People of the Revolution and the USSR

Marxism and communism 1847–1882 ○ Died in prison

Author of the Catechism of a Revolutionary, the nihilist who demanded total sacrifice for the revolutionary cause

"The revolutionary is a doomed man. He has no private interests, no affairs, sentiments, ties, property, nor even a name of his own. His entire being is devoured by one purpose, one thought, one passion — the revolution." — opening lines of the Catechism of a Revolutionary

A nihilist revolutionary who co-authored the Catechism of a Revolutionary with Bakunin. He founded the secret society People's Reprisal but was expelled from the Russian revolutionary movement after murdering a comrade who refused to submit. His doctrine, "Nechayevshchina", justified any means for the revolutionary end and left a lasting mark on revolutionary organizing.

Constitutional Democratic Party (Kadets) Marxism and communism 1865–1919 ○ Heart attack

From Legal Marxism to ethical socialism: the economist who pioneered business cycle theory

At the April 1900 Pskov meeting to organize Iskra, he sat alongside Lenin, Martov, and Struve — but he never actually joined the underground Social Democratic movement.

A leading exponent of Legal Marxism, Tugan-Baranovsky gained international recognition with his 1894 Industrial Crises in Contemporary England, which pioneered an endogenous theory of capitalist business cycles. Together with Pyotr Struve he advanced Marxist economic-historical analysis against the Narodniks and attended the 1900 organizational meeting of Iskra, but later broke with orthodox Marxism toward an 'ethical socialism' grounded in Kantian ethics, laying the theoretical foundations of the cooperative movement. After the February Revolution he served as finance minister in the Ukrainian Central Rada and was a founding member of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences; his cycle theory influenced Keynes, Robertson, and Kalecki.

Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) Marxism and communism 1868–1912 ○ Died

One of Russia's first Marxists, from Narodnaya Volya to leader of the 1905 Chita Republic

Old Tiflis workers recalled: 'On any argument or discussion, all the comrades turned to Kurnatovsky. His conclusions and judgments were always accepted without argument.'

A Narodnaya Volya activist who turned to Marxism, Kurnatovsky worked with Plekhanov's Emancipation of Labour group in Geneva and met Lenin in Minusinsk exile, where he co-signed the 'Protest of Russian Social Democrats.' In 1900 he became Iskra's representative in the Caucasus, founded the Tiflis Committee of the RSDLP, and served as young Stalin's 'party teacher.' During the 1905 revolution he organized the Soviet of Workers', Soldiers' and Cossacks' Deputies in Chita and led the armed uprising known as the 'Chita Republic.' Sentenced to death, then commuted to life at hard labor, he escaped via Japan and died in Parisian exile at 44.

Marxism and communism 1871–1898 ✕ Suicide

Russian revolutionary who organized the first Marxist circles in the Volga region

"Fedoseev enjoyed the extraordinary sympathy of all who knew him, as the model of an old-time revolutionary, wholly devoted to his cause" — Lenin, 1922

Nikolai Fedoseev was a pioneer of Russian Marxism who organized the first Marxist study circle in Kazan in 1888, introducing young Lenin and Maxim Gorky to Marxist theory. From prison, he corresponded with Lenin on questions of Marxist worldview, and wrote a major study analyzing the economic causes of the fall of serfdom in Russia, as well as a draft program for a proletarian party. His polemic against the Narodnik theorist Nikolai Mikhailovsky opened the early Marxist-Narodnik debate, and Lenin later called his party program draft 'the only correct one'. But in 1898, hounded by a fellow exile's slander in Siberia, he took his own life at 27.

Marxism and communism 1878–1911 ○ Died in prison

Iskra majority delegate at the 2nd Congress, a pioneer Caucasus Bolshevik who died in prison at 32

At his March 1905 trial in Moscow, Knunyants delivered a searing indictment of tsarism from the dock. He escaped lifelong exile in 1907, only to return to underground work in Baku — and die in Bailov Prison four years later.

An Armenian Bolshevik from Nagorno-Karabakh. He joined the League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class in 1897, was exiled to Baku in 1901, and became central to Caucasian Social Democracy. In 1902 he co-founded the Union of Armenian Social Democrats with Stepan Shaumyan; at the 1903 RSDLP 2nd Congress he sided with the Iskra majority at the moment of the Bolshevik-Menshevik split. A member of the 1905 St. Petersburg Soviet, he was sentenced to lifelong exile, escaped abroad for the 1907 Stuttgart Congress, then returned to underground work in Baku. Arrested in 1910, he died in Bailov Prison at age 32.