People of the Revolution and the USSR

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1872–1933 ✕ Suicide

Architect of Ukrainization: the cultural revolutionary who turned the gun on himself

In the spring of 1918, after the Brest crisis, Stalin told Ukraine's leaders to stop "playing at government and republic"; Skrypnyk's Ukrainian TsIK answered by telegram: "the source of its actions is not this or that commissar, but the will of the working masses of Ukraine."

Born on 13 (25) January 1872 in the village of Yasynuvata, Bakhmut uezd, Yekaterinoslav gubernia, the son of a railway telegrapher and a zemstvo midwife. A party member from 1897, he was sent to Ukraine on Lenin's orders in December 1917 and chaired the People's Secretariat, the first Soviet Ukrainian government, then headed the Cheka department against counter-revolution in 1918–1919. From 1927 to February 1933 he was People's Commissar of Education of the Ukrainian SSR, and in 1932 he opposed high grain-procurement targets.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1879–1937 ✕ Executed

Father of Soviet signals intelligence and founder of the Cheka Special Department

"If it's a cipher, go ahead and crack it," he taunted the tsarist police holding his mathematical notebooks. They never did.

An Old Bolshevik who mastered cryptography in the revolutionary underground, Bokii chaired the Petrograd Cheka and directed Special Departments on the Eastern and Turkestan Fronts before designing and founding the Cheka's Special Department (Спецотдел) in 1921. He led it for sixteen years, unifying cryptography, radio interception, direction-finding, and state-secrets protection into a single service, thereby creating the institutional foundation of Soviet signals intelligence. He also served as curator of the Solovki special-purpose camp (SLON), helping shape the early Gulag system. His concurrent fascination with esoteric mysticism and plans for a Tibetan expedition were later weaponised against him as pretext for his arrest and execution.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1889–1935 ○ Pulmonary tuberculosis

Stalin's first secretary, keeper of his archive and author of his first biography

Bazhanov recalled Tovstukha matching ballot handwriting against registration forms: who crossed out Stalin's name? "He had only half a lung, but Stalin had complete confidence in him."

Stalin's first personal secretary (1918–1935) and head of the CC Secret Department (1926–1930), Tovstukha ran Stalin's private secretariat and controlled access to the Lenin Institute archive. He authored the first official biography of Stalin for the Granat Encyclopedia (1922) and directed the first edition of Lenin's Collected Works. As an émigré he joined the French Socialist Party and worked as a labourer; after returning he became secretary at the People's Commissariat for Nationalities, where his lifelong attachment to Stalin began. His management of the documentary record, above all selective access to Lenin's and Trotsky's papers, was a decisive ideological tool for the Stalin faction.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1893–1933 ✕ Suicide

Founder of modern Ukrainian Soviet prose

On 13 May 1933 he gathered fellow writers at his apartment, then shot himself. His suicide note read: 'Yalovy's arrest is the execution of an entire generation... I understand nothing. Long live communism, long live the Communist Party.'

The writer who founded modern Ukrainian Soviet prose. Leading VAPLITE, he demanded literary autonomy under the slogan 'Away from Moscow!'; Stalin's intervention triggered the anti-'Khvylovism' campaign. His 'I (Romance)' and 'The Woodcocks' are landmarks of the Executed Renaissance.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1894–1956 ○ Heart attack

Poet of Earth: the Soviet master who sang the Ukrainian land and people through lyrical montage

I still cannot bear to look at funerals, and yet they pass through all my scripts and all my pictures, for the question of life and death affected my imagination when I was a child and left its imprint on all my work.

A Soviet film director of Ukrainian peasant origin who pioneered the lyrical montage aesthetic of the silent era. His 'Ukraine Trilogy' (above all *Earth* (1930), ranked among the greatest films ever made) rendered the Ukrainian land and people in poetic form, while he navigated Stalin's patronage and control to lay the foundations of the Dovzhenko Film Studios in Kyiv.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1908–1975 ↓ Removed 1960

Khrushchev-era secretary for party appointments

At the June 1957 showdown with the anti-party group, Kirichenko swatted aside every accusation with brute force, not troubling to pick his arguments. Without Khrushchev, he knew, he had no future either.

The first ethnic Ukrainian to serve as First Secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party, he backed Khrushchev decisively against the anti-party group in 1957 and was brought to Moscow as a CC secretary. By 1958 he was de facto second secretary, chairing the Secretariat and controlling party cadres, but his abrasive manner and independent moves alienated colleagues and eventually cost him Khrushchev's confidence. Ousted in 1960, he was demoted to factory director and ultimately forced into pensioned oblivion.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1928–2016 ○ Natural causes

CPU secretary who oversaw the anti-alcohol campaign in Ukraine and testified that Ligachev ordered the Massandra wine library destroyed

I poured the contents of the third, fourth, fifth glass and so on under the table. The secretary sitting next to me whispered: 'Listen, my trousers are soaked and there's vodka in my shoes!'

A metallurgical engineer by training, he joined party work in 1957 and rose through first secretary posts in Kramatorsk, Ivano-Frankivsk, and Nikolaev before serving 16 years as a secretary of the CPU Central Committee from 1971. When Gorbachev's anti-alcohol campaign began in 1985, Pogrebnyak oversaw its implementation in Ukraine; he later testified that Yegor Ligachev demanded the destruction of Massandra's 150-year wine library and that only Vladimir Shcherbitsky's intervention with Gorbachev saved it. In 1987 he was dispatched to Lviv as first secretary amid rising nationalist sentiment, serving until 1990, and after the Soviet collapse chaired the Ukraine-Poland society while publishing memoirs.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1931–2007 ○ Natural causes

Crimean party administrator who helped protect Massandra

During the anti-alcohol campaign, he joined Shcherbitsky in intervening to protect Massandra and its enoteca.

Viktor Makarenko was a Soviet Ukrainian party administrator who rose from factory work to regional leadership. In Sevastopol and Crimea he coordinated industry, agriculture, and tourism while navigating tensions between central directives and local production and cultural institutions. During the 1980s anti-alcohol campaign, he joined Vladimir Shcherbitsky in protecting the Massandra winery and its enoteca. His memoir-based recollections illuminate how late Soviet regional governance could mediate, rather than simply transmit, central policy.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1932–1994 ↓ Party dissolved 1991

The last deputy general secretary before dissolution

On the morning of 21 August 1991, with the coup clearly collapsing, Ivashko telephoned Vice President Yanayev from the Central Committee building and requested a plane to see Gorbachev. Refused, he was forced to board the flight to Foros alongside the very putschists — Yazov, Lukyanov and others — whose coup he had refused to endorse.

A mining engineer and economist from Kharkiv, he spent two decades in the Ukrainian party apparatus before succeeding Shcherbitsky as First Secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party in 1989. In 1990 Gorbachev created the post of Deputy General Secretary for him, the only person ever to hold it. After the August 1991 coup, Gorbachev's resignation made Ivashko the final leader of the CPSU, but within five days the party's activity was suspended, and Soviet communism ended with him.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1936–2014 ○ Natural causes

From Kiev regional party leader to Gorbachev's last chief of staff

The day Gorbachev won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990, he called Revenko in and joked, 'Want to see a Soviet millionaire?' The two then allocated the entire million-plus dollars to children's oncology centres and Chernobyl areas. When done, Gorbachev smiled: 'Well, no more millionaire.'

Ukrainian Soviet party and state official who rose to first secretary of the Kiev Oblast Committee, the capital region's top party post, then became Gorbachev's chief of staff as head of the USSR Presidential Apparatus in the union's final months. Moving up through Komsomol and party bodies, he became first secretary of the Kiev Oblast Committee in 1985 and was elected to the CPSU Central Committee in 1986. In 1990 he joined the Presidential Council, and in August 1991 Gorbachev made him head of the Presidential Apparatus, where he managed the shift from party to presidential rule. After the dissolution he was vice president of the Gorbachev Foundation before returning to Kiev.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1936–

Organizational-Party Work deputy chief who witnessed Sumgait, and said 'we were a day late'

Gorbachev says we were three hours late: nothing of the sort. We were a day late! Because we waited a whole day for the decision to send in troops.

A railway engineer who rose through the party apparatus to become deputy head of the CPSU Central Committee Organizational-Party Work Department (1987–1988) under Gorbachev. On the night of February 28, 1988, he and KGB deputy chairman Filipp Bobkov arrived in Sumgait, where he witnessed the mutilated corpses of the pogrom and later testified that Moscow's response was 'a day late, not three hours.' He later served as First Secretary of the Zaporizhzhia obkom (1988–1990) and Second Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine and Politburo member (1990–1991), before working in Moscow as vice-president of the Russian Union of Commodity Producers after the USSR dissolved.