People of the Revolution and the USSR

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1868–1944 ○ Natural causes

Co-founder of Istpart, who laid the institutional foundations of Party historiography

Once I visited him at home. He was then living in the Government Building by the Stone Bridge, now Serafimovich Street. I remember that in his study, right by his desk, millet was scattered on the floor and little chicks were pecking at it. In reply to my startled look he said: 'It's pleasant to see young life.' — From the memoirs of Boris Urlanis

Born the son of a village priest, he studied at St. Petersburg University before joining the revolutionary movement. He shared Siberian exile with Lenin in 1897 and later served as an agent for Iskra. After October he led school reform at the People's Commissariat of Enlightenment, and in 1921 he became one of the founders of Istpart, the commission that institutionalised the study of Party history. In his later years he directed the Historical Museum and the Museum of the Revolution, and he is remembered for his vivid memoir At the Turning Point, which chronicles Lenin's years in exile.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1874–1935 ○ Natural causes

Iskra agent across three revolutions, KOMZET chairman who shaped Soviet nationality policy and the Birobidzhan Jewish experiment

On December 30, 1922, he declared open the First All-Union Congress of Soviets — the moment that formalized the birth of the USSR.

An Old Bolshevik who joined the RSDLP in 1898. Born into Polish nobility, he was expelled from Moscow University, studied electrical engineering in Paris, and worked in Belgian factories as a member of the Belgian Workers' Party. An Iskra agent through all three Russian revolutions, he served on the Moscow Military Revolutionary Committee during October 1917 and chaired the Moscow Soviet. As KOMZET chairman he advanced the Birobidzhan Jewish Autonomous Oblast experiment, and as chairman of the Committee of the North he designed administrative and economic policy for northern indigenous peoples. His ashes are interred in the Kremlin Wall.

Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) Soviet communism 1876–1947 ○ Natural causes

The 'Demon' Underground and the Only Woman Vice-Chair of Sovnarkom

In the Bolshevik underground she took the codename 'Demon' (Демон) — by one account, from Lermontov's poem used as a cipher book. The name stuck for life as an emblem of her fierce revolutionary persona.

An Iskra agent and Bolshevik organiser co-opted to the Central Committee in 1903, she helped lead the 1905 and 1917 Moscow uprisings. During the Civil War she served as political commissar of the 8th and 13th Armies and became the first woman awarded the Order of the Red Banner. Her role organising the Red Terror as Crimean party secretary in 1920–21 remains fiercely debated. In 1939 she became Deputy Chair of Sovnarkom (the only woman to hold that post) and was one of the very few Old Bolshevik women to survive the Stalin-era purges, dying in 1947.

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.

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 1887–1937 Died in custody

Worker-poet known as Tsishka Hartny who headed the first Soviet government of Byelorussia

Born into a peasant family in Kapyl in 1887, he worked as a tanner, joined the Hramada in 1904 and wrote for Nasha Niva. From 1913 he worked in Petrograd factories and wrote poetry under the pen name Tsishka Hartny. In 1918, as secretary of the Belarusian National Commissariat, he campaigned for a Belarusian republic against Vilgelm Knorin and Alexander Myasnikov and won the support of Lenin and Stalin. From 1 January to 3 February 1919 he headed the Provisional Workers’ and Peasants’ Government of the Socialist Soviet Republic of Byelorussia. He later ran publishing and cultural institutions and became an academician, but was expelled from the party in 1931, arrested in 1936 and died in 1937 in a psychiatric hospital in Mogilev; some accounts say he took his own life.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1889–1938 ✕ Executed

Bolshevik who built the Soviet Air Force and ran foreign trade

After the Arcos raid of 12 May 1927 in London, Rozengolts submitted a seven-page protest memorandum denying military espionage, but on 24 May Prime Minister Baldwin disclosed the seized documents to Parliament, and on 25 May Britain severed diplomatic relations and expelled him.

A Bolshevik from 1905, when he joined at 16, he became a Civil War political commissar, helped take Kazan and served against Kolchak. He headed the Soviet Air Force from 1922 to 1924, then spent 1925–1927 in London as chargé d'affaires through the Arcos raid and the break in Anglo-Soviet relations. Returning home, he broke with the opposition and joined the Stalinist apparatus. People's Commissar of Foreign Trade from 1930 to 1937, he was dismissed, arrested, sentenced to death in the 1938 Trial of the Twenty-One and shot.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1889–1941 ✕ Executed

The deputy commissar who ran the Soviet police

Dismissed from the OGPU in 1931 for protesting Yagoda's "Vesna" frame-up, he returned under Yezhov to organize the troikas of the Great Terror.

A Cheka veteran, he became chief of the Soviet militia in 1934 and Yezhov's deputy at the NKVD in 1936, where he organized the regional troikas that issued mass death sentences during the Great Terror. Arrested in 1939, he was shot in 1941 and has never been rehabilitated.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1892–1937 ✕ Suicide

Architect of Byelorussian Soviet statehood who turned the gun on himself

On 16 June 1937, publicly denounced at the Party congress for insufficiently purging 'enemies of the people,' Chervyakov returned to his office during the recess and shot himself. Officials attributed it to 'family reasons.'

He signed the 1919 manifesto proclaiming the Byelorussian SSR and served as its first head of government and state (1920–1937). A USSR Central Executive Committee co-chairman, he championed Belarusisation and founded the Belarusian State University. He shot himself in 1937 amid the Great Purge after Party censure.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1892–1956 ✕ Died under interrogation

Builder of Soviet covert ops who kidnapped a White general in Paris, then tortured by his own service

Dressed in French police uniforms, they stopped Kutepov on the street on the pretext of questioning him and put him in a car. Kutepov resisted, and during the struggle he had a heart attack and died, Serebryansky told me. — Pavel Sudoplatov, Special Tasks

Born to a Jewish family in Minsk, he was recruited by the OGPU in 1923 and built the first Soviet spy network in Palestine, eventually recruiting over 200 agents across Europe. In 1930 his team, disguised as French police, kidnapped White General Kutepov in Paris; he later stole Trotsky's archives and smuggled warplanes to Republican Spain as head of the NKVD Special Group for Special Tasks. Arrested in 1938 on Beria's orders, tortured by Abakumov into a false confession, and sentenced to death, he was amnestied at Sudoplatov's urging in 1941 and returned to wartime intelligence. Re-arrested after Beria's fall in 1953, he died under interrogation in Butyrka prison; rehabilitated 1971.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1893–1938 ✕ Executed

The Cheka’s architect of political investigations

Asked, after the 1921 Tagantsev case and the mass executions of Petrograd intellectuals, why he had been so merciless, Agranov answered: "Seventy percent of Petrograd intellectuals were standing with one leg in the camp of our enemies. We had to burn that leg off."

Born on 12 October 1893 in Chechersk, Mogilev Governorate, into a Jewish shopkeeper's family, he joined the Socialist Revolutionaries in 1912 and the RSDLP in 1915, and was arrested and exiled to Yenisei province that same year. From 1918, as secretary of the Sovnarkom, he took orders directly from Lenin and Dzerzhinsky, and in 1919 he entered the Cheka, investigating the Kronstadt rising, the Antonov peasant revolt and the Tagantsev case. Head of the OGPU Secret Department and then deputy chairman of the OGPU, he became first deputy NKVD commissar in 1934 while in practice running the state-security directorate, and directed the Kirov murder investigation; in 1937 he was demoted to the Saratov NKVD, arrested, and shot on 1 August 1938. He was never rehabilitated.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1894–1937 ✕ Jumped during interrogation

The decade-long head of Byelorussia's government who signed the Academy purge, then stood in the same dock

On 21 June 1937, during interrogation in a fifth-floor room of the Minsk NKVD, Goloded — accused as a 'Polish spy' — threw himself from the window; the official cause was suicide, but unofficial accounts claim he was beaten to death and the jump staged.

Born a peasant who herded cattle from age seven, he joined the Bolsheviks in 1918 and from 1927 chaired the Byelorussian government for a decade, leading the industrialization and collectivization that turned the republic from an agrarian into an industrial land, for which he received the Order of Lenin in 1935. Yet he who had personally signed the resolution expelling the republic's academicians fell victim to the same terror: arrested in 1937 as a 'Polish spy,' he died after throwing himself from a fifth-floor NKVD window in Minsk.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1895–1940 ✕ Executed

Yezhov's chief of secretariat, keeper of the Great Terror's papers and figures

In November 1938, days after Yezhov lost the NKVD, his chief of secretariat was arrested — the man who had kept every figure of the Great Terror now became a deposition witness against his own patron.

An economic functionary who had passed through the Finance Commissariat, the Soviet Control Commission, and the Central Committee apparatus, he followed Yezhov into the NKVD in January 1937, serving as deputy chief and then chief of its Secretariat and chief of the 9th Special Department, and from 1938 headed the 1st Special Department in charge of operational records, registration, and statistics. The paperwork and figures of the Great Terror passed through his hands to Yezhov's desk, earning him the Order of the Red Star and the Honorary Chekist badge. Arrested on 13 November 1938 immediately after Yezhov's fall, he testified against his former patron and was sentenced by the Military Collegium and shot in February 1940; he was rehabilitated in 1956.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1895–1973 ○ Natural causes

The NKVD chief in Spain who shipped the Republic's gold to Moscow and broke the POUM, then fled Stalin

In July 1938 Orlov received a telegram ordering him aboard a Soviet ship moored at Antwerp. He took his wife and daughter onto a boat for Canada instead, and left letters addressed to Yezhov and to Stalin: so long as he and his elderly mother in Moscow were left alone, he would not say what he knew. He kept silent for fifteen years.

Born Leiba Lazarevich Feldbin. After the Red Army and the border troops in the civil war he joined the foreign department (INO) in 1926 and ran illegal stations in Paris, Berlin, Vienna and London; in September 1936 he arrived in Madrid as liaison to the Republic''s interior ministry and the following year became NKVD chief for Spain. Two operations carry his name: the shipment of 510 tonnes of the Republic''s gold reserve from Cartagena to the USSR, and the framing of the POUM as a traitor organization, in the course of which its general secretary Andreu Nin was abducted and killed. Reading his recall in July 1938 as a death sentence, he fled with his family to the United States, and after Stalin''s death published The Secret History of Stalin''s Crimes, an insider''s testimony on the Great Terror. His claims to general''s rank and to having recruited the Cambridge ring have, since the archives opened, been judged largely inflated; his actual rank was major of state security.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1895–1975 ○ Natural causes

Founder of the Sukhoi Design Bureau, the man behind the Su-7, Su-24, and Su-27

Walking home from the gymnasium in Gomel, the boy Pavel saw an airplane cross the sky and his breath caught. He climbed into the attic that same day and began building a model. "It was not a bird — a man was flying above us!"

A Soviet aircraft designer of Belarusian peasant stock who entered aviation as Tupolev's student at the Moscow Technical School. He founded the Sukhoi Design Bureau (OKB-51) in 1939 and delivered the Su-2 light bomber, only to see his bureau liquidated in 1949 after falling from Stalin's favor. Re-established in 1953 after Stalin's death, his OKB produced the backbone of Cold War Soviet tactical aviation: the Su-7 fighter-bomber (the main strike aircraft of the 1960s), the Su-9 and Su-15 interceptors, and the variable-sweep Su-17 and Su-24. Admired by peers for his technical foresight, Sukhoi launched the Su-27 program, which became one of the world's premier fighters. Twice Hero of Socialist Labor, winner of the Lenin and Stalin Prizes, he served as a Deputy of the USSR Supreme Soviet from 1958 to 1974.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1896–1938 ✕ Executed

The man who drove the Ukrainian mass operations to their peak

According to the testimony of GB Major Z.M. Ushakov, Leplevsky was so ruthless that even his own superior, Nikolai Yezhov, feared him.

A Chekist from Brest-Litovsk who headed the NKVD of Belorussia before taking charge in Ukraine, where he drove the mass operations of the Great Terror to their peak. One of Yezhov's closest lieutenants, he was among the first to be consumed by the machinery he had helped run.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1896–1938 ✕ Executed

Agriculture commissar of collectivization

In December 1929, Yakovlev proposed that 'at least a third' of farmland be collectivized by spring 1930. Stalin dismissed it as too cautious. Yakovlev backed down and faithfully executed the more extreme timetable.

Born Epstein. He joined the Bolsheviks in 1913 and after the revolution led party work in Ukraine. In 1923 he became editor of Krestyanskaya Gazeta (Peasants' Gazette), rising as an authority on rural affairs. Appointed the USSR's first People's Commissar for Agriculture in 1929, he chaired the Politburo commission on collectivization and drafted the landmark decree of January 5, 1930, which set a forced timetable for collectivizing major grain regions and proclaimed the 'liquidation of the kulaks as a class.' He also sponsored Trofim Lysenko, helping set Soviet biology on its anti-scientific course. Arrested during the Great Terror and executed in 1938.