People of the Revolution and the USSR

Constitutional Democratic Party (Kadets) Imperial establishment and White movement 1850–1910 ○ Heart failure

The Roman law scholar and Kadet leader who chaired Russia's first constitutional parliament

On 27 April 1906, opening the First Duma: "I bow to the State Duma. A great deed is being accomplished; the will of the people receives its expression in a legislative body founded on immutable laws."

Sergei Muromtsev, a Roman law scholar and founding leader of the Kadet Party, was the face of Russian constitutionalism. As a Moscow University professor, he pioneered the sociological study of law and chaired the Moscow Juridical Society. In 1906 he was elected chairman of the First State Duma (426 of 436 votes), leading Russia's first constitutional representative body; after its dissolution he was jailed for signing the Vyborg Appeal. His 1910 funeral became the largest opposition demonstration since 1905, enshrining him as a legend of Russia's constitutional history.

Constitutional Democratic Party (Kadets) Imperial establishment and White movement 1854–1933 ○ Died

Kadet orator who branded the gallows 'Stolypin's necktie'

What Mr. Purishkevich calls the Muravyov collar, his descendants will perhaps call the Stolypin necktie…

A Russian liberal politician who began as a progressive zemstvo activist in Tver province, helped found the Constitutional Democratic (Kadet) Party, and served in all four State Dumas. One of the Duma's finest orators, on 17 November 1907 he denounced Stolypin's field courts-martial from the rostrum as 'Stolypin's necktie,' a phrase that became emblematic of the repression; an enraged Stolypin challenged him to a duel, and Rodichev had to apologize. After the February Revolution he served as the Provisional Government's Commissar for Finnish Affairs, opposed the October Revolution by joining the White camp, and died in exile in Lausanne.

Constitutional Democratic Party (Kadets) Imperial establishment and White movement 1859–1943 ○ Natural causes

Leader of the Kadets: 'Stupidity or Treason?'

At the Duma tribune in November 1916, he listed the government's failures one by one and after each asked the same refrain — and the chamber roared back: "Treason!"

Historian and leader of the Constitutional Democratic Party (Kadets). His 1916 'Stupidity or Treason?' speech shook the Tsarist regime, and as Foreign Minister he triggered the April Crisis of 1917. In exile he edited a newspaper in Paris; during the Nazi-Soviet war he backed the USSR.

Union of 17 October (Octobrists) Imperial establishment and White movement 1862–1936 ○ Died

Octobrist leader who received the Tsar's abdication: Boer War volunteer turned Provisional Government minister

On 2 March 1917, Guchkov boarded the imperial train at Pskov with Shulgin and received the act of abdication from Nicholas II. Three centuries of Romanov rule ended in that carriage.

Alexander Guchkov led the Union of 17 October (Octobrists), championing constitutional monarchy and Stolypin's reforms as a conservative liberal. As Chairman of the Third Duma, he denounced Rasputin and the court, becoming an enemy of Nicholas II. On 2 March 1917 he and Vasily Shulgin received the Tsar's abdication at Pskov; he became War Minister but resigned during the April Crisis. He later backed Kornilov and the White movement. A Boer War volunteer, Tibet traveler, and serial duellist, he died in Paris in 1936.

Russian Empire Imperial establishment and White movement 1864–1930 ○ Natural causes

The Kadet minister named special plenipotentiary to save Petrograd on the day of the October Revolution

At 4 pm on 25 October, the cabinet granted Kishkin plenipotentiary authority over all military and civil authorities in the capital. He at once dismissed Colonel Polkovnikov "for inaction" and appointed General Bagratuni commander of the Petrograd Military District.

A Moscow physician who rose to the Central Committee of the left-Kadet faction and served as deputy chief representative of the All-Russian Union of Cities during World War I. After the February Revolution he became commissar of the Provisional Government in Moscow, and in September 1917 joined its last cabinet as Minister of Public Charities. On the afternoon of 25 October he was granted special plenipotentiary powers to restore order in Petrograd, and immediately dismissed Colonel Polkovnikov as district commander, appointing General Bagratuni in his place; that night he was arrested with the rest of the cabinet in the Winter Palace by Antonov-Ovseenko. After the Civil War he returned to medicine, co-founded the All-Russian Famine Relief Committee with Prokopovich and Kuskova in 1921, and suffered repeated arrests and exile before his death in 1930.

Russian Empire Imperial establishment and White movement 1869–1916 ✕ Murdered

The Siberian “holy man” who reached the imperial bedchamber

November 1, 1905. Nicholas II wrote in his diary: "At 4 o'clock we went to Sergiyevka. We drank tea with Militsa and Stana. We made the acquaintance of a man of God — Grigori from Tobolsk province."

A Siberian peasant mystic. His ability to calm the heir's haemophilia won the Empress's absolute trust, and during the war he swayed ministerial appointments. Murdered in December 1916 by aristocrats hoping to save the monarchy. The dynasty collapsed two months later.

Imperial establishment and White movement 1870–1920 ○ Typhus

The far-right monarchist who hurled water glasses in the Duma and shot Rasputin

In his November 19, 1916 Duma speech: "While Rasputin is alive, we cannot win." Prince Felix Yusupov approached him immediately afterwards and proposed the assassination conspiracy.

The leading far-right monarchist politician of late Imperial Russia, who co-founded the Black Hundreds and the Union of the Archangel Michael. As a deputy to the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th State Dumas, he was notorious for antisemitic, anti-parliamentary speeches and physical antics on the chamber floor. In December 1916, convinced that eliminating the court's 'dark forces' would save the monarchy, he joined the Rasputin conspiracy and personally fired his pistol at the fleeing starets. After the revolution he led an underground anti-Bolshevik organization, was arrested and amnestied, and died of typhus in Novorossiysk while serving the White movement.

Constitutional Democratic Party (Kadets) Imperial establishment and White movement 1870–1944 ○ Died

From Marxism through liberalism to conservative anti-Bolshevism: the thinker who traced the arc of a Russian intelligentsia

Vasily Shulgin recalled asking him: “So you too should have been crushed?” Struve, trembling his white beard, rose and shouted: “Yes! Me first! The moment a revolutionary raises his head — whack! — a rifle butt to the skull!”

A thinker who moved from legal Marxism through liberal activism, co-founding the Union of Liberation and contributing to Vekhi (1909), to becoming a White ideologue. He wrote the first RSDLP Manifesto (1898) and sustained anti-Bolshevik scholarship in emigration.

Constitutional Democratic Party (Kadets) Imperial establishment and White movement 1875–1949 ○ Natural causes

The capitalist who gave his workers a nine-hour day and built the Progressive Bloc to challenge the autocracy

On 16 May 1917, addressing the congress of military-industrial committees, he warned: "Anti-state tendencies, masking their true essence under a slogan hypnotizing the masses, are leading Russia in giant strides toward catastrophe."

One of Russia's largest textile magnates, he was a pioneering industrialist who introduced a nine-hour working day, worker housing, schools, and hospitals as early as 1900. As founder of the Progressist Party and Deputy Chairman of the Fourth Duma, he organized the Progressive Bloc during World War I, making himself the parliamentary opposition's central figure against the tsarist autocracy. After the February Revolution he served twice as Minister of Trade and Industry in the Provisional Government and, as Kerensky's deputy premier, chaired the cabinet meeting that was arrested at the Winter Palace on the day of the October Revolution. He spent his later decades in French emigration as chairman of Milyukov's newspaper Последние новости and a leading voice of left-liberal émigré politics.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Imperial establishment and White movement 1876–1918 ✕ Executed

Bolshevik Central Committee member and Duma leader who was the Okhrana's best-paid spy

At a Bolshevik fundraising ball in February 1913, Stalin — wearing a suit and silk cravat lent by Malinovsky — was arrested while Malinovsky was talking to him; Malinovsky shouted he would free him.

A Polish-born labour organiser who rose to the Bolshevik Central Committee and leadership of the party's Duma faction (1912), Malinovsky was simultaneously the Okhrana's highest-paid secret agent, codenamed 'Portnoi' (the Tailor). Having won Lenin's deep trust, he penetrated the party leadership and enabled the arrests of Ordzhonikidze, Sverdlov, and Stalin, while deepening the Bolshevik-Menshevik split on police instructions. Forced to resign in 1914, he returned to Soviet Russia in 1918, was convicted by the Supreme Tribunal, and executed by firing squad in the Kremlin. His exposure deepened the culture of conspiratorial mistrust within the Bolsheviks, contributing to the paranoid logic that later fuelled the Great Terror.

Russian Empire Imperial establishment and White movement 1878–1976 ○ Natural causes

The Duma monarchist who took the tsar's abdication and became an ideologue of the White movement

At the tsar's train in Pskov, Shulgin — unwashed and unshaven for four days — appeared before Nicholas II in a dirty jacket. A member of the suite told him: 'We will not forget this little jacket of yours.'

Vasily Shulgin was a leading conservative politician in the late Russian Empire, a deputy in the II, III, and IV State Dumas and editor of Kievlyanin, who championed Russian nationalism and constitutional monarchy. In March 1917 he traveled to Pskov with Alexander Guchkov and personally received Nicholas II's abdication, but could not avert the revolutionary catastrophe. During the Civil War he served as an ideologue of the White movement, then emigrated to Yugoslavia; in 1944 he was arrested by Soviet forces and spent 12 years in Vladimir Central Prison. Amnestied in 1956, he remained in the USSR, wrote memoirs, and appeared in the 1965 documentary The Verdict of History, a living witness to the old order who was defeated but never submitted.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Imperial establishment and White movement 1879–1967 ○ Natural causes

A polemicist who turned from revolutionary internationalism to wartime patriotism

In July 1917, he placed the material alleging Lenin was a German agent in Zhivoe Slovo.

Grigory Alexinsky rose as a Bolshevik activist and Second Duma deputy during the 1905 revolutionary period, but the pressures of war and revolution drove him sharply toward social patriotism. In 1917 he joined Plekhanov’s Yedinstvo group, attacked the Bolsheviks, and helped place Ensign Yermolenko’s inadequate testimony into the public claim that Lenin was a German agent. The exposure strengthened anti-Bolshevik politics among soldiers and in the soviets, while revealing the path by which a revolutionary became an émigré opponent of Bolshevism.

Soviet Union Imperial establishment and White movement 1901–1946 ✕ Executed

Hero of the Battle of Moscow who defected to lead the Nazi-backed Russian Liberation Army

June 1942: with his 2nd Shock Army encircled, Vlasov was offered escape by plane. He refused, hid in German-occupied territory with his men, and was betrayed by a local farmer ten days later.

Andrey Vlasov was a Red Army lieutenant general hailed as a "defender of Moscow" for leading the 20th Army in the capital's defense, who after his capture in the 1942 Lyuban operation defected to Nazi Germany. As leader of the Russian Liberation Army (ROA) and the Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia (KONR), he advanced an anti-Stalinist program for a democratic Russia, codified in the 1944 Prague Manifesto with its pledges of national self-determination and basic freedoms. The Nazis used him chiefly as a propaganda weapon, but in the war's final days the ROA's 1st Division joined the Prague uprising against the Germans. Captured by Soviet forces after the war, he was hanged for treason following a secret trial; his legacy remains fiercely contested in Russian historiography and memory politics.