People of the Revolution and the USSR

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1888–1938 ✕ Executed

Ukrainian Soviet state-builder and scholar-politician, revolutionary bureaucrat across education, party, and control

As counting commission chair at the 17th Party Congress in 1934, he reported to Kaganovich that many ballots were cast against Stalin; according to his son Dmytro's testimony, he regarded this as signing his own death sentence.

A founding-generation Bolshevik Ukrainian statesman who helped create the CP(B)U and served as Chairman of the All-Ukrainian Central Executive Committee. He led the delegation of the Ukrainian People's Republic of Soviets at the Brest-Litovsk peace talks and signed the treaty establishing the USSR. Twice People's Commissar of Education (1922–1924, 1933–1938), he succeeded Mykola Skrypnyk in 1933 and implemented the rollback of Ukrainization. As the first editor-in-chief of the Ukrainian Soviet Encyclopedia and a full member of the Academy of Sciences, he helped build Soviet Ukraine's scholarly infrastructure. He also served as CC Secretary of the CP(B)U and head of Workers' and Peasants' Inspection. Arrested in a cinema with his family in November 1937, he was sentenced after a 20-minute trial to a term meaning death and shot the same day; rehabilitated in 1956.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1890–1946 ✕ Murdered

Pioneer of Ukrainian national communism, the original 'Shumskyism'

In April 1926, Shumsky met Stalin privately in Moscow for over two hours, demanding Kaganovich's replacement by Ukrainian Vlas Chubar and accelerated Ukrainization. Stalin's resulting Politburo letter condemned 'Shumskyism' as nationalist deviation — a watershed in the suppression of Ukrainian national communism.

A symbol of Ukrainian national communism and the prototype of 'Shumskyism': the demand for substantive republican autonomy against Moscow's centralism. A Borotbist who rose to the CP(b)U Politburo, he drove the de-Russification of Ukraine's cities and proletariat and the promotion of Ukrainian cadres as People's Commissar of Education (1924–1927). His 1926 confrontation with Stalin led to his condemnation for 'nationalist deviation' and removal from all posts; his name became shorthand for the suppression of Ukrainian autonomy within the Soviet system. Arrested in 1933, he endured the Solovki camps and Krasnoyarsk exile before the NKVD murdered him upon release in 1946; rehabilitated in 1958.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1891–1918 ✕ Assassinated

Petrograd's press commissar whose assassination helped trigger the Red Terror

“Comrades, do you think I am looking at my watch? No — I am looking at the clock of humanity, the clock of the world revolution.”

Petrograd's Commissar for Press and Propaganda and a magnetic crowd orator who built the Bolshevik censorship apparatus and founded Krasnaya Gazeta. Shot dead by an SR militant on 20 June 1918, his assassination, alongside Uritsky's murder and the attempt on Lenin, became the spark for the full-scale Red Terror.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1894–1985 ○ Natural causes

The literary commissar who coined 'socialist realism' with Stalin

Gronsky defined socialist realism as "Rembrandt, Rubens and Repin put at the service of the working class."

A journalist and Party functionary who began as a revolutionary under the Tsar and became one of the architects of Soviet literary control. As editor-in-chief of Izvestia (1928–1934), the USSR's second newspaper, he coined the term 'socialist realism' in a May 1932 conversation with Stalin: a phrase that became the official doctrine of all Soviet arts. That same year he was appointed chairman of the Organizing Committee of the Union of Soviet Writers, co-founded the Literary Institute with Maxim Gorky, and as editor of Novy Mir served as Stalin's direct intermediary with the literary world during the critical period when the new orthodoxy was formulated and enforced. Arrested in 1938, he spent sixteen years in camps and exile, and after rehabilitation in 1954 remained a committed communist to the end of his life.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1896–1938 ✕ Executed

Propaganda chief who moved from Bukharin's 'red professor' circle to Stalin's side

At the First Congress of Soviet Writers in August 1934: "The fact that we have free creative competition in literature does not by any means mean that we have no line. Our line is that of socialist realism." The congress ran 17 August to 1 September 1934.

Born in Borovshchina, Smolensk province, he joined the RSDLP(b) in 1915 while studying at the Petrograd Polytechnic Institute, and in 1921-1923 studied at the Institute of Red Professors as part of Bukharin's circle of 'red professors'. He edited Komsomolskaya Pravda in 1925, headed the press department of the CC's North-Western Bureau and the Leningrad provincial committee in 1926-1930, and opposed forced grain procurement in 1928 before going over to Stalin. From 1930 he headed the CC Department of Culture and Propaganda and de facto ran the Writers' Union organizing committee; at the First Congress of Soviet Writers in August 1934 he set socialist realism as the official line. He headed the Party Propaganda and Agitation Department from 1935, edited Bolshevik from 1934, and sat on the CC Orgburo. Arrested in April 1938 and shot on 1 August 1938, he was rehabilitated in 1956.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1896–1948 ○ Natural causes (disputed)

The ideology manager whose name marked Stalinist culture

In September 1947, at the founding conference of the Cominform, he declared that world political forces had divided into 'two major camps: the imperialist and anti-democratic camp, and the anti-imperialist and democratic camp', codifying the USSR's official Cold War worldview.

Stalin's close ally, Zhdanov became Leningrad party first secretary in 1934 and, as a Politburo member during the Great Terror, personally approved 176 documented execution lists; a 1989 CPSU Central Committee resolution named him one of the organizers of the mass repressions of the 1930s-40s. Emerging after the war as the party's de facto second-in-command, he drove the Zhdanovshchina campaigns against literature, music and philosophy from 1946, organized the Cominform in 1947 and codified the 'two camps' worldview. He lost Stalin's favour in June 1948 and died on 31 August 1948.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1898–1979 ○ Natural causes

The historian who wrote Stalin's biography, then dismantled his myth

At Stalin's funeral in 1953, Pospelov sobbed uncontrollably until Beria shook him, shouting "What's the matter with you? Cut it out!" Just three years later, that same Pospelov wrote the report that became the foundation of Khrushchev's Secret Speech.

Party historian who co-authored Stalin's official biography and edited Pravda for nine years, then chaired the commission whose report on mass repressions became the foundation of Khrushchev's 1956 Secret Speech.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1899–1968 ○ Natural causes

Stalinist philosopher-diplomat who built orthodoxy, then incubated the foundations of Soviet cultural history

"Yudin and Mitin don't exactly catch stars from the sky, but they know the technique of the job well." — Stalin, assessing his chief philosophers

A philosopher who purged the Deborin school with the 'letter of three' (1930). Edited Mao's Selected Works and served as Soviet ambassador to China, witnessing the Sino-Soviet rift. In his later years sheltered unorthodox cultural historians, laying foundations for Soviet cultural history.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1901–1932 ✕ Suicide

A Bolshevik woman who worked in Lenin's secretariat, married Stalin, and pursued her own political independence

At Voroshilov's dinner on the night of November 8, 1932, Stalin threw an orange peel at her and shouted 'Hey!'; Alliluyeva shot back 'I am not your "Hey"!' and walked out — hours later she was dead by her own hand.

The youngest daughter of an Old Bolshevik family — her father Sergei Alliluyev hid Lenin during the July Days of 1917, her godfather was Avel Yenukidze — she joined the party in 1918, worked in Lenin's secretariat under Lydia Fotieva, then in the Department of Agitation and Propaganda. In 1929 she entered the Industrial Academy to study synthetic fibre engineering, becoming a party-cell colleague of Nikita Khrushchev. Her marriage to Stalin placed her at the center of Kremlin power, but the tension between her aspiration to be an independent political actor and the role of a leader's wife defined her short life, which ended by her own hand in 1932 at age 31.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1901–1945 ○ Heart attack

Stalin's wartime propaganda chief and Moscow party boss, whose death became a spark for the Doctors' Plot

On 17 October 1941, with German troops 20 km from Moscow and the city gripped by panic, Shcherbakov took to the radio: "We shall fight for Moscow tenaciously, fiercely, to the last drop of blood", restoring order with his own voice.

One of Stalin's key wartime lieutenants, Shcherbakov served as Moscow First Secretary from 1938 and from 1941 as CC secretary and Sovinformburo chief, directing foreign propaganda and domestic press. From 1942 he also headed the Red Army's Main Political Directorate, responsible for political education across the armed forces. He had helped found the Union of Soviet Writers in 1934 and, after Gorky's death, shaped it into an instrument of party literary policy. As Moscow boss he organized wartime air defence, evacuation and munitions. He died of a heart attack at 43, days after victory; his sudden death became a spark for the Doctors' Plot.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1901–1984 ○ Natural death

Head of SMAD’s Propaganda Administration who drove the founding of the SED and the Sovietisation of eastern Germany

An economist trained in Leningrad, he joined the Communist Party in 1927. He went into hiding during the Great Terror, and his parents were repressed. In the war he headed the 7th department of several fronts’ political administrations. From October 1945 to September 1949 he headed the Propaganda (later Information) Administration of the Soviet Military Administration in Germany; fluent in German, he strongly backed Walter Ulbricht. He pushed the 1946 merger of the KPD and SPD and from 1948 the development of a separate state on Soviet lines. He fell from favour as it became clear that Stalin did not support his and Ulbricht’s plans for rapid socialisation, and in 1949, after accusations from counter-intelligence, he was recalled. He later taught economics at Leningrad University.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1901–1987 ○ Natural causes

Stalin-era chief philosophical authority who installed dialectical materialism as state doctrine

"The absolute, overwhelming majority of Menshevizing-idealism cadres turned out to be enemies, traitors — exposed and arrested by the NKVD." — justifying the mass arrest of fellow philosophers at the Institute of Philosophy, May 1937

The philosopher who installed Stalinist orthodoxy in Soviet philosophy by overthrowing the Deborin school as 'Menshevizing idealism.' For three decades he enforced party control as editor of Under the Banner of Marxism and director of the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute, before a plagiarism scandal drove him from his last post.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1901–1991 ○ Natural causes

Chief editor of the 5-volume Philosophical Encyclopedia and architect of the standard Soviet Marxist-Leninist philosophy textbook

"Is he writing about them — or about us?!" — his handwritten comment on Yu. A. Levada's entry on 'fascism' for the Philosophical Encyclopedia

Ideological official who guarded Soviet philosophical orthodoxy during the Thaw. As chief editor of the 5-volume Philosophical Encyclopedia he set the boundaries of Marxism-Leninism; remembered by colleagues as an unwavering Stalinist.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1902–1982 ○ Natural causes

The Kremlin's Grey Cardinal

Whenever Suslov was away, Kirilenko chaired the Secretariat in his place. On returning, Suslov would cancel wholesale all the decisions taken without him. (Alexander Yakovlev)

Russian and Soviet party and state figure who rose from a poor peasant family in Shakhovskoye, Saratov province, and joined the party in 1921, already influential under Stalin. He served as a Central Committee secretary from May 1947 until his death, edited Pravda in 1949-1950, and from 1965 was Second Secretary of the CPSU, the party's second-ranking figure under General Secretary Brezhnev. Overseeing ideology, propaganda, culture, censorship and education, he was known as the 'grey cardinal' and took part in the decisions to intervene in Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Afghanistan in 1979. He died in Moscow in 1982 and was buried at the Kremlin Wall Necropolis.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1903–1978 ○ Natural causes

Composer who fused Armenian folk melody with the Soviet symphony

“I wrote around 700 pages of the Gayane score in half a year, in a cold Perm hotel room with only a piano, stool, table and bed. Gayane is the only ballet on a Soviet theme that hasn't left the stage for a quarter of a century.”

Aram Khachaturian was a Soviet Armenian composer and conductor, ranked with Shostakovich and Prokofiev among the leading Soviet composers. Raised in multi-ethnic Tbilisi, he moved to Moscow at 19 and studied under Myaskovsky at the Moscow Conservatory. His Piano Concerto, Violin Concerto, and the 'Sabre Dance' from Gayane brought international fame; Spartacus won the Lenin Prize. Denounced as a formalist in 1948, he was rehabilitated and served as Secretary of the Union of Soviet Composers from 1957 until his death. His fusion of Armenian folk melody and Caucasian rhythms with the Russian classical tradition became a model of Soviet multinational cultural policy.