People of the Revolution and the USSR

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Imperial establishment and White movement 1879–1967 ○ Natural causes

A polemicist who turned from revolutionary internationalism to wartime patriotism

In July 1917, he placed the material alleging Lenin was a German agent in Zhivoe Slovo.

Grigory Alexinsky rose as a Bolshevik activist and Second Duma deputy during the 1905 revolutionary period, but the pressures of war and revolution drove him sharply toward social patriotism. In 1917 he joined Plekhanov’s Yedinstvo group, attacked the Bolsheviks, and helped place Ensign Yermolenko’s inadequate testimony into the public claim that Lenin was a German agent. The exposure strengthened anti-Bolshevik politics among soldiers and in the soviets, while revealing the path by which a revolutionary became an émigré opponent of Bolshevism.

Russian White movement Imperial establishment and White movement 1883–1920 ○ Frostbite and pneumonia

The White movement's greatest 'soldier-general': conqueror of Kazan who vanished into the ice

"Tell my men that I adored them, and that my death in the midst of them proves it."

Born into a Swedish-Russian noble family, he served as a staff officer in World War I and contributed to the planning of the Brusilov Offensive. In 1918, leading a small volunteer detachment of the Komuch People's Army against the Bolsheviks, he captured Kazan through mobile warfare, pushing the Red Eastern Front to the brink of collapse and earning the nickname 'little Napoleon.' As commander-in-chief of Kolchak's Eastern Front, he led the collapsing armies on the Great Siberian Ice March toward Lake Baikal; he died of frostbite and pneumonia en route, but his men carried his coffin to the very end.

Russian White movement Imperial establishment and White movement 1885–1920 ✕ Executed

The Kadet politician who engineered Kolchak's dictatorship and stood with him to the end

On 22 September 1919 he wrote in his diary: 'General Knox came to see me… He received instructions from Churchill to support exclusively the Supreme Ruler.' The prime minister's own record from inside a collapsing regime.

A Kadet Party deputy in the imperial State Duma, he organized the military coup in Omsk in November 1918 that installed Alexander Kolchak as Supreme Ruler, the conspiracy's leader according to contemporary sources. He served as Kolchak's Minister of Internal Affairs and, from November 1919, as Chairman of the Council of Ministers, leading the crumbling White government as its only loyal politician to the end. Handed over with Kolchak by the Czechoslovak Legion to the Irkutsk Political Center in January 1920, he was shot without trial at dawn on 7 February 1920 on Lenin's direct orders.

Socialist Revolutionary Party (PSR/SR) Imperial establishment and White movement 1885–1960 ○ Natural causes

The Socialist Revolutionary official who pressed the revolutionary government toward coercive order

Filonenko later testified that "General Kornilov, under the sway of his staff and the circulating rumours, feared some unforeseen action against himself."

Maxim Filonenko was a lawyer and Socialist Revolutionary who, as government commissar at Supreme Headquarters in 1917, worked with Kornilov and Savinkov to restore the death penalty and tighten military discipline. He sided with Kerensky during the Kornilov crisis, then joined anti-Bolshevik underground activity before emigrating to work as a lawyer and professor of law.

Russian White movement Imperial establishment and White movement 1886–1921 ✕ Executed

The White Army warlord who liberated Mongolia and dreamed of reviving the empire of Genghis Khan

My name is surrounded with such hate and fear that no one can judge what is true and what is false, what is history, and what is myth.

Born to a Baltic German noble family of the Russian Empire and convinced he descended from Genghis Khan, Ungern was a White Army lieutenant general who led the Asiatic Cavalry Division under Grigory Semyonov in Siberia before crossing into Mongolia in 1920. In February 1921 he expelled the Chinese occupation forces and restored the Bogd Khan's theocratic monarchy, earning the title darkhan khoshoi chin wang, but ruled through terror, purging Jews and suspected Bolshevik sympathizers. His brief regime extended the Russian Civil War onto Mongolian soil and represented the most extreme fringe of the White movement: an occult-obsessed monarchist who fused Russian imperialism with a vision of a restored pan-Asian Buddhist empire. Captured by his own mutinous Mongol troops in August 1921 and handed to the Red Army, he was executed by firing squad in Novonikolayevsk after a six-hour show trial.

Russian White movement Imperial establishment and White movement 1890–1920 ✕ Shot while escaping

Ataman of the Ussuri Cossacks who took Khabarovsk in 1918 and became notorious for shootings without trial and plunder

Born in the Grozny district of the Terek Region in 1890, he graduated from the military school in Tbilisi, transferred to the Ussuri Cossack Regiment in 1914 and won the Sword of St. George in the First World War. Elected ataman of the Ussuri Cossack Host in January 1918, he fought the Bolsheviks and on 5 September took Khabarovsk, becoming head of its garrison. Mass shootings without trial followed in Khabarovsk that year, and the robbery, murder and rape committed by his men outraged White leaders, Kolchak first among them. In February 1920 he secretly handed the gold of the Khabarovsk branch of the State Bank to the Japanese command and crossed into China, where the Chinese authorities arrested him; in early September he was shot while trying to escape.

Russian White movement Imperial establishment and White movement 1890–1946 ✕ Executed

The White ataman who ruled Transbaikal under Japanese protection and defied Kolchak

«…in the conditions of the nascent civil war, all softness and humanity must be cast aside»: justifying his White Terror policy in his memoirs About Myself.

Born a Transbaikal Cossack, he was a capable cavalry officer decorated with the Order of St. George in the First World War. In late 1917 he formed the Special Manchurian Detachment (OMO), opening one of the first fronts of the Siberian civil war; with Japanese military and financial backing he seized the Transbaikal region and established the 'Eastern Outskirts' government. He defied Kolchak's authority and built an independent power base, while the mass White Terror carried out under his rule was so brutal that US Army intelligence investigated it as a war crime. After his defeat in 1920 he continued anti-Soviet activities in Manchuria under Japanese patronage until Soviet forces captured him in 1945 and he was hanged.

Russian White movement Imperial establishment and White movement 1891–1938 ✕ Executed

The 27-year-old White general whose Yakut expedition closed the Civil War

'I do not know my political convictions. I am not a party man. I want good and happiness for the people, I want the Russian people to be a kind, peaceful, but strong and mighty people': diary entry during the Yakut expedition

One of the youngest White generals of the Russian Civil War, he became a major-general at 27 and was nicknamed 'the Siberian Suvorov.' In December 1918 his troops captured Perm, taking 20,000 Red Army prisoners whom he released to their homes, and he went on to command the 1st Siberian Army under Admiral Kolchak. After the White collapse, he lived in exile in Harbin working as a carpenter and cab driver, then in September 1922 led a volunteer druzhina into Yakutia: the last military operation of the Civil War, ending with his surrender at Ayan in June 1923. His death sentence was commuted to ten years, but he was rearrested in the Great Purge and shot in Novosibirsk in 1938.

Russian Empire Imperial establishment and White movement 1892–1917/1918 ✕ Executed

A soldier leader who defied imperial orders

“Will we fire on the workers? I personally do not want to go.”

Timofey Kirpichnikov was a junior leader in the Imperial Russian Army who used his front-line experience and influence among soldiers to judge orders for himself. After the suppression of demonstrations on 26 February 1917, he persuaded his men not to fire on workers and led the Volhynian Regiment’s mutiny the next morning, helping set off the Petrograd garrison’s wider defection. Celebrated by the Provisional Government as a revolutionary hero and awarded the Cross of St George, he opposed the Bolsheviks after October and was ultimately executed within the White movement.