People of the Revolution and the USSR

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1894–1938 ✕ Executed

Regional party boss of collectivization and the Great Terror who heard Stalin ask why there were so many spies on his watch

In September 1937, after Vareikis reported to Stalin that 500 spies had been identified and shot among Far Eastern railway workers alone, Stalin asked: 'Comrade Vareikis, why is it that there are so many spies in your area of work?'

Born into a Lithuanian working-class family, he worked as a lathe operator in Moscow factories and joined the Bolsheviks in 1913. During the Civil War he commanded the defense of Simbirsk and helped suppress the Left SR uprising. After heading the Central Committee press department, he served as First Secretary of the Central Black Earth, Voronezh, Stalingrad, and Far Eastern Territories in succession. During collectivization he personally directed the suppression of the Ostrogozhsk uprising and presided over troikas that convicted tens of thousands. In 1937, from his Far Eastern post, he oversaw the deportation of 170,000 Koreans to Central Asia and reported to Stalin that 500 spies had been uncovered among railway workers alone, only to be arrested that October and shot in 1938. Rehabilitated in 1956.

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 1895–1926 ○ Typhoid

The revolution's Valkyrie. Poet, scout, and the first woman commissar of the Naval General Staff

Disguised as a peasant woman, she infiltrated White-held Kazan — was arrested by a Japanese intelligence officer, then slipped through a door and vanished. —Trotsky, My Life

Emerging from the Silver Age circles of Petersburg, she became the Bolsheviks' most distinctive literary witness, transforming from an Acmeist poet into a pioneer of revolutionary documentary writing built on first-hand immersion in the events she recorded. As the first woman commissar of the Naval General Staff, a Comintern agent during the 1923 Hamburg uprising, and a member of the Soviet diplomatic mission to Afghanistan, she turned every assignment into literature. She died of typhoid in 1926 at thirty, having burned through a lifetime of action in a single decade.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1895–1937 ✕ Executed

Party master of the Azov-Black Sea krai, brought down on the eve of the Great Terror

At the 1934 Seventeenth Party Congress he went to Kirov and relayed the 'old men's' wish to act on Lenin's testament, moving Stalin to another post and making Kirov general secretary.

An Old Bolshevik who joined the party in 1914, he ran collectivization and grain requisitioning as first secretary of the Lower Volga and then the North Caucasus krai, where the 'blacklist' repressions of the Kuban in 1932 bear his name. First secretary of the Azov-Black Sea krai from 1934, he was encircled when Yevdokimov arrived in late 1936 to purge the 'Sheboldaev clan', with Lyushkov running the regional NKVD. Demoted to Kursk after the February-March 1937 plenum, he was arrested that June and shot in October.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1895–1971 ○ Natural causes

The organization man who sat in the Politburo for 20 years, the CC secretary most often dispatched to purge the regions

On the night of 3 April 1917, at the Finland Station welcome for Lenin's return, he sat three or four steps away and recalled the moment in his memoirs: "How many times we underground Bolsheviks had dreamed of seeing and hearing Lenin — and now at last our dream had come true."

Born to a peasant family in Kuznetsovo, Smolensk Governorate, he had two years of rural schooling and went to Moscow in 1908 at age 13, working as a tavern dishwasher. He encountered Marxism at workers' courses, joined Social-Democratic circles in 1911–1912, moved to St Petersburg in 1914 and joined the Bolsheviks. He took part in the October Revolution and the 2nd Congress of Soviets, and as CC secretary he effectively ran the Orgburo and was dispatched to purge regional party organizations during the Great Terror. He sat in the top leadership for 20 years as a full Politburo member (1932–1952). A USSR Supreme Soviet deputy in 1937–1962, from 1962 he was adviser to the Supreme Soviet Presidium. He died in Moscow on 5 December 1971 and is buried at Novodevichy Cemetery.

Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) Soviet communism 1896–1917 ✕ Murdered

The 21-year-old commissar who brought Kronstadt sailors to the revolution

Freed from Kresty Prison on the day of the October Revolution, he went straight to the front as political commissar of the combined sailor-soldier detachment blocking the Kerensky-Krasnov advance on Petrograd.

The young Bolshevik who led Kronstadt and brought the Baltic Fleet sailors to the revolution. Freed from Kresty Prison during the October Revolution, he helped repel Kerensky's counter-offensive, then was sent to the Romanian Front where a clandestine officers' group murdered him.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1896–1940 ✕ Suicide

The Saint-Just of the avant-garde, theorist of production art

«Only by jumping out of art will you understand it» — in the final note to his 1924 book on Nathan Altman, Arvatov distilled into a single sentence his methodological leap from formal analysis to social fact.

A Proletkult theorist and co-founder of LEF, he championed 'production art' — merging art with industry — and laid the foundation for Constructivist aesthetics. A frontline concussion forced him to stop writing by the late 1920s; he took his own life in 1940.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1896–1966 ○ Diabetes

Bolshevik mathematician who resurrected mathematical logic in the Soviet Union

When the Whites tried to execute her, the bullets struck only her tall hat because she was so small; she fell from the bridge into the river and hid among the reeds until nightfall.

A Bolshevik revolutionary turned Soviet mathematician and philosopher, she was the founder who revived and institutionalized mathematical logic as an autonomous discipline in the Soviet Union. She survived a White Army execution squad during the Civil War, and in 1933 she discovered and published Marx's 'Mathematical Manuscripts,' laying the foundation for Marxist mathematical research worldwide. Once an orthodox Marxist-Leninist who attacked 'idealist' mathematics in the 1930s, she later reversed course and resurrected mathematical logic at Moscow State University during the Stalin era when it was suppressed; she is also known for persuading Wittgenstein to abandon his plan to emigrate to the Soviet Union in 1935.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1897–1939 ✕ Executed

The worker-Bolshevik who built the Komsomol's mass base and made 'study' its watchword

At the Fifth Komsomol Congress in 1922, when a delegate proposed that Smorodin be promoted nationwide as "the leader of working youth," he shot back from the podium: "What the hell are you making an icon out of me for?"

Born into a peasant family, he became an apprentice at a surgical instruments factory in Petrograd at fourteen, joined the Bolsheviks in May 1917, and took part in the October armed uprising. He led the creation of the Petrograd Socialist Union of Working Youth (SSRM) and served as First Secretary of the Komsomol Central Committee from 1921 to 1924, consolidating the youth organization's mass base during the NEP and making 'study' its central task. He later served as a regional party secretary in Leningrad and Stalingrad and participated in the Great Purge as an NKVD troika member, but was himself arrested as an 'enemy of the people' in 1938, shot in 1939, and posthumously rehabilitated in 1954.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1898–1940 ✕ Executed

A leading voice of Soviet journalism whom Hemingway immortalized as Karkov

Hemingway remembered the Pravda correspondent this way: "the most intelligent man he had ever met... he looked comic, but he had more brains and more inner dignity and outer insolence and humour than anybody he had ever known."

Journalist and publicist who ran Ogonyok, Krokodil and other major Soviet periodicals and headed the Writers' Union foreign commission. Born in Kiev, he took part in the 1917 Revolution and the Civil War and joined the Bolshevik Party in 1918. Sent to the Spanish Civil War as a Pravda correspondent, he wrote Spanish Diary (1938). Arrested in 1938, shot in Lefortovo prison in 1940 and rehabilitated in 1954.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1899–1951 ○ Illness

The engineer who wrote utopia's ruins

In October 1932, at Gorky's house on Malaya Nikitskaya, Stalin told Soviet writers they were "engineers of human souls" and there asked after the writer he had destroyed a year earlier.

An engineer and land-reclamation specialist who turned to fiction, he was a writer whose prose gave Soviet literature an unmistakable voice. His real surname was Klimentov; "Platonov" was a pen name taken from his father's name, Platon. Written between 1926 and 1930, *Chevengur* and *The Foundation Pit* treated collectivization and Stalinist policy with a skepticism that kept them out of print for decades. He died of tuberculosis in Moscow on 5 January 1951; his last publications were collections of retold Russian folk tales.