People of the Revolution and the USSR

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1881–1975 ○ Natural causes

Lenin's personal secretary and conduit of his final political struggle

On March 5, 1923, Lenin dictated to Fotieva his letter severing relations with Stalin, then told her to inform Kamenev he had allied with Trotsky on the Georgian question. Glyasser told Trotsky: 'Vladimir Ilyich is preparing a bomb against Stalin.'

Lenin's personal secretary (1918–1924), she took dictation of his "Letter to the Congress" (Testament) in 1922, safeguarding it for 30 years until its release in 1956. In 1923 she relayed communications between the incapacitated Lenin and Trotsky.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1882–1922 ✕ Car crash

The Bolsheviks' legendary expropriator, the revolutionary who feigned madness and survived four death sentences

Lenin described him as "a person of absolutely exceptional devotion, courage and energy." Maxim Gorky called him "an artist of the revolution."

Born Simon Ter-Petrosyan in Gori, he grew up alongside Stalin, who tutored him in Russian and drew him into Marxism. Kamo masterminded the 1907 Tiflis bank robbery, the largest revolutionary expropriation in Russian history, delivering 341,000 rubles to the Bolshevik faction. Arrested in Berlin, he feigned insanity so meticulously that the leading German psychiatrists declared him psychotic; extradited to Russia, he eventually escaped a Tiflis psychiatric ward and was received by Lenin in Paris. During the Civil War he rebuilt the Bolshevik underground in the Caucasus. Yet the destructive daring that made him a legend was ill-suited to peacetime. In 1922 he was struck by a truck while cycling through Tiflis and died hours later.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1882–1939 ✕ Executed

From proletarian poetry to the science of labour: founder of Soviet social engineering who trained half a million workers

"In the social field there must come an era of precise measurements, formulas, blueprints, control gauges, social normals. We must pose the problem of complete mathematization of psychophysiology and economics." 'Our Tasks' (1921)

Born on 8 October 1882 (O.S. 26 September) in Suzdal, Vladimir Governorate, the son of a schoolteacher. Expelled from the Moscow Teachers' Institute in 1902 for organizing a student demonstration, he became a professional revolutionary and chaired the Kostroma Soviet in 1905. Drawing on work as a metalworker in France, he founded the Central Institute of Labour (CIT) and developed 'social engineering' and the scientific organization of labour (NOT); he chaired the All-Union Committee for Standardization in 1932–1936. Arrested in September 1938 on charges of belonging to a counter-revolutionary terrorist organization, he was shot at Kommunarka on 15 April 1939 and rehabilitated in March 1956.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1882–1941 ✕ Executed

Cheka founding member who guarded Lenin personally

During the Left SR uprising of July 1918, Belenky was arrested together with Dzerzhinsky; accounts date the episode to 6 July or to August 1918.

Born in 1882 or 1883 in Sverzhen, Belarus, to a Jewish family. He joined the RSDLP in January 1902 as a Bolshevik, emigrated to France in December 1904, worked in Paris as a shoemaker and printer, and met Lenin at the Longjumeau Party School. Returning in May 1917, he managed the Central Committee press 'Trud' until December, when he was assigned to the Cheka. He headed Lenin's personal security from 1919 to 1924 and until 1928 led the special department protecting party and government leaders. From 1930 he served as OGPU-NKVD Special Plenipotentiary, but was arrested on 9 May 1938, shot at Kommunarka on 16 October 1941, and rehabilitated in 1956.

Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL) Soviet communism 1882–1968 ○ Natural causes

Polish Social Democrat who forged an independent revolutionary path from the SDKPiL underground to the Comintern

In June 1911 she gave birth to her son Jan in Warsaw's Pawiak prison and lived with him in her cell for eight months.

Born into a Polish-Jewish family in Warsaw and trained at the Warsaw Conservatory, Sofia Dzerzhinskaya joined the SDKPiL in 1904 and became a core cadre of the Polish revolutionary movement alongside Rosa Luxemburg and Leo Jogiches. Despite repeated arrests and Siberian exile, she continued underground newspaper publishing and exile organizing in Kraków, then served with the Soviet diplomatic mission in Bern (1918) before settling in Moscow. From 1939 to 1943 she handled Polish affairs on the Comintern Executive Committee, directed Radio Kościuszko broadcasting communist messages into occupied Poland during World War II, and received the Order of Lenin three times.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1883–1921 ✕ Accidental death

Founder and head of the Donetsk-Krivoy Rog Soviet Republic, close friend of Stalin and Kirov

March 1902, Moscow. Nineteen-year-old Fyodor raised a homemade red banner — 'Inviolability of the Person! Freedom of Speech! Freedom of Assembly!' — the signal launching the student demonstration. Arrest, prison, expulsion: thus 'Artyom' was born.

An Old Bolshevik from 1901, he rose from Donbas miner and railway worker to organizer of Russian immigrant workers in Australia, and in 1918 founded and led the Donetsk-Krivoy Rog Soviet Republic. A close friend of Stalin and Kirov, he chaired the All-Ukrainian Military Revolutionary Committee and CEC during the Civil War and served as Moscow Party executive secretary. He defended Soviet power against German occupiers and Denikin's White Army, dying at 38 in the 1921 aerowagon derailment. His infant son was adopted and raised by Stalin.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1883–1938 ✕ Executed

An early Bolshevik responsible secretary later put in the dock

On the first day of the Third Moscow Trial, March 1938, Krestinsky rose and declared: 'I am not a Trotskyite and was never a member of the anti-Soviet bloc.' Across all three Moscow show trials, it was the only open-court repudiation of a confession.

Born in Mogilev to a teacher's family, Krestinsky trained as a lawyer before becoming a Bolshevik revolutionary. He led the party in Yekaterinburg, joined the first Politburo, and after Sverdlov's death served as Responsible Secretary (effectively party leader) from 1919 to 1921. His support for Trotsky in the trade union debate cost him his posts. He spent nine years as Soviet plenipotentiary in Germany, the republic's most important diplomatic mission, before his arrest in the Great Purge. At the Third Moscow Trial he alone repudiated his confession in open court, the only defendant across all three show trials to do so.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1883–1947 ○ Arrested 1940, posthumously rehabilitated

Vyborg worker-Bolshevik who handed Lenin his party card

On the night of 3 April 1917 at the Finland Station, representing the Vyborg district committee, he handed Lenin, just back from exile, party membership card No. 600.

A veteran of the 1905 Sormovo barricade fighting who studied at Lenin's Longjumeau party school in 1911, Chugurin was, alongside Kayurov and Pavlov, one of the Vyborg Bolshevik nucleus that drove the February 1917 street actions from the Women's Day strikes into armed insurrection. He personally handed Lenin party card No. 600 at the Finland Station upon his return from exile, served on the Vyborg district uprising headquarters during October, and later headed the political department of the 5th Army and held posts in the Cheka presidium. Arrested on fabricated charges in 1940, he emerged from the camps ill and worked as a tinsmith until his death; he was rehabilitated posthumously.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1883–1954 ○ Gallstones

The eraser poised over party rolls for thirty years

January 1948, the musicians' summons at the Kremlin. As Zhdanov lectured, Shkiryatov ordered Prokofiev to pay attention. Prokofiev replied: "I never pay attention to people who haven't been introduced to me."

A Bolshevik since 1906, he began underground work among Moscow garment workers. From 1921, when he executed Lenin's first party verification, he spent three decades as Stalin's standing operational enforcer in the Central Control Commission and Party Control Committee, prosecuting Bukharin and Rykov, arresting the entire Chechen-Ingush leadership, and exiling Molotov's wife, rising to chairman of the Party Control Committee and CC Presidium member in 1952, only to be dropped from the Presidium a month after Stalin died.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1883–1958 ○ Esophageal cancer

Classic writer of socialist realism who pioneered the Soviet industrial novel with Cement

This is Workers' Russia; this is us; the new world of which mankind has dreamed throughout the centuries. — from Cement

Born into an Old Believer peasant family and radicalized as a teacher and underground revolutionary, Gladkov drew on his direct experience restoring the Novorossiysk cement works during the Civil War to write Cement (1925). The first Soviet industrial novel to dramatize post-revolutionary reconstruction, depicting the ruined factory as an arena of class, gender, and bureaucratic conflict, it became a canonical text of socialist realism and the prototype of the production novel.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1884–1936 ✕ Executed

Zinoviev's right hand who saved Petrograd, then vanished at Stalin's first show trial

Petrograd, 1919. Serge: 'Loud of voice, fond of the bottle, he never admitted a situation was hopeless. The city was saved mainly through Grigory Yevdokimov.'

A river sailor at 15 who joined the Bolsheviks in 1903, he helped save Petrograd from Yudenich in 1919 as political chief of the 7th Army. Victor Serge wrote: 'The city was saved mainly through Grigory Yevdokimov.' He chaired the Petrograd unions, became deputy chair of the Soviet, and in 1925 rose to First Secretary of the Leningrad party as Zinoviev's closest lieutenant and leader of the New Opposition. Stalin brought him to Moscow as CC secretary in 1926, but he joined the United Opposition, lost every post, and was expelled. Reinstated, he worked obscurely in the dairy industry until Kirov's murder triggered his arrest; he was a principal defendant at the first Moscow show trial and shot with Zinoviev and Kamenev.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1884–1937 → Died

The architect of a forbidden future

In June 1931, Zamyatin wrote directly to Stalin: "For me, as a writer, to be deprived of the opportunity to write is a death sentence." With that one line, he secured permission to leave the Soviet Union.

A Bolshevik naval engineer turned writer, he imagined a future of control and conformity in *We*. The novel became the first work banned by Soviet censorship; when life as a writer became impossible, he wrote directly to Stalin and secured permission to leave. Even in Paris exile he kept his Soviet passport and sat with the Soviet delegation at the 1935 anti-fascist writers' congress, but died outside his homeland.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1885–1918 ✕ Executed

Tatar revolutionary who led the Kazan Muslim Socialist Committee and became the first head of the Soviet Muslim Commissariat

Born in 1885 into a merchant family, in Kazan or in Kazaevo in Perm province according to different records, he took part in the 1905 revolution. After the St Petersburg Polytechnic he moved in 1912 to the law faculty of the Psychoneurological Institute, where he met Mikhail Frunze among others and organised a circle of Muslim students. After the February Revolution he led the Muslim Socialist Committee in Kazan and its newspaper Qızıl Bayraq, became a member of the Kazan Military Revolutionary Committee in October and was elected to the Constituent Assembly. In January 1918, on Lenin’s advice, he became head of the Muslim Commissariat (Muskom) and sent sailors to crush the Trans-Bulak Republic. Appointed extraordinary food commissar for the Volga in July, he was captured and executed after Komuch’s People’s Army took Kazan in August.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1885–1919 ○ Illness

The organizer who linked party and state after October

On 5 January 1918, as the Constituent Assembly prepared to convene, Sverdlov pushed aside the elderly SR deputy who rose to open proceedings and declared the meeting open himself — in the name of the Central Executive Committee, not the Assembly.

As chairman of both the Secretariat and the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, he knit together the practical machinery of early Bolshevik power. He turned Lenin's political decisions into votes, appointments and institutional operation: an unrivaled organizer who directed the October rising, dissolved the Constituent Assembly, steered the first Soviet constitution, launched the Comintern, and was decisive in ratifying Brest-Litovsk. More than twelve years of prison and exile forged the party network and field instinct that became his weapons. When he died of Spanish flu at 34, Lenin wrote 'the pillar upon which the entire party stood has collapsed'; his absence is widely seen as enabling Stalin's concentration of power.