People of the Revolution and the USSR

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1899–1951 ○ Illness

The engineer who wrote utopia's ruins

In October 1932, at Gorky's house on Malaya Nikitskaya, Stalin told Soviet writers they were "engineers of human souls" and there asked after the writer he had destroyed a year earlier.

An engineer and land-reclamation specialist who turned to fiction, he was a writer whose prose gave Soviet literature an unmistakable voice. His real surname was Klimentov; "Platonov" was a pen name taken from his father's name, Platon. Written between 1926 and 1930, *Chevengur* and *The Foundation Pit* treated collectivization and Stalinist policy with a skepticism that kept them out of print for decades. He died of tuberculosis in Moscow on 5 January 1951; his last publications were collections of retold Russian folk tales.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1899–1970 ○ Natural causes

Creator of the Kuleshov Effect, the father of Soviet montage theory who proved editing, not the shot, creates meaning

“We make pictures — Kuleshov made cinematography.” — tribute penned by his students in the preface to his 1929 book The Art of Cinema (My Experience)

Soviet film director, theorist, and educator. He proved the psychological principle of montage through the 'Kuleshov Effect' and founded the world's first film school (VGIK) in 1919, laying the theoretical foundation for the Soviet montage school that produced Eisenstein and Pudovkin.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1899–1983 ○ Natural causes

Poet of "Zemlyanka" and the Writers' Union enforcer who led the campaign against Pasternak

Trapped under fire near Istra in November 1941, his coat shredded by shrapnel, Surkov said: 'Not one step back from the regimental HQ. And to death — four steps.' Those words became 'Zemlyanka.'

Russian Soviet poet and literary functionary who served as First Secretary of the Union of Soviet Writers (1953–1959). Author of the iconic WWII song "Zemlyanka" and two-time Stalin Prize laureate, he led the official campaign against Boris Pasternak during the Doctor Zhivago affair, traveling to Italy in 1957 to press Feltrinelli to halt publication. A paradoxical nomenklatura enforcer who, in 1937, secretly slipped 300 rubles into the pocket of a destitute Osip Mandelstam and quietly aided Anna Akhmatova during the Zhdanov years.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1901–1956 ✕ Suicide

Writers’ Union manager who killed himself at the thaw

After the 20th Congress, Fadeyev confessed to his old friend Yuri Libedinsky: "My conscience torments me. It's hard to live, Yura, with bloodied hands."

Novelist whose Civil War story The Rout (1927) was the most celebrated Soviet literary work of the 1920s, and administrator who led the Writers’ Union for nearly two decades. A Bolshevik from seventeen and a Far Eastern partisan, he helped organize RAPP and later enforced the Party’s literary line: attacking Akhmatova and Pasternak in campaigns yet privately aiding disgraced writers. His postwar novel The Young Guard became a generation’s defining text, though Party criticism forced him to rewrite it. After Khrushchev’s Secret Speech he shot himself, leaving a letter that indicted the Party’s destruction of literature and exposed the fracture in a writer who had been its loyal enforcer.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1901–1971 ○ Heart failure

The director who built Lenin's screen myth for Stalin, then dissected fascism under the Thaw

While writing Lenin in October, he watched NKVD officers raid his host's Moscow apartment and arrest assistant director Albert Slivkin, who was later shot. Romm still delivered the film on time for Stalin's private screening on the eve of the anniversary.

Mikhail Romm was the director who created the definitive cinematic image of Lenin through films personally commissioned by Stalin, Lenin in October (1937) and Lenin in 1918 (1939), establishing a visual canon that endured for decades. Born to a Jewish family in Irkutsk and trained as a sculptor, he turned to cinema at Mosfilm, where he earned five Stalin Prizes and laid the foundations of Soviet sound film. After Stalin's death, he dissected the mechanics of totalitarianism in the landmark documentary Ordinary Fascism (1965), seen by over 40 million viewers, embodying the critical conscience of the Thaw-era intelligentsia. As a professor at VGIK, he trained the postwar generation of Soviet directors, Tarkovsky, Shukshin, Mikhalkov among them, shaping the future of Russian cinema.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1902–1942 ✕ Killed in crash

Co-author with Ilf of The Twelve Chairs, satirist who captured NEP-era Soviet life and later edited Ogonyok magazine

Last lines of his Sevastopol dispatch, found in his field bag after the crash: 'Perhaps the city will hold out after all. I've grown used to believing in miracles.'

With Ilya Ilf, Petrov wrote the seminal Soviet satirical novels The Twelve Chairs (1928) and The Little Golden Calf (1931), creating the iconic rogue-hero Ostap Bender, a con man whose wit exposed the absurdities of NEP-era Soviet society. Born Yevgeny Katayev, the younger brother of writer Valentin Katayev, he drew on his experience as an Odessa criminal investigator to bring an unvarnished reporter's eye to his fiction. In 1935 he and Ilf drove across America, producing the travelogue One-Storied America, and after Ilf's death from tuberculosis in 1937 he revived the magazine Ogonyok as its editor. During the German-Soviet war he served as a front-line correspondent; returning from besieged Sevastopol in July 1942, his plane crashed and he was killed.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1903–1966 ○ Emphysema and heart failure

The actor of transformation, whose profile is stamped on the Order of Alexander Nevsky

I have worked on the figure of Ivan the Terrible not only in film but on the stage, I have come to love this figure, and I believe our reworking of the scenario can be a correct and truthful one.

An actor who moved between the Alexandrinsky stage and Soviet cinema. As the lead of Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible he became the face of the state epic, and the range of his transformations, from Paganel to Don Quixote, earned him Stalin's remark that he was an actor who knew how to transform himself.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1904–1936 ○ Illness

Author of How the Steel Was Tempered, paragon of socialist realism

Life is given to us but once. So live that, dying, you can say: all my life, all my strength were given to the finest cause in the world — the fight for the liberation of humankind.

Bolshevik activist from age 13, Red Army cavalryman in Kotovsky's brigade, and Komsomol organizer, Nikolai Ostrovsky wrote How the Steel Was Tempered (1932–1934) after ankylosing spondylitis left him blind and paralyzed at 25. Dictating to volunteer secretaries through a writing frame, he produced a semi-autobiographical novel whose protagonist Pavel Korchagin became the moral template for generations of Soviet, Chinese, and Korean communists. With 36.4 million copies sold, it remains the best-selling book in the Russian language and one of the best-selling books of all time. Awarded the Order of Lenin in 1935, Ostrovsky died at 32, his life itself a testament to the revolutionary will his novel celebrated.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1904–1966 ○ Natural causes

From Ulmanis's favorite novelist to the architect of Latvia's Sovietization

On 21 July 1940, the motion to join the USSR was moved in the Latvian Saeima by none other than the country's most beloved novelist, Vilis Lācis.

Born the son of a port worker, Lācis became Latvia's most widely read novelist with Fisherman's Son (1933). Enjoying the patronage of Kārlis Ulmanis's nationalist regime while maintaining underground Communist ties, he became Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars (later Council of Ministers) of the Latvian SSR in 1940, serving 19 years and overseeing agricultural collectivization and the mass deportations of 1949. As a writer, he reached the pinnacle of Soviet letters with the Stalin Prize-winning novels Storm and To the New Shore. He also served as Chairman of the Soviet of Nationalities (1954–1958). His works, translated into over 50 languages, remain the most widely read body of Latvian literature.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1905–1984 ○ Natural causes

The Russian and Soviet novelist of And Quiet Flows the Don

“Each of us writes at the dictate of his heart, and our hearts belong to the Party and the people.” From his speech to the Second All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers (1954).

A Russian and Soviet novelist born into a non-Cossack 'inogorodnye' family in the Don region of the Russian Empire, he completed And Quiet Flows the Don in four volumes between 1925 and 1940, an epic of revolution and civil war tearing Cossack villages apart. By denouncing the abuses of collectivization to Stalin in letters in 1933 he helped bring grain aid and an investigation, and during the Terror of 1937–1938 he again appealed to save local officials. A loyal Party member from 1932 and a USSR Supreme Soviet deputy from 1937, he alienated much of the intelligentsia by endorsing the Sinyavsky–Daniel trial in 1966. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1965 and died of laryngeal cancer at Vyoshenskaya in 1984.