1878–1938 ✕ Executed

The commissar who steered from famine's shadow to NEP finance, then fell under industrialization's demands

At the 5 April 1930 Politburo meeting Stalin passed an obscene note mocking Bryukhanov, who had proposed nickel alloy coinage, and Mezhlauk appended a drawing of the hanging commissar; both were shot in 1938.

A Bolshevik from 1902, born in Simbirsk as the son of a land-surveyor official; he studied at Moscow and Kazan universities without graduating and was expelled for revolutionary activity. Under the Tsar he endured repeated arrests and exile, headed the Bolshevik committee in Ufa and chaired the Ufa Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies, and was a delegate to the Seventh (April) All-Russian Conference. During the Civil War he helped organize mass grain requisitions and directed the food detachments and punitive expeditions, and became People's Commissar of Finance on 16 January 1926. Removed on 18 October 1930 and relegated to secondary posts, he was arrested on 3 February 1938, shot on 1 September 1938 and rehabilitated in 1956; some reference works give his death as 30 June 1942.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1878–1938 ○ Perforated ulcer

The Cheka executioner who personally shot the last Tsar

I told Nicholas the Soviet of Workers' Deputies had resolved to shoot them. He asked 'What?' and turned toward Alexei — at that moment I shot him and killed him outright.

Born to a Jewish working-class family in Tomsk province, he trained as a watchmaker and joined the Bolsheviks in 1905. As commandant of Ipatiev House in July 1918, he personally directed the execution of Nicholas II and the Romanov family, shooting the Tsar with his Mauser pistol and overseeing the concealment and destruction of the bodies. After the Civil War he served as head of Yekaterinburg Gubernia Cheka and a Moscow district Cheka chief, then from 1921 headed the Gold Department of Gokhran, where he earned a reputation for fighting corruption. He ended his career as director of the Polytechnical Museum in Moscow and died of a perforated ulcer in 1938, shortly after his daughter Rimma was arrested as a Trotskyite during the Great Purge.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1878–1941 ✕ Executed

Old Bolshevik who led the Cheka Special Department, building the Red Terror in the North and the earliest Soviet camp system

“I suffer innocently. Please believe me. Time will testify to the truth.” — from his letter to Andreyev from Lefortovo prison, 1939, read aloud by Khrushchev at the 20th Party Congress Secret Speech in 1956.

A Bolshevik military organiser who became head of the Cheka's Military Section (later the Special Department) in September 1918, he directed the Red Terror across the Northern Front: executing thousands in Arkhangelsk and Vologda, establishing the Kholmogory extermination camp, and closing the Solovetsky Monastery to found one of the earliest Soviet forced-labour camps. His wife Olga's sisters married Nikolai Podvoisky and were the mother of Artur Artuzov, placing Kedrov at the centre of a Chekist family network. After leaving the Cheka in 1921 due to ill health, he drifted through peripheral economic and health posts before his arrest in 1939; acquitted in July 1941, he was shot on Beria's order in Saratov that November.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1878–1953 ○ Natural causes

The leader born to a poor Georgian family who came to dominate party and state

At 4:30 a.m. on 22 June 1941 Zhukov and Timoshenko came to the Kremlin to report the German invasion. By Zhukov's account Stalin was pale, holding an empty, untobaccoed pipe. When Molotov reported Germany's declaration of war, he sank silently onto a chair and fell into a long pause.

Born 18 December [O.S. 6 December] 1878 to a poor family in Gori, Georgia, he joined the Marxist RSDLP as a youth and edited Pravda, raising Bolshevik funds through robberies and kidnappings while enduring repeated arrests and internal exile. After the October Revolution of 1917 he entered the party's governing Politburo and helped oversee the founding of the USSR in 1922, the year he became General Secretary. Collectivisation and rapid industrialisation followed, along with the 1932–33 famine and the Great Purge, then victory in the Second World War. He died at the Kuntsevo dacha on 5 March 1953. In his lifetime 1879 was also held to be his birth year.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1878–1958 ○ Natural causes

Worker-Bolshevik who gave his name to Dnipropetrovsk and led Soviet Ukraine for two decades

In February 1915, a tsarist court stripped him of all rights and sentenced him to lifelong exile in Turukhansk — punishment for a worker-deputy who had spoken against the war.

A worker-Bolshevik, born the son of a tailor, who began laboring at age eleven. Elected to the Duma (1912), he was exiled to Siberia for anti-war speeches. After the October Revolution, as People's Commissar of Internal Affairs, he helped found the Cheka. From 1919 to 1938 he served as Soviet Ukraine's head of state, signed the 1922 treaty creating the USSR, and was a candidate Politburo member. He survived the Great Purge but was dismissed in 1939, ending his career as deputy director of the Museum of the Revolution. The city of Ekaterinoslav was renamed Dnipropetrovsk in his honor in 1926 and carried his name until 2016.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1879–1937 ✕ Executed

Father of Soviet signals intelligence and founder of the Cheka Special Department

"If it's a cipher, go ahead and crack it," he taunted the tsarist police holding his mathematical notebooks. They never did.

An Old Bolshevik who mastered cryptography in the revolutionary underground, Bokii chaired the Petrograd Cheka and directed Special Departments on the Eastern and Turkestan Fronts before designing and founding the Cheka's Special Department (Спецотдел) in 1921. He led it for sixteen years, unifying cryptography, radio interception, direction-finding, and state-secrets protection into a single service, thereby creating the institutional foundation of Soviet signals intelligence. He also served as curator of the Solovki special-purpose camp (SLON), helping shape the early Gulag system. His concurrent fascination with esoteric mysticism and plans for a Tibetan expedition were later weaponised against him as pretext for his arrest and execution.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1879–1937 ✕ Executed

The Polish revolutionary who ran Lenin's financial pipeline from Kraków to Stockholm

April 13, 1917, Stockholm station. Parvus waited for Lenin, who arrived on the sealed train. Lenin refused to meet him in person and used Ganetsky as intermediary. Parvus asked: "Peace is necessary. What does he intend to do?" Ganetsky relayed the question; Lenin answered: "I am not interested in diplomacy. My task is social-revolutionary agitation."

A Polish revolutionary from Warsaw who co-founded the SDKPiL and became Lenin's trusted financial operative. During World War I he partnered with Alexander Parvus to establish trading companies in Copenhagen and Stockholm, channelling profits from scarce wartime goods into revolutionary coffers, a route central to the 'German gold' controversy. After the October Revolution he helped build the Soviet financial system as deputy head of the State Bank and a collegium member of Narkomvneshtorg, later serving as plenipotentiary to Latvia and signing the Treaty of Kars before perishing in the Great Terror.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1879–1938 ✕ Executed

From Cheka deputy to civil aviation: the revolution's all-weather organizer

At his Military Collegium trial on 28 July 1938 he retracted the confession extracted from him, stating he had never belonged to the 'Polish Military Organisation', but the hearing lasted about twenty minutes and ended in a death sentence.

Born into a Jewish petty-bourgeois family in Mława, then in the Płock Governorate of the Russian Empire, he trained as an electrical engineer at the Higher Technical Courses in Warsaw and joined the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL) in 1900. Sources agree he was arrested repeatedly between 1902 and 1913 and spent years in Tsarist prisons and Siberian exile, but they differ on the number of arrests, recording six in some accounts and seven in others. In 1917 he sat on the Irkutsk Soviet as a Bolshevik, served on the Petrograd Soviet executive and the Military Revolutionary Committee during the October uprising, and was elected to the Constituent Assembly. From 1921 he was deputy chairman of the Cheka and later the GPU, and from 1925 to 1930 deputy chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council; arrested in 1937, he was shot in 1938 and rehabilitated in 1956.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1880–1936 ✕ Suicide

Chief of the Soviet trade unions, third man of the Right Opposition

"They accuse us abroad of a one-party regime. Not true. We have many parties. Only one is in power, and the rest are in prison." At the 11th Party Congress in 1922, the hall answered Tomsky with a storm of applause.

A leading figure of the Soviet trade-union movement, he headed the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions from 1918 and entered the Politburo in 1922. In the trade-union controversy of 1920–1921 he defended union autonomy against Trotsky's program of militarizing the unions, and in 1929 fell with Bukharin and Rykov as the "Right deviation." A lithographer with minimal formal schooling, he shot himself at his Bolshevo dacha on 22 August 1936 as news of an investigation against him was published. His family too was repressed in the late 1930s, and he was fully cleared only in 1988.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1880–1937 ✕ Executed

The pragmatic Bolshevik who designed and led the Far Eastern Republic

After Krasnoshchyokov was dismissed during an illness, Lenin protested in a letter to Molotov: "We have harassed this man, who undoubtedly has brains, energy, knowledge and experience."

The first head of the Far Eastern Republic (1920–1921) and a key architect of the early Soviet mixed-economy experiment. After emigrating to America in 1902, he graduated from the University of Chicago Law School and worked as a labour attorney before returning to Russia in 1917 and immediately joining the Bolsheviks. He persuaded Lenin to create a buffer state in the Far East to secure Japan's withdrawal during the Civil War, personally drafting the republic's constitution in English and securing the Gongota Agreement with Japan as premier and foreign minister. He later served as Deputy People's Commissar for Finance, joined the Presidium of Vesenkha, and founded Prombank, laying the institutional foundations for industrial finance under the NEP.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1880–1948 ○ Heart attack

The operational commander of October, sidelined by the revolution he led

"You know how stubborn I am — listen, then later don't do it. But write everything down so I feel heard." Advising Eisenstein on the film October, 1927.

Nikolai Podvoisky, a village priest's son who left seminary for the Bolsheviks, was the de facto field commander of the October armed uprising: as head of the Military Revolutionary Committee's operational trio, he directed the storming of the Winter Palace. He became Soviet Russia's first People's Commissar for Military Affairs, only to be pushed aside by Trotsky four months later, and during the Civil War organized Vsevobuch, universal military training. He designed the Red Star and the Order of the Red Banner, then devoted himself to mass physical culture as chairman of the Red Sport International. Sidelined under Stalin, he survived the purges, wrote his memoirs, and at 61 volunteered to dig Moscow's defence trenches.

Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) Soviet communism 1880–1965 ○ Natural causes

Lenin's trusted Bolshevik publicist and a 68-year party veteran

January 1917, Zurich: Karpinsky read Lenin's furious draft letter to Olga Ravich and called it "abusive." Lenin later told Inessa Armand: "Karpinsky called my letter abusive — I'll have to write an apology."

One of the oldest Bolsheviks (joined 1898), he edited party organs under Lenin in Geneva exile. After the revolution, as editor of Bednota and head of VTsIK's agitation department, he built the institutional framework for Bolshevik peasant and mass propaganda.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1880–1969 ○ Natural causes

Institutional founder of Soviet military intelligence

Atatürk personally ordered Aralov's bronze figure placed on Istanbul's Taksim Square Republic Monument — the only Soviet diplomat on the monument — in gratitude for the aid Soviet Russia gave during the Turkish War of Independence.

Institutional founder of Soviet military intelligence: first head of the Red Army Registration Directorate (future GRU) in 1918, he built the foundations of Bolshevik strategic intelligence. A member of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic and a founding member of the Cheka, he helped construct the Red Army alongside Trotsky. After the Civil War he served as Soviet plenipotentiary to Lithuania, Turkey, Latvia, and China; his bronze figure stands on Istanbul's Taksim Square Republic Monument, placed at Atatürk's personal request for Soviet aid during Turkey's war of independence. Purged from intelligence in 1937, he volunteered for the front at 60 and served as trophy chief of the 33rd Army through WWII.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1881–1925 ✕ Murdered

The Bessarabian 'Red Robin Hood' who rose from Tsarist outlaw to legendary Soviet Civil War commander

In May 1917, during Carmen at the Odesa Opera House, the recently pardoned Kotovsky appeared to a standing ovation, delivered a revolutionary speech from the stage, and watched his prison shackles auctioned for 10,000 rubles.

A Bessarabian revolutionary commander. Notorious under the Tsar as a bandit who sided with the poor, he led Red cavalry in the Civil War and helped establish the Moldavian ASSR. Mythologized in his lifetime as a legend of Soviet folklore; murdered in 1925.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1881–1936 ○ Heart attack

Commander-in-Chief who led the Red Army to victory in the Civil War

In modern war, the defeat of the enemy requires a sum of continuous and systematic victories across the entire front — each blow connected to the next in time. The side that summed up its blows won.

A former Tsarist colonel who joined the Red Army in 1918, Sergey Kamenev became its Commander-in-Chief (1919–1924) and led the campaigns that defeated Kolchak, Denikin, and Wrangel. As Eastern Front commander he broke Kolchak's armies; as supreme commander he secured Soviet power through coordinated multi-front offensives, guided by his doctrine of the 'summation of continuous blows.' After the Civil War, political commanders who had once served under him eclipsed his career. He was demoted to head of air defence in 1934, and the marshal's rank went to five former subordinates. He died of a heart attack in 1936, escaping the Purge; Stalin posthumously erased him, restoring his name to the Kremlin Wall only in the 1960s.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1881–1938 ✕ Executed

Lenin’s successor as premier, destroyed as the Right Opposition

In November 1917 Rykov resigned from Sovnarkom and the Central Committee alongside Kamenev, Zinoviev and others, objecting that the government had not formed a coalition of all socialist parties. Sources date this to 16 or 17 November; he retracted it a few days later.

Rykov became chairman of Sovnarkom after Lenin's death, leading the Soviet government for six years and embodying the administrative continuity of NEP. During the Civil War he had directed the wartime economy as chairman of VSNKh and overseen Red Army logistics. As premier he stood with Bukharin and Tomsky as the core of the party's 'Right,' championing the worker-peasant alliance, gradual socialist construction through the market, and balanced industrialization. He opposed Stalin's forced collectivization and breakneck industrialization during the 1928-29 grain crisis, was branded the 'Right Opposition' and removed as premier in 1930, arrested in 1937, executed after the third Moscow trial of 1938, and rehabilitated in 1988.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1881–1940 ○ Heart attack

Proletkult theorist who became architect of Stalin-era arts censorship

From his front-page Pravda article 'Time Builds Airplanes,' 18 July 1923: 'We lost 7,000 working hours today waiting for a meeting to begin. With that expenditure of labor power, we could have built one or even two airplanes. We waited another half-airplane's worth of time before the meeting finally started.' The article sparked the founding of the Time League.

Joined the Bolsheviks in 1904. As a Proletkult theorist he led the 'Time' League and pioneered Soviet scientific labour organization (NOT). First chairman of the State Committee on the Arts (1936–38), he built the institutional framework for Stalin-era cultural control and later completed his History of the Paris Commune.