People of the Revolution and the USSR

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1878–1938 ✕ Executed

“The Russian Clausewitz”. Theorist of strategy and operational art

In the great debate that split Soviet military thought in the 1920s, Tukhachevsky declared of Svechin: "Svechin was not a Marxist and never wanted to be one... Consciously or unconsciously he is an agent of imperialist intervention." The scholarly dispute had turned into a political indictment. Svechin never recanted.

A former Tsarist general who became the Soviets' foremost military theorist, Svechin's Strategy (1927) established 'operational art' as the bridge between strategy and tactics. He foresaw future war as economic total struggle, but his warnings were ignored and he was shot in 1938.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1878–1943 ○ Stomach cancer

The Party's Chief Atheist, Called 'the Soviet Priest'

Khrushchev recalled: "In the Party we called Yaroslavsky 'the Soviet priest.'" His own maxim: "The struggle against religion is the struggle for socialism."

Yaroslavsky was the supreme ideologue of Soviet anti-religious policy. As chairman of the League of Militant Atheists (1925–1943), he directed the USSR's organized campaign against religion. Joining the RSDLP in 1898, he led the Moscow armed uprising in October 1917 and served as Military Commissar of the Moscow Military District. As Secretary of the Party Collegium (1924–1934), he helped enforce party discipline and purges. He authored The Bible for Believers and Unbelievers, was Stalin's loyal supporter and the official interpreter of Party history, and was elected to the Academy of Sciences in 1939.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1878–1945 ○ Illness

IMEL director and the first Marxist philosopher to publicly anoint Stalin as a theorist

"Lenin teased me as 'Aduracky' — foolish — for my naivety." — family memoirs

A Bolshevik philosopher from Kazan. In 1929 he was the first to publicly hail Stalin as 'theoretician of Leninism.' As IMEL director (1931–1939), his Marx-Engels edition defined how the communist world read the classics for decades.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1879–1964 ○ Natural causes

The Marxist economist who predicted the Great Depression, and was punished for arguing capitalism could adapt

In the late 1920s, when most analysts proclaimed capitalism stable, he predicted the Great Depression; when the Comintern insisted on capitalism's imminent collapse, he predicted its end — and was proven right both times, earning Stalin's confidence.

A Hungarian Marxist economist who directed the USSR Academy of Sciences' Institute of World Economy and World Politics for two decades as the Comintern's foremost analyst. He earned Stalin's confidence by correctly predicting both the onset of the Great Depression and its end, each time against prevailing orthodoxy. After the war, his argument that wartime state intervention enabled capitalism to adapt provoked a fierce campaign: his institute was shut down in 1947 and he was branded a 'bourgeois economist.' Rehabilitated after Stalin's death, he received the Lenin Prize in 1963; a posthumous manuscript, opened per his will, delivered a sharp critique of Soviet bureaucratic degeneration.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1896–1966 ○ Diabetes

Bolshevik mathematician who resurrected mathematical logic in the Soviet Union

When the Whites tried to execute her, the bullets struck only her tall hat because she was so small; she fell from the bridge into the river and hid among the reeds until nightfall.

A Bolshevik revolutionary turned Soviet mathematician and philosopher, she was the founder who revived and institutionalized mathematical logic as an autonomous discipline in the Soviet Union. She survived a White Army execution squad during the Civil War, and in 1933 she discovered and published Marx's 'Mathematical Manuscripts,' laying the foundation for Marxist mathematical research worldwide. Once an orthodox Marxist-Leninist who attacked 'idealist' mathematics in the 1930s, she later reversed course and resurrected mathematical logic at Moscow State University during the Stalin era when it was suppressed; she is also known for persuading Wittgenstein to abandon his plan to emigrate to the Soviet Union in 1935.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1901–1969 ○ Natural death

First Secretary of the Estonian Communist Party in 1944–1950, removed in 1950 for allegedly shielding “bourgeois nationalists”

Born in Pärnu County in 1901, he moved to the Netherlands in 1925 and joined its Communist Party, then settled in the Soviet Union in 1926 and studied at the Communist University of the National Minorities of the West. Arrested in the Great Purge in 1938, he was soon released without charges. During the German occupation he was the de facto leader of the Communist Party of Estonia and head of the Estonian partisan movement staff, and on 28 September 1944 he was elected First Secretary. He headed the central staff of the destruction battalions, and in March 1949 he briefed the county plenipotentiaries before the deportation. Removed after the Eighth Plenum of 1950 and replaced by Johannes Käbin, he worked in Moscow as an economist, took his doctorate in 1964, and, because of his disagreements with Käbin, never returned to Estonia; he died in Moscow in 1969.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1901–1984 ○ Natural death

Head of SMAD’s Propaganda Administration who drove the founding of the SED and the Sovietisation of eastern Germany

An economist trained in Leningrad, he joined the Communist Party in 1927. He went into hiding during the Great Terror, and his parents were repressed. In the war he headed the 7th department of several fronts’ political administrations. From October 1945 to September 1949 he headed the Propaganda (later Information) Administration of the Soviet Military Administration in Germany; fluent in German, he strongly backed Walter Ulbricht. He pushed the 1946 merger of the KPD and SPD and from 1948 the development of a separate state on Soviet lines. He fell from favour as it became clear that Stalin did not support his and Ulbricht’s plans for rapid socialisation, and in 1949, after accusations from counter-intelligence, he was recalled. He later taught economics at Leningrad University.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1905–1983 ○ Natural causes

Builder of Marxist aesthetics who defended absolute truth and beauty against relativism

"Contrary to the catchphrases of our century, absolute beauty exists just as absolute truth does" — VKHUTEIN journal, 1927

Jewish philosopher from Melitopol. After breaking with the avant-garde at VKHUTEMAS, he devoted his life to reconstructing Marx's aesthetics as a coherent system. In the 1930s, with Lukács, he refuted vulgar sociology and grounded art theory in dialectical materialism, compiling the landmark anthologies Marx and Engels on Art and Lenin on Art. Targeted in the post-war anti-cosmopolitan campaign, he became a lightning rod in the 1960s for his anti-modernist polemics, and in his last years developed an original philosophy centred on 'ontognoseology.'