People of the Revolution and the USSR

Activity(set)
Any Political and party leadership 26 Government and administration 5 Military command 8 Security, intelligence and policing 2 Diplomacy and international organization 3 Economy, finance and planning 3 Agriculture and land policy 1 Social movements and organizing 33 Scholarship and theory 4 Science and technology 2 Literature and arts 3 Law and justice 1
Affiliation

Most people

Any

All 0 affiliations

Position(set)
Any Imperial establishment and White movement 1 Counter-revolutionary forces 2 Left critics of Bolshevism 3 Socialist-bloc reform leader 1 Dissident 6 Anarchists 3 Non-Bolshevik socialists 5 Narodniks 1 Jacobins and French revolutionary radicals 1 National liberation and anti-colonial movements 2 Russian revolutionary democrats 2 Western Marxist theorists 1 Marxism and communism 61
Citizenship
Any Soviet Union 2 Hungary 1
Background
Any Russia 2 Hungary 1
Era
Any

People of the Soviet Union

The revolutionary generation1917–1940 1 People of the thaw and the stagnation1953–1985 1

People of the wider world

The Cold War and decolonization1945–현재 1
Literature and arts Left critics of Bolshevism Clear all

Alexander Konstantinovich Voronsky

Александр Константинович Воронский
Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Left critics of Bolshevism Soviet Union Russia 1884–1937 ✕ Executed

Editor of Krasnaya Nov, Marxist critic who discovered Babel and Pasternak and led Pereval against RAPP

1921, in Lenin's Kremlin apartment. At the founding meeting of Krasnaya Nov, Gorky showed a collection of Indian tales. Lenin cut him short: "We pay for this in gold currency. This year there will be famine." Voronsky recalled: "Two truths collided — one said man does not live by bread alone, the other answered: but what if there is no bread?"

Marxist critic who founded Krasnaya Nov and discovered Babel and Pasternak. As leader of the Pereval group, he championed art as cognition of life against RAPP's class-war aesthetics. Joined the Left Opposition in 1923; executed in 1937.

Career timeline
  • 1904Joined the RSDLP(B) in Tambov
  • 1906–1910Arrested; one year solitary in Peter and Paul Fortress, two years exile in Yarensk
  • 1912Delegate to the Prague Conference; took minutes, spoke for a mass workers' daily
  • 1917–1920Odessa Soviet executive committee, Ivanovo-Voznesensk Party chair, VTsIK member; helped suppress the Kronstadt rebellion
  • 1921–1927Founded and edited Krasnaya Nov; edited Prozhektor; founded Krug publishing; led the Pereval literary group
  • 1923Signed the Declaration of the 46, joined the Left Opposition
  • 1927–1930Expelled from Party as Trotskyist, exiled to Lipetsk; renounced opposition in 1929, reinstated in 1930
  • 1930–1935Editor of classical literature at Goslitizdat; wrote autobiographical fiction
  • 1937Arrested 1 Feb during the Great Purge; on Stalin's signed death list; shot 13 Aug after a 15-minute trial

Varlam Tikhonovich Shalamov

Варлам Тихонович Шаламов
Left critics of Bolshevism Soviet Union Russia 1907–1982 ○ Natural causes

The writer who testified to Kolyma through prose

Kolyma Tales depicts the camps not as correction or heroism, but as the destruction of human beings.

Close to the Left Opposition in youth, he was arrested and imprisoned, spending many years in Kolyma from 1937. He recorded camp dehumanization in the compressed prose of Kolyma Tales, largely unpublished in the USSR during his lifetime.

Career timeline
  • 1929First arrested for Left Opposition activity
  • 1937–1951Imprisoned in the Kolyma camps
  • 1954–1973Writes six Kolyma Tales cycles
  • 1988–1989Kolyma Tales published in the USSR

Balázs Nagy

Nagy Balázs
Left critics of Bolshevism Hungary Hungarian 1920–2003 ○ Natural causes

The exile historian of workers’ councils

In the resolution he recorded for 31 October, the workers' councils opened with 'The factory is the property of the workers.'

Balázs Nagy was a Hungarian revolutionary socialist and exile writer who documented how workers’ councils created an autonomous political and economic organisation outside the state apparatus and party bureaucracy during the 1956 revolution. He left a firsthand account of the formation of the Central Workers’ Council of Greater Budapest, its strike after 4 November, and its negotiations with the new government; the study was published in French in Brussels in 1961. His work shows both how working-class self-organisation functioned as an alternative political form amid defeat and the limits imposed on it by military intervention and repression.

Career timeline
  • 1956Participated in Budapest’s workers’ council movement
  • 1956.11Documented the formation and resistance of the Central Workers’ Council of Greater Budapest
  • 1961Published the French study La formation du Conseil Central Ouvrier de Budapest en Brussels
  • 1964Published Budapest 1956: The Central Workers’ Council in International Socialism
  • 2003Died