People of the Revolution and the USSR

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1906–1967 ○ Heart attack

The Stalin-era chief investigator who pioneered the Soviet detective story

Kamil Ikramov recalled that even in the Khrushchev years, whenever Sheinin drove past the house where Vyshinsky had lived, he wept real tears.

A State Counsellor of Justice 2nd Class who, as head of the USSR Procuracy's Investigative Department (1935, 1939–1949), directed investigations into the Kirov assassination, the Zinoviev–Kamenev and Bukharin–Rykov–Yagoda trials, and other major political cases of the Stalin era. He served on the Soviet prosecution team at the Nuremberg Trials as assistant to Chief Prosecutor Roman Rudenko. At the same time he built a parallel literary career: his collection Notes of an Investigator (1938) pioneered the Soviet detective genre, and his screenplay for Meeting on the Elbe (1949) won the Stalin Prize. Arrested in 1936 and again in 1951 (the second time in connection with the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee case), he survived both imprisonments and spent his later years as deputy editor-in-chief of Oktyabr and editor-in-chief of Mosfilm, dying of a heart attack in 1967.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1906–1975 ○ Lung cancer

The composer who scored the Soviet century, and walked through two official annihilations

"Most of my symphonies are tombstones. Monuments to all the people of our nation who were killed." — From oral memoirs recorded by Solomon Volkov

One of the 20th century's greatest composers, he wrote 15 symphonies and 15 string quartets. His graduation piece, the First Symphony (1926), brought instant international fame, while his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District (1934) was celebrated for two years before Pravda destroyed it as 'Muddle Instead of Music' in 1936. The Seventh ('Leningrad') Symphony, written during the siege, became a global symbol of Soviet resistance, yet in 1948 he was again purged from public life by the Zhdanov decree against formalism. Across symphonies, chamber works, and film scores, his music remains an aural record of the tension between the Soviet regime and the artist's conscience.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1910–1971 ○ Natural causes

Novy Mir editor who opened the Thaw and national poet of Vasili Tyorkin

Solzhenitsyn's obituary: 'There are many ways of killing a poet. The method chosen for Tvardovsky was to take away his offspring, his passion, his journal. Six months later, he took to his death-bed.'

Poet whose wartime Vasili Tyorkin made him a national voice. As Novy Mir editor, he published Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a defining act of the Thaw, before being forced out under Brezhnev and dying soon after.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1910–1975 ○ Illness

The radio voice of the besieged city

In February 1942, just after her husband Molchanov starved to death, Berggolts read over the radio: "I, too, am a widow of Leningrad."

A Soviet poet who became the living voice of Leningrad during the 1941–1944 siege, reading her poems and speeches over the radio almost daily to citizens on the edge of starvation. Arrested in 1938 in the 'Literary Group' case, she endured torture and stillbirth in prison but refused to confess; she was released and exonerated in 1939. Her wartime works *February Diary* (1942) and *Leningrad Poem* (1942) faced the siege's horror and its citizens' dignity without flinching, and her words carved on the Piskaryovskoye Memorial, 'No one is forgotten, nothing is forgotten', became an enduring symbol of war memory. She won the Stalin Prize (1951) for *Pervorossiysk* and opened a path for Thaw-era literature with her autobiographical novel *Day Stars* (1959).

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1911–1991 ○ Natural causes

The Brezhnev-era literary gatekeeper who celebrated Siberia while enforcing official aesthetics as head of the Writers' Union for 15 years

At the 25th Party Congress, 1976: "The deep, wise report of Comrade Brezhnev contains a gigantic, immeasurable energy of inspiration. As if along wires, this energy has jolted into the hearts of people, inspiring them to work and great achievements."

Born the thirteenth child of a Siberian bear-hunter near Tomsk, he joined the Komsomol at 13 and launched a career in journalism and fiction. His epic novels (Strogovy, Salt of the Earth, and Siberia) chronicled peasant life and the taiga, winning him the Stalin and Lenin Prizes. In 1971 he became First Secretary of the Union of Soviet Writers and for fifteen years enforced literary policy: he led campaigns against Solzhenitsyn and Pasternak, and personally awarded Brezhnev the Lenin Prize for the leader's memoirs. Though his books sold millions and were adapted into TV serials, intellectuals mocked them as volumes nobody read; with perestroika he resigned in 1989.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1913–2007 ○ Natural causes

Gatekeeper of Soviet music for 43 years

He told the BBC: "I was Stalin's Commissar. When I said No! — it meant No."

Composer who controlled Soviet music for 43 years as Secretary of the Union of Soviet Composers (1948–1991). He rose by denouncing Prokofiev and Shostakovich in Zhdanov's 1948 anti-formalism campaign and earning Stalin's trust. Under Khrushchev he helped revoke the 1948 resolution while also supporting young musicians, a figure of lasting contradiction. He wrote eight operas, three symphonies, thirty film scores, and the hit song 'Moscow Windows,' winning the Hero of Socialist Labour, Lenin Prize, and three Stalin Prizes. In old age he denounced perestroika as 'betrayal.'

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1913–2009 ○ Natural causes

The poet who wrote the anthem for Stalin, Brezhnev, and Putin

In 2009, on his deathbed, Mikhalkov told his wife: "Well, that's enough for me. Goodbye." And closed his eyes.

A giant of Soviet children's literature and the poet who wrote the lyrics for the Soviet national anthem in 1944 and 1977 and the Russian national anthem in 2000. His long poem Uncle Styopa was beloved by generations of Soviet children, and he founded and edited the satirical newsreel Fitil for over four decades. As Chairman of the Union of Writers of the RSFSR from 1970 to 1990, he sat at the apex of Soviet literary administration, earning the Hero of Socialist Labour, the Lenin Prize, and three Stalin Prizes. Though criticized for joining campaigns against Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn, he also worked behind the scenes to secure housing, jobs, medical care, and even prison releases for numerous writers.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1915–1979 ○ Lung cancer

The poet of 'Wait for Me': six-time Stalin Prize-winning war correspondent and literary bureaucrat

"I was not a soldier, only a correspondent. But I have a piece of earth I will never forget — the field near Mogilev where, in July 1941, I saw for the first time how our men knocked out and burned 39 German tanks in a single day."

Poet of 'Wait for Me' (1941), the most beloved Soviet wartime lyric. A six-time Stalin Prize-winning war correspondent who turned his frontline experience into The Living and the Dead trilogy. As a literary bureaucrat he joined the Pasternak persecution, yet pushed through Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1919–1991 ○ Natural causes

A frontline cameraman who recorded liberation

In the first weeks after Auschwitz was liberated, Vorontsov's images of survivors and the camp turned immediate observation into international evidence.

Alexander Vorontsov was a Soviet documentary cameraman and director whose work carried the experience of war into recorded images. In the first weeks after the liberation of Auschwitz, he filmed survivors and the camp with the 1st Ukrainian Front crew, contributing footage to the film Osventsim and to Soviet evidence presented at Nuremberg. After the war he continued as a cameraman and director at the Central Studio for Documentary Films, linking frontline record-making to the institutions of peacetime Soviet cinema.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1924–1994 ○ Natural causes

Georgian film director whose Repentance fired the cultural starting gun of glasnost

When Repentance was shelved, Abuladze kept the only video copy under his bed, fearing it would be destroyed.

A Georgian Soviet film director. His debut Magdana's Donkey (1955), co-directed with Rezo Chkheidze, won the Cannes short film prize and signaled Soviet cinema's return to the international stage. His trilogy of The Plea (1967), The Wishing Tree (1976), and Repentance (1984) marked his peak; Repentance, shelved for two years after completion, was the first Soviet film to confront the Stalinist terror in allegorical form, and its 1986 release at the Fifth Congress of the Filmmakers' Union became the cultural starting gun of glasnost. It won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 1987; Abuladze later served as a People's Deputy of the USSR (1989–1991).