People of the Revolution and the USSR

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1881–1963 ○ Natural causes

Founder of Soviet Marxist philosophy, condemned as 'Menshevizing idealism'

"I told Anastas Ivanovich that for 25 years I've been trying to understand what it is, and still haven't." (Replying to Mikoyan on what 'Menshevizing idealism' meant, Kremlin, October 1956; sources give differing wordings of the exchange.)

The philosopher who institutionalised Soviet Marxist philosophy. He became a full academician of the USSR Academy of Sciences in 1929 and led the dialecticians to victory over the mechanists. Condemned in 1931 for 'Menshevizing idealism,' he was stripped of his editorship and of the directorship of the Institute of Philosophy he had founded, but continued research in the Academy and served as academician-secretary of its History-Philosophy Division in 1940–1941. In the late 1940s anti-cosmopolitan campaign his sector's staff were dismissed; he survived into the Khrushchev thaw to see his works republished after 1956.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1894–1938 ✕ Executed

Regional party boss of collectivization and the Great Terror who heard Stalin ask why there were so many spies on his watch

In September 1937, after Vareikis reported to Stalin that 500 spies had been identified and shot among Far Eastern railway workers alone, Stalin asked: 'Comrade Vareikis, why is it that there are so many spies in your area of work?'

Born into a Lithuanian working-class family, he worked as a lathe operator in Moscow factories and joined the Bolsheviks in 1913. During the Civil War he commanded the defense of Simbirsk and helped suppress the Left SR uprising. After heading the Central Committee press department, he served as First Secretary of the Central Black Earth, Voronezh, Stalingrad, and Far Eastern Territories in succession. During collectivization he personally directed the suppression of the Ostrogozhsk uprising and presided over troikas that convicted tens of thousands. In 1937, from his Far Eastern post, he oversaw the deportation of 170,000 Koreans to Central Asia and reported to Stalin that 500 spies had been uncovered among railway workers alone, only to be arrested that October and shot in 1938. Rehabilitated in 1956.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1896–1937 ✕ Executed

A prodigy who commanded an army at twenty-three, architect of the Red Army's mechanization

Marshal Zhukov's verdict: "He was a genuine Soviet commander who had mastered operational art to perfection. He was a military man in the full sense of the word."

Born to a Lithuanian peasant family, he served as an artillery officer in the First World War. At twenty-three he commanded the 14th Army, defeating Denikin's forces in the Civil War and capturing Kharkov and Odessa; as C-in-C of the Far Eastern Republic he liberated Vladivostok. A German internship grounded him in mechanized warfare, and together with Tukhachevsky and Yakir he drove the Red Army's technical modernization, capping his career by directing the 1936 grand manoeuvres in Belorussia. Arrested in the "Tukhachevsky case" of 1937, he was shot the next day and rehabilitated in 1957.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1898–1937 ✕ Executed

The Dmitlag chief who staged the "reforging" propaganda

April 30, 1937: the Moscow-Volga Canal opens with flags, prisoner-painted portraits, and orchestras — all staged by Firin. Arrested May 28, shot that August.

A Gulag camp chief from a Red Army intelligence background. After serving as deputy chief of the White Sea–Baltic Canal camp in 1932, he ran Dmitlag, the vast camp complex whose prisoners built the Moscow–Volga Canal. He turned forced labor into a stage for the 'reforging' propaganda narrative and, with Maxim Gorky and Leopold Averbakh, co-edited the notorious 1934 volume Belomor celebrating the canal. He cut rations for prisoners judged unproductive even as he preached 'reforging': the paradox of the Gulag's propaganda man. A Yagoda loyalist, he was arrested and shot in 1937.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1899–1955 ✕ Executed

The transport chief who assembled the deportation trains

In October 1941 Milshtein reported to Beria: 657,364 soldiers detained as stragglers since the invasion, 10,201 shot — 3,321 "before the ranks."

A Beria protégé who built his party career in Georgia, Milshtein was appointed head of the NKVD Main Transport Directorate in 1939, making him the operator of the railway apparatus of Stalinist mass deportations. His directorate assembled and moved the trains that forcibly relocated entire nationalities: Poles, Karachais, Kalmyks, Chechens, and Ingush. For this work he received the Order of Suvorov 2nd class, a combat decoration the Soviet state itself annulled in 1962. Arrested shortly after Beria's fall in 1953, he was tried separately and shot in January 1955.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1902–1978 ○ Natural causes

Insider chronicler of the NKVD during the Great Terror

Arriving in Novosibirsk as militsiya chief in early 1938, he refused to hand his detectives over to the arrests and convoys of the mass operations. After a month of clashes with oblast NKVD chief Gorbach he was transferred out; four months later he was arrested himself.

A veteran Cheka operative from 1919, he headed the Ivanovo oblast militsiya from 1935 and in February 1938 became deputy People's Commissar of Internal Affairs of the Kazakh SSR and head of its militsiya. Posted to Novosibirsk just before that, he refused oblast NKVD chief Gorbach's demand to throw militsiya personnel into the arrests of the mass operations and was pushed out within a month. Arrested in Alma-Ata in June 1938, he held out against spy confessions for over nine months, then deliberately wrote absurd statements, such as being an illegitimate son of the Manchukuo emperor Puyi, to put the fabrication itself on record. Sentenced to ten years in 1940, he was released to the front as a private in 1942 and rehabilitated in the mid-1950s. His memoir NKVD from Within: Notes of a Chekist (published posthumously in 1995) is a rare inside account by a surviving senior officer, widely cited by historians.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1908–1984 ○ Natural causes

Scientific director of uranium isotope separation for the Soviet atomic bomb

“A scientist is not a job title or a place of work — you don't become one by walking into a lab and starting to think. Being a scientist is a constant, sometimes agonizing, sometimes beautiful state.” — at a Komsomol prize ceremony, shortly before his death, 1984.

Soviet experimental physicist. In 1933, with M. M. Noskov, he discovered the photomagnetic effect in semiconductors (the Kikoin-Noskov effect) and pioneered measurements of the Hall effect in liquid metals and gyromagnetic ratios in superconductors. In 1943 Kurchatov recruited him to Laboratory No. 2, where he became scientific director of uranium isotope separation; he and Kurchatov were the only two from Lab No. 2 on the Technical Council of the Special Committee. He served as deputy director of the Kurchatov Institute (1960–1984), co-founded the magazine Kvant with Kolmogorov, and co-authored the standard Soviet physics textbook with his brother Abram. He kept a facsimile of the Dead Sea Scrolls in his office and read Hebrew.