People of the Revolution and the USSR

Kronstadt Provisional Revolutionary Committee Left critics of Bolshevism 1892–1947 ✕ Died in prison

The sailor who led the Kronstadt rebellion, became a Soviet spy, and died in a camp

March 1921, Kronstadt. The newspaper of Petrichenko's Provisional Revolutionary Committee declared: 'Here in Kronstadt has been laid the first stone of the third revolution, striking the last fetters from the laboring masses and opening a broad new road.'

Stepan Petrichenko was a senior clerk aboard the Baltic Fleet battleship Petropavlovsk who proclaimed the 'Soviet Republic of Soldiers and Fortress-Builders of Naissaar' on an Estonian island in December 1917, serving as its chairman. In March 1921, he emerged as leader of the Kronstadt rebellion, chairing the Provisional Revolutionary Committee and demanding an end to 'the dictatorship of the Communists', the most dramatic internal challenge to Bolshevik rule. After the rebellion was crushed by Trotsky's forces, Petrichenko fled to Finland and, in 1922, was recruited by Soviet intelligence, serving as a secret agent for over 20 years. Arrested and extradited to the USSR in 1945, he was sentenced to 10 years for 'counter-revolutionary terrorist organization' and died during a prison transfer in 1947.

Soviet Union Left critics of Bolshevism 1900–1929 ✕ Executed

Left SR assassin of Mirbach turned OGPU illegal resident, executed for meeting Trotsky

"A man who, amid the crowd, shot the imperial ambassador / Came up to shake my hand / And thank me for my poems." — Nikolai Gumilyov, 'My Readers'

A Jewish revolutionary from Odessa. As a Left SR inside the Cheka, he led the 1918 assassination of German ambassador Mirbach, sparking the Left SR uprising. Amnestied, he became one of the OGPU Foreign Department's first illegal residents, building agent networks in Persia, Palestine, Mongolia, and the Middle East under commercial cover. A flamboyant figure in Moscow literary circles who befriended Mayakovsky and Yesenin, he was arrested and shot in 1929 after secretly meeting Trotsky in Constantinople and agreeing to carry opposition letters into the USSR.