People of the Revolution and the USSR

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1874–1946 ○ Natural causes

The diplomat who pronounced Poland dead, then became education commissar

At 3 a.m. on 17 September 1939, Potemkin read the Polish ambassador a note: "The Polish state has ceased to exist." The Red Army was already crossing the frontier.

A teacher turned Marxist propagandist turned diplomat, Vladimir Potemkin is remembered for handing the Polish ambassador the note declaring Poland's extinction on 17 September 1939. He then served as People's Commissar of Education of the RSFSR, founding the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences and editing the three-volume History of Diplomacy, which earned him two Stalin Prizes.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1901–1971 ○ Died

Soviet commandant of Berlin who declared a state of emergency in East Berlin on 17 June 1953

Born into a peasant family in Poltava Governorate, he joined the Red Army in 1918 and fought in the Civil War; in 1925 he changed his birth surname Khailo to Dibrova. A political officer, he became a member of the military council of the Baltic Special Military District in 1940 and was removed from the military council of the North-Western Front after the defeats at the start of the German–Soviet war. After serving on the military councils of the 59th Army and the 2nd Shock Army on the Volkhov Front, he commanded the 145th Rifle Division in 1944 in the Vitebsk–Orsha and Riga operations until he was badly wounded. From 1952 to 1956 he was commandant of the Soviet sector of Berlin, and during the uprising of 17 June 1953 he declared a state of emergency in East Berlin. He then worked at the Frunze Military Academy, retired in 1960 and died in Moscow in 1971.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1919–2006 ○ Natural causes

Stalin's son-in-law who criticized Lysenko, recanted, then built Rostov University over 31 years as rector

Stalin at the Politburo, turning on Yuri Zhdanov: "What, don't you know that our entire agriculture rests on Lysenko?"

Son of Andrei Zhdanov and briefly Stalin's son-in-law, Yuri Zhdanov was appointed head of the CC Science Department at age 28 in 1947, becoming a key science-policy official in late Stalinism. In April 1948 he publicly criticized Lysenko's theories (Stalin summoned him to the Politburo with the rebuke "Don't you know our entire agriculture rests on Lysenko?") and Zhdanov was forced to publish a humiliating recantation in Pravda. He took part in the 1950 antisemitic campaign against Jewish scientists, yet after Stalin's death he rebuilt his career as rector of Rostov State University (1957–1988), transforming it over 31 years into one of the USSR's top universities. An organic chemist with over 800 publications, he discovered acylotropy and chaired the North Caucasus Scientific Center.