People of the Revolution and the USSR

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1870–1926 ○ Leukemia

From revolutionary engineer to Soviet diplomatic architect, the only Bolshevik who could do business with Western capital

In 1893, the young Krasin visited Tolstoy to argue that revolution was inevitable. The great apostle of non-violence "began to stamp with rage," as Krasin's wife Liubov, who was present, recorded.

From Siberian exile under the Tsar to general director of Siemens-Schuckert Russia, then to the Soviet state's first People's Commissar of Foreign Trade, Krasin's trajectory was unique among Bolsheviks. During the 1905 revolution he led the Combat Technical Group, handling arms and finance, and built the underground 'Nina' press in Baku to print Iskra. He quit politics in 1909, rose through Siemens to become its Russian head, then returned at Lenin's call in 1918. Architect of the state monopoly on foreign trade and the 1921 Anglo-Soviet Trade Agreement, he was the only senior Bolshevik at home in Western business circles; Lenin rated him the party's ablest practical organizer.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1872–1950 ○ Natural causes

The founder of Soviet statistics whom Lenin rebuked and relied on

On August 16, 1921, Lenin wrote to Popov that the Central Statistical Board, 'which lags behind an unofficial group of writers, is a model bureaucratic institution.'

Pavel Popov was the first head of the Central Statistical Administration (ЦСУ), which produced the data foundation for Soviet central planning. A zemstvo statistician, he met Lenin and Tsiurupa in Ufa exile, a connection that secured his appointment to lead the state statistical apparatus in 1918. Under his direction, ЦСУ compiled the world's first inter-sectoral balance of a national economy for 1923/24. Lenin rebuked him in 1921 (calling ЦСУ 'a model bureaucratic institution') yet Popov remained until 1926 and served on the Gosplan Presidium. He survived the purges and worked in Gosplan until 1948, a rare longevity for a non-Bolshevik who joined the party only in 1924.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1872–1959 ○ Natural causes

Early architect of electrification and planning

December 23, 1920, Petrograd. Krzhizhanovsky presents the GOELRO plan. Lenin rises and calls it 'the Party's second programme.' On the vast map behind them, thirty red lights blink — the power stations of the future.

One of Lenin's oldest comrades: they founded the League of Struggle together in 1893, shared arrest and exile. In Butyrka prison he wrote the Russian lyrics of the revolutionary anthem 'Warszawianka.' As lead architect of the GOELRO electrification plan and first chairman of Gosplan, he directed the world's first comprehensive national development plan, the methodological prototype for every Soviet five-year plan. As vice-president of the Academy of Sciences he founded the Energy Institute and laid the scientific basis for the unified energy system. Sidelined in the late 1930s for criticising Stalin, he escaped the purges and was rehabilitated as a Hero of Socialist Labour in 1957.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1877–1974

The economist who designed socialism in numbers

"Better to stand for high tempos than to sit for low ones" — Strumilin's famous riposte to the geneticists during the 1920s planning methodology debates.

Soviet economist and statistician who laid the intellectual foundations of the planned economy. He developed the world's first system of material balances, formulated the 'Strumilin index' for labor productivity, and pioneered the measurement of economic returns to education. Active in the revolutionary movement from 1897, he was a Menshevik through three arrests and exiles before joining the Bolshevik Party in 1923 and serving as deputy chairman of Gosplan. Elected a full member of the Academy of Sciences in 1931, he received the Lenin and Stalin Prizes and was named a Hero of Socialist Labor (1967).

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1878–1938 ✕ Executed

'The countryside is against us': the deputy finance commissar who said it to the Politburo

'The countryside, except for a small section of the poor peasants, is against us.' One sentence from Deputy Finance Commissar Frumkin's letter to the Politburo, 15 June 1928. It became the starting pistol for the crackdown on the Right Opposition.

An Old Bolshevik who joined the Bund in 1898 before entering the RSDLP, Frumkin served in the Food Commissariat during the Civil War and as deputy commissar for foreign trade and finance under NEP. In June 1928, at the height of the grain-procurement crisis, he sent a letter to the Politburo declaring that 'the countryside, except for a small section of the poor peasants, is against us': a direct indictment of Stalin's forced-requisition policy and its destruction of the smychka, the worker-peasant alliance. That single letter made him the first man formally accused of the 'Right Deviation,' the opening salvo of Stalin's liquidation of the NEP coalition. Arrested in October 1937, he was shot in July 1938 and rehabilitated in 1956.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1878–1938 ✕ Executed

The commissar who steered from famine's shadow to NEP finance, then fell under industrialization's demands

At the 5 April 1930 Politburo meeting Stalin passed an obscene note mocking Bryukhanov, who had proposed nickel alloy coinage, and Mezhlauk appended a drawing of the hanging commissar; both were shot in 1938.

A Bolshevik from 1902, born in Simbirsk as the son of a land-surveyor official; he studied at Moscow and Kazan universities without graduating and was expelled for revolutionary activity. Under the Tsar he endured repeated arrests and exile, headed the Bolshevik committee in Ufa and chaired the Ufa Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies, and was a delegate to the Seventh (April) All-Russian Conference. During the Civil War he helped organize mass grain requisitions and directed the food detachments and punitive expeditions, and became People's Commissar of Finance on 16 January 1926. Removed on 18 October 1930 and relegated to secondary posts, he was arrested on 3 February 1938, shot on 1 September 1938 and rehabilitated in 1956; some reference works give his death as 30 June 1942.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1880–1936 ✕ Suicide

Chief of the Soviet trade unions, third man of the Right Opposition

"They accuse us abroad of a one-party regime. Not true. We have many parties. Only one is in power, and the rest are in prison." At the 11th Party Congress in 1922, the hall answered Tomsky with a storm of applause.

A leading figure of the Soviet trade-union movement, he headed the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions from 1918 and entered the Politburo in 1922. In the trade-union controversy of 1920–1921 he defended union autonomy against Trotsky's program of militarizing the unions, and in 1929 fell with Bukharin and Rykov as the "Right deviation." A lithographer with minimal formal schooling, he shot himself at his Bolshevo dacha on 22 August 1936 as news of an investigation against him was published. His family too was repressed in the late 1930s, and he was fully cleared only in 1988.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1880–1937 ✕ Executed

The pragmatic Bolshevik who designed and led the Far Eastern Republic

After Krasnoshchyokov was dismissed during an illness, Lenin protested in a letter to Molotov: "We have harassed this man, who undoubtedly has brains, energy, knowledge and experience."

The first head of the Far Eastern Republic (1920–1921) and a key architect of the early Soviet mixed-economy experiment. After emigrating to America in 1902, he graduated from the University of Chicago Law School and worked as a labour attorney before returning to Russia in 1917 and immediately joining the Bolsheviks. He persuaded Lenin to create a buffer state in the Far East to secure Japan's withdrawal during the Civil War, personally drafting the republic's constitution in English and securing the Gongota Agreement with Japan as premier and foreign minister. He later served as Deputy People's Commissar for Finance, joined the Presidium of Vesenkha, and founded Prombank, laying the institutional foundations for industrial finance under the NEP.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1882–1932 ○ Natural causes

An imaginative economic theorist who bridged NEP and central planning, co-founded Gosplan, and championed Jewish agricultural settlement

"The real heroism with which he conquers physical disabilities which long ago would have overwhelmed a less unbreakable spirit." — Arthur Ransome, British journalist who met Larin in Moscow, 1920

An economist and revolutionary born in Simferopol. A founding member of Gosplan, he advocated centralized planning based on his study of the German war economy. He led the Jewish agricultural settlement movement (OZET) and wrote prolifically despite lifelong muscular dystrophy.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1882–1938 ✕ Executed

Architect of NEP industrialization who championed trusts against Glavkist centralization

“We can manage well only by decentralizing industrial management, bringing the management body closer to the factory, while centralizing leadership of industry as a whole.” — defending trusts against Glavkist centralizers.

A Bolshevik engineer and economic manager from a Moscow merchant family, Bogdanov chaired the Supreme Council of the National Economy (VSNKh) of the RSFSR from 1921 to 1925, designing the institutional architecture of industry under the New Economic Policy. He oversaw the production of the first Soviet tank at the Sormovo plant and, as chairman of the Council of Military Industry, introduced planned production cooperation among military factories during the Civil War. A committed defender of the trust form of industrial organization with broad enterprise autonomy, he opposed the centralized 'Glavkist' model and chaired the Main Concession Committee to attract foreign capital. As head of Amtorg in the United States from 1930 to 1934, he helped pave the way for Soviet-US diplomatic relations, but was arrested in 1937 during the Great Purge and executed in 1938.

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 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 1884–1937 ✕ Executed

First People's Commissar for Agriculture who laid the statistical foundations of Soviet planning

On October 29, 1917, when Lenin urged the Central Committee to ready itself to seize power immediately, Milyutin was the first to oppose him: "We are not ready to strike the first blow; we are unable to depose and arrest the authorities in the immediate future." Lenin argued against him point by point. Exactly one week later, Milyutin was in charge of food supplies for that very insurrection.

As the first Sovnarkom People's Commissar for Agriculture (1917), he helped shape the revolutionary government's land policy. An economic theorist who began as a Menshevik and joined the Bolsheviks in 1910, he later headed the Central Statistical Administration (TsSU) and served as deputy chairman of Gosplan, building the statistical and calculative infrastructure of Soviet planning. A technocrat who sustained the state economic apparatus through the transitions from War Communism to NEP to the Five-Year Plans, he was arrested and executed in 1937 on charges of belonging to a 'Right counter-revolutionary organization.'

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1884–1941 ✕ Executed

The finance commissar who passed from Cheka to the Left Opposition

In the prison train, Valentina Polyakova confronted her: 'Your false testimony got my husband shot.' Yakovleva answered: 'It was Yezhov's order. They kept me awake fifteen days and nights — I lost control and signed.'

An Old Bolshevik who led the Petrograd Cheka during the revolution, she was also a leader of the Left Opposition in 1924–26. After serving as the Russian republic’s finance commissar, she was arrested in 1937, given a long prison sentence, and shot in the 1941 mass execution at Oryol prison.

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 1885–1944 ○ Natural causes

Architect of the chervonets who tamed NEP inflation, then broke with Stalin as the first high-ranking Soviet financial defector

Lenin to Sheinman, 28 February 1922: "At present the State Bank = a bureaucratic paper game. There is the truth for you, if you want to hear not the sweet communist-official lies, but the truth."

A Bolshevik since 1903, he chaired the Helsinki Soviet in 1917 and served in the Constituent Assembly. Across two terms as Gosbank chairman (1921–24, 1926–29), he introduced the gold-backed chervonets that tamed hyperinflation under the NEP. Lenin rebuked him for running a "bureaucratic paper game," yet that institution-building made monetary stabilization possible. Recalled from abroad in 1929, he refused to return, becoming an early nevozvrashchenets and escaping the purges in London exile.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1885–1960 ○ Natural causes

A social democrat who changed course between revolution and economics

At the Northern Front, he reported to Kerensky the reality that soldiers no longer wanted the offensive.

Vladimir Voitinsky was a Russian revolutionary and economist who explored both the labor movement and theories of markets. After Bolshevik work during the 1905 Revolution and exile in Siberia, he moved toward the Mensheviks in 1917 and sought cooperation between the soviets and the Provisional Government. As commissar of the Northern Front, he helped prepare the June Offensive but then confronted soldiers exhausted by war and unwilling to obey orders, exposing the limits of revolutionary military authority. After October he lived in exile and became an international labor and economic researcher who argued for democratic social reform.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1887–1938 ✕ Executed

First chairman of VSNKh; theorist of the Left Communists and of Democratic Centralism

Sent in November 1917 to break the sabotage of State Bank officials, he became the bank's first manager and obtained the keys to its vaults and cash for the Sovnarkom, moving to the chairmanship of VSNKh on 23 December.

Born in Kursk province into a small-landed noble family, he studied law at Moscow University and joined the Bolsheviks in 1907. Appointed a commissioner of the State Bank in November 1917 after the October Revolution, he secured the keys to its vaults and its funds, and in December became the first chairman of the Supreme Economic Council (VSNKh). A theoretical leader of the Left Communist group that opposed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in 1918, he co-led the Democratic Centralism group in 1920-21, which demanded open discussion and the representation of minority views in the party. He later served as deputy chairman of Gosplan and head of the Central Statistical Administration, was arrested in 1937, executed on 1 September 1938 and rehabilitated in 1957.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1888–1935 ○ Natural causes

Planning official of the first Five-Year Plans

On 25 January 1935, after chairing meetings all morning, he returned home pale and refused his housekeeper's offer to call a doctor, retiring to his room. When the Kremlin physician arrived, Kuibyshev was already dead of a coronary thrombosis.

Born the son of a tsarist officer, he joined the Social Democratic Party at sixteen and endured eight arrests and exiles in the Bolshevik underground. During the Civil War he served on the Revolutionary Military Councils of the 1st and 4th Armies; afterwards he chaired Rabkrin, the Supreme Economic Council, and Gosplan, becoming the architect and executor of Stalin's industrialization drive. A Politburo member from 1927, he oversaw the full span of economic policy and became a loyal symbol of Soviet industrialization whose name was bestowed on cities and factories after his death.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1888–1937 ✕ Executed

First People's Commissar for Justice, Gosplan deputy chairman, and victim of the Great Purge

On October 24-25, 1917, he was in the Smolny Institute helping direct the armed uprising; within days, at 29, he became the Soviet government's first People's Commissar for Justice.

Born into a noble family in Saratov, he joined the Bolsheviks in 1903 and took part in the 1905 revolution. After the October Revolution he was appointed the first People's Commissar for Justice in the original Sovnarkom, then served in the Supreme Economic Council (VSNKh), led economic bodies in Siberia and the Urals, chaired the Oil Syndicate (Neftesindikat) and Donugol, and became deputy chairman of Gosplan. Within the party he sat on the Central Committee from the Sixth Congress (1917) onward; in 1918 he was a 'Left Communist' opposing the Brest-Litovsk Treaty before later backing Stalin. Arrested in 1937 on false charges, he was sentenced to death and shot; rehabilitated in 1956.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1888–1937 ✕ Executed

Revolutionary-turned-banker who led Gosbank through collectivization

In 1919 he led armed detachments through the villages of Belarus, forcibly seizing grain from the peasantry. Eighteen years later the system he helped build shot him as a 'wrecker.'

Born to a Jewish merchant family in Siberia, he joined the Socialist Revolutionary Party in 1904 and switched to the Bolsheviks in July 1917. During the October Revolution he served as head of the Minsk garrison and on the Military Revolutionary Committee of the Western Front; during the Civil War he was food commissar in Belarus and Lithuania-Belarus, becoming one of the organizers of forced grain requisitioning expeditions. From 1930 to 1934 he chaired the USSR State Bank while serving simultaneously as Deputy People's Commissar of Finance, overseeing the credit reform of 1930–1932 that accompanied collectivization. He then led the People's Commissariat of Grain and Livestock Sovkhozes from 1934 until his arrest during the Great Terror; he was shot in November 1937.