Narodniks
1851–1895
✕ Struck by a train at a crossing
He killed the tsar's gendarme chief with a dagger, then introduced the Russian revolution to the West with his pen
On the eve of assassinating Mezentsov in 1878, Kravchinsky wrote: 'Long enough have we preached love — the time has come to call forth hatred. Merciless, bloody vengeance shall henceforth be the answer to your crimes.'
A writer and revolutionary who served as a bridge between the Russian Narodnik movement and the West. After activity in the Chaikovsky Circle he assassinated gendarme chief Mezentsov with a dagger in 1878 and fled into exile; in London he published Underground Russia (1883), introducing the Russian revolutionary movement to the West for the first time, and founded the Russian Free Press Fund and the Society of Friends of Russian Freedom, becoming the hub of émigré anti-tsarist agitation.
Career timeline
1872–1873Joined the Chaikovsky Circle; conducted socialist propaganda among St. Petersburg workers
1873–1874Went to the People — agitated peasants in Tver and Tula, arrested and escaped
1875–1876Fought in Herzegovina uprising against Ottoman rule; wrote for Bakuninist journal Rabotnik in Geneva
1877Joined the Benevento insurrection with Malatesta and Cafiero; arrested and amnestied
1878Joined Land and Liberty, edited its journal; assassinated Mezentsov on 4 August; fled abroad in November
1883Published Underground Russia — the West's first comprehensive account of the Russian revolutionary movement
1889Published The Career of a Nihilist (Andrei Kozhukhov), a novel of revolutionary life
1890–1895Founded the Society of Friends of Russian Freedom and Russian Free Press Fund; edited monthly Free Russia
Ukrainian Social Democratic writer who led the Rada's General Secretariat and the Directory
Just as you created the dictatorship of workers and peasants in Russia, we must create a dictatorship of the Ukrainian language in Ukraine.
A Ukrainian Social Democratic writer, he led the Central Rada's General Secretariat in 1917 and retook Kyiv as first chairman of the Directory in 1918. Arguing for talks with the Soviets he broke with Petliura and resigned in 1919, dying in France in 1951.
Career timeline
1905Co-founder of the Ukrainian Social Democratic Workers' Party
1917Vice-president of the Central Rada and first head of its General Secretariat
1918.01Premier of the Ukrainian People's Republic, soon resigned
1918.12Retook Kyiv as chairman of the Directory
1919–1920Wrote the memoir Rebirth of a Nation
1920Deputy head of the Ukrainian SSR Sovnarkom; soon re-emigrated
On 13 May 1933 he gathered fellow writers at his apartment, then shot himself. His suicide note read: 'Yalovy's arrest is the execution of an entire generation... I understand nothing. Long live communism, long live the Communist Party.'
The writer who founded modern Ukrainian Soviet prose. Leading VAPLITE, he demanded literary autonomy under the slogan 'Away from Moscow!'; Stalin's intervention triggered the anti-'Khvylovism' campaign. His 'I (Romance)' and 'The Woodcocks' are landmarks of the Executed Renaissance.
Career timeline
1917–1919Joined Bolshevik underground, joined Red Army
1919Joined RCP(b)
1921Moved to Kharkiv, began literary career
1922–1923Published *Blue Etudes* and *I (Romance)*
Poet of Earth: the Soviet master who sang the Ukrainian land and people through lyrical montage
I still cannot bear to look at funerals, and yet they pass through all my scripts and all my pictures, for the question of life and death affected my imagination when I was a child and left its imprint on all my work.
A Soviet film director of Ukrainian peasant origin who pioneered the lyrical montage aesthetic of the silent era. His 'Ukraine Trilogy' (above all *Earth* (1930), ranked among the greatest films ever made) rendered the Ukrainian land and people in poetic form, while he navigated Stalin's patronage and control to lay the foundations of the Dovzhenko Film Studios in Kyiv.
Career timeline
1926Debut films Vasya the Reformer and Love's Berries
The editor who turned Ogonyok into the battering ram of glasnost, publishing what the system suppressed for seventy years
"For seventy years, we were taught that the son who betrayed his father, or a person who burned a church, was a hero. People have been living a comprehensive lie."
A Kyiv-born poet and physician, Korotich was an establishment writer who won the USSR State Prize for an anti-American novel in 1985, but when Alexander Yakovlev secured his appointment as editor of Ogonyok in May 1986, he turned the magazine into the spearhead of glasnost. Ogonyok was the first to publish the truth about the Afghanistan war's casualties, Stalin's purges, and nomenklatura privileges, and was the first to print Pasternak and Nabokov; circulation exploded from 260,000 to 4.6 million. Elected a People's Deputy in 1989, he joined the Interregional Group; after refusing to return from the US during the August 1991 coup, he was dismissed, later taught at Boston University, and in his final years publicly supported Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Soviet Union
Soviet communism
1941–2020
○ Natural causes
The last Soviet culture minister
In his diploma performance as Hitler, Gubenko poured all his hatred for the man who killed his parents into the role. Lyubimov saw it and immediately brought him to the Taganka Theatre.
An actor and film director who rose from war orphan to People's Artist of the RSFSR. He was the first working arts professional to become Soviet Minister of Culture (1989–1991) since Anatoly Lunacharsky. After the USSR collapsed, he entered left-wing politics, serving as chair of the Duma's Culture Committee and deputy speaker of the Moscow City Duma, where he defended Soviet cultural heritage. Following the Taganka Theatre split, he founded and led the Sodruzhestvo Aktyorov Taganki until his death in 2020.
