People of the Revolution and the USSR

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1897–1962 ○ Natural causes

Ammunition and atomic administrator under Beria

"Comrade Stalin, you were imprisoned by enemies, but I was imprisoned by our own."

Born to a Jewish oil worker's family in Baku, he rose from engineer to People's Commissar of Armaments in 1939. Arrested and tortured just before the war, he was summoned by Stalin after the German invasion and appointed Commissar of Ammunition, quadrupling shell production by war's end. After the war, he led the First Main Directorate alongside Kurchatov, building the administrative and industrial foundation of the Soviet atomic bomb project, and later oversaw hydrogen bomb development. He was one of the very few awarded the Hero of Socialist Labor three times.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1902–1958 ○ Natural causes

Metallurgy administrator of Stalinist industrialization

In 1930, appointed head of ferrous metallurgy at 28, he asked Ordzhonikidze to send him to the factory floor instead. He chose the furnace over the desk — and became the Soviet Union's master of steel.

An Armenian from Shusha, he trained at the Moscow Mining Academy and on the shop floor of the Elektrostal plant. Rising through the Special Steel Trust, he moved through defense industry and shipbuilding before becoming commissar for ferrous metallurgy in 1940. During the war he evacuated southern and central metal plants beyond the Urals and directed specialty steel production for tanks, aircraft and ammunition, earning the Hero of Socialist Labor title in 1943. After the war he led reconstruction as Deputy Premier and Minister of Ferrous Metallurgy, while also overseeing uranium supply for the Soviet atomic project. In 1938 his German internship nearly cost his life on suspicion of being a 'German spy,' but Stalin personally intervened.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1912–1981 ○ Natural causes

The Azeri engineer who built the Soviet gas industry into the world's largest

Landing on the bare tundra at the future Urengoy site in 1973, Orudzhev declared: "I am not Peter the Great, but I will borrow his words: here a city shall be built." From that moment, Novy Urengoy — Russia's 'gas capital' — was born.

An Azeri engineer from a Baku working-class family who built the Soviet gas industry into the world's largest. As Minister of the Gas Industry from 1972, he developed the West Siberian supergiant fields of Urengoy and Medvezhye and created the Unified Gas Supply System (ЕСГ), which remains the backbone of Russian gas power today.