People of the Revolution and the USSR

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1882–1955 ○ Natural causes

From tsarist artillery officer to Stalin's first ambassador to Washington: a Russian nobleman who crossed revolution and diplomacy

At a White House reception, Roosevelt declared: 'If Mr. Troyanovsky says, looking at the moon, that this is the sun, I personally, gentlemen, will believe him.'

Alexander Troyanovsky was the first Soviet plenipotentiary to the United States, appointed in 1933 upon the establishment of diplomatic relations, and the architect of early cooperative ties with the Roosevelt administration. Born to hereditary nobility, trained as a tsarist artillery officer, he joined the Bolsheviks in 1904, broke with them for the Mensheviks in 1914, served on the Menshevik Central Committee and in the Constituent Assembly, then joined the Bolshevik Party in 1923 and entered Stalin's foreign-trade and diplomatic apparatus. As plenipotentiary to Japan (1927–1933) and then Washington, he negotiated the 1935 US–Soviet trade agreement and repeatedly urged Stalin to pursue rapprochement with America against Nazi Germany. His son Oleg Troyanovsky later served as Soviet Permanent Representative to the UN, founding one of the Soviet era's most durable diplomatic dynasties.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1883–1938 ✕ Executed

The security viceroy of the Far East

On 11 August 1937, Yezhov forwarded Lyushkov's telegram to Stalin, who scribbled in the margin: 'Deribas will have to be arrested. St.' Molotov and Voroshilov added 'For,' and Deribas was arrested the next day.

An old Bolshevik Chekist who served as OGPU-NKVD plenipotentiary for the Far East from 1929, directing the Maki-Mirage counter-intelligence operation against Japan and forced-labour construction of the BAM. After eight years as the region's 'viceroy,' he was swept up in the Great Purge and shot in 1938.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1883–1939 ✕ Executed

The Southern Front commander who broke Denikin: the last of the first five marshals whose name was erased

“I am clean before the people, the Party, and the Red Army”: his letter to Stalin, March 1938

A career officer who earned the Gold Sword for Bravery and six other decorations in the First World War, Yegorov commanded the Southern Front in the Civil War and routed Denikin's White forces, then led the Southwestern Front in the Polish-Soviet War. As Chief of the General Staff from 1931, he pushed for mechanization and tank-warfare doctrine, and in 1935 became one of the first five Marshals of the Soviet Union. He fell from Stalin's favour in late 1937, was arrested in 1938, and was shot on Red Army Day 1939, without a public trial.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1883–1951 ○ Natural causes

Official publisher of Pravda who rose from Duma deputy to nominal head of the Russian republic

When war broke out, Badayev and the Bolshevik Duma deputies voted against war credits, and the Petersburg Committee issued its first anti-war proclamation: 'Down with war! War against war!'

A Petersburg locksmith turned Bolshevik deputy to the Fourth State Duma, Badayev served as the official publisher of Pravda at Lenin's direction, using his parliamentary immunity as a legal shield for the party newspaper. Exiled to Turukhansk with the Bolshevik Duma faction for anti-war activity in 1914, he returned after the February Revolution and took charge of food supply for Petrograd and the Northern Region. Under Stalin he rose through the cooperative movement and food industry commissariat to become Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR (1938–1944), the republic's formal head of state during the war years, while also serving as Deputy Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. He authored the widely translated memoir 'Bolsheviks in the State Duma' (1929), and the Badayev Warehouses in Leningrad remain a lasting toponym.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1883–1954 ○ Natural causes

Stalin's Moscow-trial prosecutor who later carried hardline Soviet diplomacy to the UN

At the UN General Assembly on 18 September 1947, then only Deputy Foreign Minister, Vyshinsky denounced the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan for using relief "as an instrument of political pressure."

Born in Odessa into a Polish szlachta (gentry) family, he moved to Baku as a child and joined the Menshevik wing of the RSDLP in 1903; arrested twice in 1906–1907 and sentenced by a Tiflis court in 1908 to a year in Bailov prison, where he met Stalin. He graduated from Kiev University in 1913, practiced law, and joined the Bolsheviks in 1920. He was RSFSR prosecutor (1931), Deputy Procurator (1933) and Procurator of the USSR (1935–1939), and served as state prosecutor in all three Moscow processes of 1936–1938. From May 1939 he was Deputy Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars, and from 1940 to 1946 First Deputy People's Commissar of Foreign Affairs; he effectively directed the Soviet delegation at Nuremberg. As Minister of Foreign Affairs (1949–1953) and then permanent representative to the UN (1953–1954), he died of a heart attack in New York on 22 November 1954.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1883–1954 ○ Gallstones

The eraser poised over party rolls for thirty years

January 1948, the musicians' summons at the Kremlin. As Zhdanov lectured, Shkiryatov ordered Prokofiev to pay attention. Prokofiev replied: "I never pay attention to people who haven't been introduced to me."

A Bolshevik since 1906, he began underground work among Moscow garment workers. From 1921, when he executed Lenin's first party verification, he spent three decades as Stalin's standing operational enforcer in the Central Control Commission and Party Control Committee, prosecuting Bukharin and Rykov, arresting the entire Chechen-Ingush leadership, and exiling Molotov's wife, rising to chairman of the Party Control Committee and CC Presidium member in 1952, only to be dropped from the Presidium a month after Stalin died.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1883–1958 ○ Esophageal cancer

Classic writer of socialist realism who pioneered the Soviet industrial novel with Cement

This is Workers' Russia; this is us; the new world of which mankind has dreamed throughout the centuries. — from Cement

Born into an Old Believer peasant family and radicalized as a teacher and underground revolutionary, Gladkov drew on his direct experience restoring the Novorossiysk cement works during the Civil War to write Cement (1925). The first Soviet industrial novel to dramatize post-revolutionary reconstruction, depicting the ruined factory as an arena of class, gender, and bureaucratic conflict, it became a canonical text of socialist realism and the prototype of the production novel.

Soviet communism 1883–1960 ○ Heart attack

Father of Soviet ferrous metallurgy who built Kuznetsk

A chemistry student, young Bardin wandered into Professor Izhevsky's lecture and resolved: 'I will be a blast-furnace operator.' Thirty years later, that resolve was Europe's largest steelworks.

A village tailor's son, Bardin studied metallurgy at Kyiv Polytechnic and learned steelmaking as a labourer in American mills. A disciple of blast-furnace master Mikhail Kurako, he rebuilt the works of Yuzovka, Yenakiyevo, Makeyevka, and Kamenskoye, then as chief engineer of the Kuznetsk Combine (1929–1937) erected Europe's largest blast furnaces in 1,000 days. Made a full Academician in 1932 without a single paper, he was vice-president of the Academy of Sciences from 1942. In wartime he concentrated Ural science on defence; afterwards he championed oxygen-converter steelmaking and continuous casting. A non-party figure the security organs never touched, he adopted eleven children of his repressed colleagues.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1883–1960 ○ Natural causes

From prisoner to directorate chief, and dead in his own bed

The formula Solzhenitsyn recorded as Frenkel's: "From a prisoner we must take everything in the first three months — after that we don't need him!"

A Jewish merchant born in Constantinople who became known as the 'Timber King of the Black Sea' in Odessa and ran a smuggling operation. Arrested in 1923 and sent to Solovki, he proposed tying food rations to labour output (the 'nourishment scale') and was elevated from prisoner to camp administrator within a year. He went on to lead construction of the White Sea-Baltic Canal, BAM, and the NKVD railway directorate, becoming the de facto architect of the Gulag forced-labour system. During the Battle of Stalingrad his crews built the Volga rockada railway in six months, a feat that earned him his third Order of Lenin. Retired as a lieutenant general and died in his Moscow bed.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1884–1958 ○ Natural causes

The Gosplan mathematical economist who first formalized the capital-goods-led growth model

At the height of the 1929 industrialization debate, Feldman declared that growth "cannot be limited by petty-bourgeois resistance — only by material possibilities, with all working people strained to the edge of physical and psychological endurance."

An electrical engineer by training, the Gosplan economist who in 1928 formulated the first formal growth model in the history of economics. His two-sector capital-goods/consumer-goods framework was adopted as the working hypothesis for the Soviet General Plan (1930–45), yet tendentious criticism forced him out of Gosplan in 1931. In the 1950s, American economist Evsey Domar rediscovered his work, and the Feldman–Mahalanobis model later became a theoretical foundation for India's development planning.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1884–1975 ○ Natural causes

From Menshevik to Soviet envoy to the British Empire: a convert and survivor who stood at the center of world-war diplomacy

In November 1918 he wrote to the Menshevik Central Committee that he was "fortunate to have the great honor of taking part in the last heroic-desperate attempt of democracy to save the revolution." Two years later he joined the Bolsheviks.

A Soviet diplomat and historian who crossed from Menshevism to Bolshevism. As ambassador to Britain for eleven years from 1932, he served as a central channel of wartime Allied diplomacy and signed the Maisky–Sikorski agreement restoring Soviet-Polish relations. After the war, as Deputy People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs, he took part in the Yalta and Potsdam conferences and led the commission on German reparations. His London diplomatic diary is regarded as an unparalleled source on the inner workings of interwar and wartime Soviet diplomacy.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1885–1949 ○ Natural causes

From party control to the art museum: an icon-painter Bolshevik

At 11 he left his village to apprentice as a painter; at 16 he was painting icons under a master. Twenty years later, those same hands held the cadre lists of the party's central apparatus.

Born to a peasant family in Vladimir province, he was apprenticed at age 11 and mastered icon painting before joining the Bolsheviks in 1905 at twenty. After the Civil War he led the party organization in the Ivanovo-Voznesensk region; in 1923 he rose to head the Organizational-Instruction Department of the Central Committee, managing the cadre-appointment line during Stalin's early consolidation of the party machine and serving as a candidate member of the Orgburo. He then spent fifteen years in the Central Control Commission and Party Control Commission, including through the apparatus purges of the Great Terror, and after a brief removal from duty in 1939 became director of the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, a post he held until his retirement in 1944.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1885–1951 ○ Natural causes

From 1st Cavalry Army commissar to the purge's personnel executioner

"Motor warfare, mechanisation, aviation and chemistry were invented by military specialists. For now, the main thing is the little horse. The decisive role in the coming war will be played by the cavalry."

A Bolshevik since 1904, he rose from tailor to professional revolutionary. Together with Budyonny and Voroshilov, he co-founded the 1st Cavalry Army and served on its Revolutionary Military Council, emerging as a Civil War hero. Appointed Deputy People's Commissar of Defence and head of the Command and Leadership Personnel Directorate in 1937, he became a central executioner of the Great Purge, spearheading the investigation into an 'illegal fascist conspiracy' among officers in the Kiev Military District. During World War II, as head of Glavupraform he oversaw all Red Army formation and manpower, though his dogmatic insistence on cavalry over mechanisation drew sharp postwar criticism.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1886–1934 ✕ Assassinated

The Leningrad organizer whose murder became the pretext for the Great Terror

In his first year in Leningrad in 1926, Kirov toured the factories and spoke at more than 180 workers' meetings.

A revolutionary and Soviet politician who joined the RSDLP in Tomsk in 1904 and took part in the 1905 Revolution; his birth surname was Kostrikov. He led the rebuilding of the Baku oilfields as First Secretary of the Azerbaijan Communist Party in 1921, took over the Leningrad party in 1926 and became a full Politburo member in 1930. In the Civil War he commanded the defence of Astrakhan and crushed anti-Bolshevik and workers' risings there with large-scale shootings, and in 1933 he sat on the Leningrad oblast 'troika' with power to pass death sentences in counter-revolutionary cases. On 1 December 1934 he was shot and killed at the Smolny in Leningrad by Leonid Nikolaev, and his death became the pretext for the Great Terror.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1886–1937 ✕ Gunshot death, attributed to suicide

Commander of the industrial front: he pulled the trigger himself

Around his fiftieth birthday in October 1936, shaken by news of his brother Papulia's arrest, he refused to attend the celebration held in his honour at Pyatigorsk; his wife Zinaida went alone.

An Old Bolshevik who joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1903, he was elected to the Central Committee at the Prague conference of 1912 and became a full Politburo member in 1930. He directed the Sovietization of the Caucasus and the creation of the Transcaucasian Federation, headed the Central Control Commission and Rabkrin in 1926–30 and the Supreme Economic Council in 1930–32, then led the First and Second Five-Year Plans as People's Commissar of Heavy Industry from 1932. At the commissariat he opposed mass repression in his own branch and shielded his cadres; he died in Moscow on 18 February 1937, with the official announcement giving heart failure as the cause. The purge of his deputies and relatives, and the circumstances of his death, are recorded alongside competing accounts of how he died.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1886–1938 ✕ Executed

The revolutionary who built Soviet cinema's golden age and dreamed of a Soviet Hollywood

15 November 1934, the Kremlin. After his ninth viewing of Chapaev, Stalin asked Shumyatsky: "Is this being shown in every district centre?" Shumyatsky answered that the USSR had only about 400–500 sound projectors; Stalin replied that over 2,000 district centres were missing such films.

Born in Verkhneudinsk (now Ulan-Ude) to a poor Jewish artisan family, he led the 1905 Krasnoyarsk armed uprising and, as chairman of Tsentrosibir in 1917, proclaimed Soviet power across Siberia. He was second Premier and Foreign Minister of the Far Eastern Republic (1920), Soviet plenipotentiary to Persia (1923–1925), and rector of the Communist University of the Toilers of the East from late 1926. Appointed chairman of Soyuzkino in November 1930, he headed the Chief Administration of the Cinema and Photo Industry (GUKF) from 1933 and became a deputy chairman of the Committee for Arts in 1936. Removed from his post on 7 January 1938 and arrested in the night of 17–18 January on charges of participation in a counter-revolutionary terrorist organisation and espionage, he was shot at Kommunarka on 29 July 1938 and rehabilitated on 22 February 1956.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1887–1938 ✕ Executed

Latvian Bolshevik who denounced NKVD case fabrication in court

In the trial record cited by Khrushchev in 1956, Rudzutak asked to report NKVD fabrication and coerced confessions to the Central Committee.

Latvian Bolshevik and trade-union leader. Born to peasant farmhands, he joined the party in 1905 and was sentenced to hard labour in 1909, released in 1917. He served as People's Commissar of Railways, a full Politburo member and head of the Central Control Commission; arrested in May 1937, he denied guilt in court and denounced NKVD case fabrication. Shot on 29 July 1938, he was rehabilitated when the 1955 review established the case was falsified.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1887–1939 ✕ Executed

Stalin's famine envoy and terror executor called the 'hangman of Ukraine', executed in 1939

His letter in Pravda on 28 December 1935 called for installing New Year trees in schools, children's homes, Pioneer palaces, clubs and theatres, restoring the banned yolka; the first officially organised Soviet yolka followed in Kharkiv on 30 December 1935.

Born into a weaver's family in Ivanovo-Voznesensk, he joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party in 1904 and was arrested in 1908, spending four years in Vladimir Central Prison before deportation to the Irkutsk region. During the October Revolution he helped bring Irkutsk under Bolshevik control and took part in creating the Far Eastern Republic; transferred to Ukraine in 1923, he became secretary of the Ukrainian Central Committee in 1925. Some 100,000 CP(b)U members were expelled in the 1933-34 purge, and he was widely known as the 'hangman of Ukraine'; moved to Kuibyshev as first secretary in 1937, he expanded the Great Terror there until his arrest on 21 February 1938, his execution after a fabricated confession, and his rehabilitation in 1955.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1887–1943 ○ Died in prison

The geneticist who built the world's largest seed bank and stood against Lysenko

“We shall go into the pyre, we shall burn, but we shall not retreat from our convictions.” — Leningrad, 1939, as Lysenko's persecution reached its peak.

Russian and Soviet geneticist and botanist. He discovered the law of homologous series in hereditary variation, developed the theory of centers of origin of cultivated plants, and built the world's largest seed collection: over 250,000 samples gathered across some 180 expeditions worldwide. As the first president of the All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences (VASKhNIL) and longtime director of the Institute of Plant Industry (VIR), he led Soviet agricultural science, until his open opposition to Lysenko's pseudoscience provoked his arrest on fabricated charges in 1940. He died of dystrophy in Saratov prison in 1943 and was posthumously rehabilitated in 1955.