People of the Revolution and the USSR

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1894–1937 ✕ Jumped during interrogation

The decade-long head of Byelorussia's government who signed the Academy purge, then stood in the same dock

On 21 June 1937, during interrogation in a fifth-floor room of the Minsk NKVD, Goloded — accused as a 'Polish spy' — threw himself from the window; the official cause was suicide, but unofficial accounts claim he was beaten to death and the jump staged.

Born a peasant who herded cattle from age seven, he joined the Bolsheviks in 1918 and from 1927 chaired the Byelorussian government for a decade, leading the industrialization and collectivization that turned the republic from an agrarian into an industrial land, for which he received the Order of Lenin in 1935. Yet he who had personally signed the resolution expelling the republic's academicians fell victim to the same terror: arrested in 1937 as a 'Polish spy,' he died after throwing himself from a fifth-floor NKVD window in Minsk.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1894–1938 ✕ Executed

The Kazakh Bolshevik strategist who argued for a unified Turkestan against Stalin's national delimitation

In June 1923, Stalin accused Ryskulov of 'pan-Turkism.' From the floor, Ryskulov retorted: "Just months ago, Comrade Stalin, you praised Sultan-Galiev as a devoted communist. Reversing that now is sheer political convenience."

Kazakh Bolshevik revolutionary and a pivotal leader of the Turkestan ASSR. He argued that the Turkic-speaking peoples of Central Asia constituted a single historical nation and opposed Stalin's national delimitation; at the June 1923 IV Conference he openly rebutted Stalin's accusation of 'pan-Turkism.' As RSFSR deputy Sovnarkom chairman (1926–1937), he drove the Turkestan–Siberian Railway and Karaganda industrial complex. During the 1932–1933 Kazakh famine, he wrote directly to Stalin documenting the mass starvation from forced collectivisation and secured food relief. Executed 1938, rehabilitated 1956.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1894–1969 ○ Natural causes

Khrushchev's loyal executor: a peasant-born apparatchik who twice led Soviet Ukraine's government

'Silence was his trump card. He'd wait for Khrushchev to propose something, then say: "Yes, yes, of course, that's exactly right."' — William Taubman

Soviet party and state leader who twice headed the Ukrainian SSR government (1938–1939, 1947–1954) and served 15 years as Chairman of its Supreme Soviet Presidium (1954–1969). Born to a poor peasant family, he joined the Bolsheviks in 1918 and organized Red partisans. In the 1930s he formed a lasting patron-client bond with Nikita Khrushchev in Moscow's Bauman district, riding that connection to the chairmanship of the Ukrainian Council of People's Commissars during the Great Purge. He organized partisan resistance under German occupation and led postwar reconstruction. Remembered as a classic yes-man whose silence was his trump card.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1895–1973 ○ Natural causes

The weaver who became wartime premier of the Russian republic

On 10 October 1941 Stalin named Khokhlov to the Western Front Military Council alongside Zhukov and Bulganin: 'Block the road to Tula and Moscow as long as possible.' The three names appear together on every order of the Battle of Moscow.

Born to a peasant family in Gubino near Moscow, he started work as a weaver at ten, then in 1918 raised a detachment of 125 fellow villagers and joined the Red Army, fighting in the Civil War on the Eastern Front before being badly wounded. After the Leningrad Financial Academy he rose through the Moscow Oblast soviet and the Central Union of Consumer Societies (Tsentrosouz), becoming Chairman of the RSFSR Council of People's Commissars in 1940. When the Great Patriotic War broke out he served on the Western Front Military Council, directing troop and supply transportation during the Battle of Moscow and earning a lieutenant-general's rank: the only RSFSR premier to hold a front-line generalship. After the war he returned to Tsentrosouz to rebuild the rural cooperative network shattered by war, then headed the State Trade Inspectorate from 1955 until retirement in 1965.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1895–1975 ↓ Removed 1958

The uniformed premier pushed aside by Khrushchev

On the Western Front in 1941, German bombers flying in formation toward Moscow made Bulganin frantic: 'Why aren't we shooting them down?' Zhukov looked up from his map: 'Calm yourself, Nikolai Alexandrovich. If we shoot here they will bomb our own positions; let the rear units deal with them.'

A Chekist-turned-administrator, Bulganin rose through Moscow city administration, the MELZ electric-lamp plant and the RSFSR premiership to Stalin's trust. From 1938 he was a deputy chairman of the Council of People's Commissars and twice headed the Gosbank board, and during the war he served on the military councils of the Western, 2nd Baltic and 1st Belorussian fronts. Made a Marshal in November 1947 so that the parade reviewer's rank would not fall below the parade commander's, he was valued not as a strategist but as a reliable executor. After Stalin's death he took Defence, then in 1955 the premiership, forming the 'B&K' duo with Khrushchev and touring Yugoslavia, India and Britain. In the 1957 Anti-Party Group crisis he vacillated between the camps; in 1958 he lost both the premiership and the marshal's rank. He died in Moscow in 1975.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1896–1938 ✕ Executed

Son of a Bukharan merchant who rose from the Jadid reform movement to become the first head of government of Soviet Uzbekistan

Russian diplomat Alexander Barmine recalled: "Fayzulla Khodzhayev, called the 'Lenin of the Uzbeks,' was small, wiry, and full of consuming energy, in spite of the malaria which often gave his face a greenish tinge. He enjoyed life, and could laugh gaily beneath a crushing load of work. He knew his people, was a great orator, and was much loved."

Born to a wealthy merchant family in Bukhara, Khodzhayev was sent to Moscow at age 11 and confronted the gap between traditional society and modern Europe. He joined the Jadid movement in 1916, co-founded the Young Bukharan Party, and after a failed 1918 coup against the Emir, fled to Tashkent under a death sentence. In 1920 he became Chairman of the Council of People's Nazirs of the Bukharan PSR, and in 1924 the first Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the Uzbek SSR, leading Central Asia's national delimitation and integration into the USSR. He opposed Stalin's cotton monoculture drive, lost influence, and was arrested in 1937, sentenced to death at the Third Moscow Trial.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1898–1940 ✕ Executed

Yezhov’s longtime secretary, source of the first deposition against him

On 14 January 1939 she was forced to sign a confession that her old chief had drawn her into a conspiracy. The first deposition of the Yezhov case came from his own longtime secretary.

Born in Borisoglebsk in 1898, she first met Yezhov at a Kislovodsk resort in the summer of 1925 and from 1926 worked as a technical secretary in the Central Committee apparatus. When Yezhov took charge of a CC department in 1930 she became his secretary and stayed at his side until 1936, then worked briefly in the NKVD secretariat before returning to the CC. Her husband was Mikhail Ryzhov, who rose to deputy commissar of internal affairs under Yezhov. Arrested on 17 December 1938 after Yezhov's fall, she was interrogated by Beria himself, and at her interrogation of 14 January 1939 she was forced to sign a statement confessing that she had belonged to a counterrevolutionary conspiracy since 1931 and that her old chief had recruited her. That deposition became the starting point of the political case against Yezhov. On 26 January 1940 the Military Collegium sentenced her to death on charges of counterrevolutionary activity; she was shot the next day, and was rehabilitated in September 1956.