People of the Revolution and the USSR

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1882–1938 ✕ Executed

Estonian Bolshevik and Soviet People's Commissar of Justice who helped design the Gulag camp system

On Bloody Sunday, 9 January 1905, the nineteen-year-old Yanson marched with his father toward the Winter Palace and watched him fall wounded as troops opened fire on the crowd.

An Estonian Bolshevik revolutionary who chaired the Reval (Tallinn) Soviet of Workers' Deputies in 1905 and later organized the Estonian Workers' Socialist Federation while in American exile. As a leading figure in the Central Control Commission during the 1920s, he directed party purges and, in 1928, co-authored a proposal to Stalin with Tolmachev and Yagoda to replace the existing prison system with OGPU-model forced labour camps. He subsequently served as People's Commissar of Justice of the RSFSR and People's Commissar of Water Transport of the USSR before his arrest in 1937 and execution the following year.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1952–

An Estonian legal scholar who challenged the Soviet official narrative in the language of law

On the Yakovlev commission, he argued that the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic was legally null and void.

Igor Gräzin is an Estonian legal scholar and politician whose work has ranged across legal theory, philosophy of law, and comparative jurisprudence. Elected to the Congress of People's Deputies of the Soviet Union in 1989, he served on the Yakovlev commission examining the secret protocols and the legal meaning of the Baltic states' incorporation. His intervention brought legal expertise into the political struggle over sovereignty and historical memory during the Soviet Union's final crisis.