People of the Revolution and the USSR

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1893–1976 ○ Natural causes

Co-founder of MiG: the Soviet Union's foremost fighter designer who never joined the Communist Party

Toulouse, 1913. Gurevich's classmate at the aeronautics school was Marcel Bloch. Thirty years later, one would design the MiG-15, the other the Mirage — two Jewish fighter designers who once shared a classroom, now facing each other across the Cold War sky.

Born to a Jewish family in Kursk province, expelled from Kharkiv University for revolutionary activity, he studied aeronautics in France. In 1939 he co-founded OKB-155 (MiG) with Artyom Mikoyan, serving as Vice Chief Designer (1939–1957) and Chief Designer (1957–1964), working on every MiG from the MiG-1 through MiG-25. The MiG-3 was a mainstay early in the German-Soviet war; the MiG-15 seized air superiority over Korea; the MiG-25 remains the fastest interceptor ever fielded. Hero of Socialist Labor, six Stalin Prizes, Lenin Prize: the only top-tier Soviet military designer never to join the Communist Party.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1893–1991 ↓ Removed 1957

'Iron Lazar', Stalin's hard-line enforcer

At the 17th Party Congress in 1934, as chair of the counting committee, he is reported to have deleted some 290 votes against Stalin so that Stalin, not Kirov with 3, appeared to have the fewest negative votes. The falsification is a widely repeated account rather than a settled fact.

Born to a Jewish family of modest means and trained as a shoemaker, he joined the Bolsheviks in 1911 and from 1922 ran the party's organisation department, placing Stalin's supporters in key posts. As general secretary of the Ukrainian party in 1925–1928 he pressed centralisation and the coercive reorganisation of agriculture, and as a full Politburo member from 1930 he directed the party secretariat, the reconstruction of Moscow and the building of the Metro. In 1932 he headed the North Caucasus grain-procurement commission that blacklisted whole villages, and during the Great Terror he signed execution lists and toured regions to press purges. Removed with the Anti-Party Group in 1957 and expelled from the party in 1961, he died in 1991 at 97, the last surviving Old Bolshevik.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1894–1937 ✕ Suicide

The Red Army's political chief who backed the purges, then shot himself as they closed in

Every year his father came from Kiev asking for his old leather boots. Gamarnik always refused: "If working people saw those boots, they'd say: his son serves in the army and steals — where else would the old man get such boots?"

A revolutionary who led the Bolshevik underground in Civil War Ukraine and directed the industrialization of the Soviet Far East. For eight years from 1929 he built and led the Red Army's political commissar system as head of the Political Directorate, while giving political backing to Tukhachevsky's modernization of the army around mechanization and air power. He publicly supported the purge of Bukharin's 'Right Opposition' at the 1929 Central Committee plenum, but when he himself was accused in the 'military-fascist conspiracy' and dismissed in May 1937, he shot himself rather than await arrest. Rehabilitated in 1955.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1894–1938 ✕ Executed

The Gosbank chairman Stalin called 'our Red banker' and removed a week later

On 14 July 1936, in Stalin's office, Gosbank chairman Maryasin voiced fears for his fate. Stalin embraced him: 'You're no oppositionist. You're our Red banker. What are you afraid of?' A week later, his office was sealed with a lump of plasticine.

Born in Mogilyov, he joined the Bolsheviks in 1915 and rose through party organs: from the Ukrainian CP(B) to deputy head of the Organizational Distribution Department of the Central Committee in Moscow, where he became a close friend of Nikolai Yezhov. After graduating from the Institute of Red Professors in 1930 he entered Gosbank, serving as its chairman from April 1934 to July 1936 while simultaneously acting as Deputy People's Commissar of Finance and member of the Council of Labor and Defense. Arrested five months after his removal, he was shot in August 1938, tortured on the direct orders of Yezhov, whom he had once affectionately called 'Lyovushka.'

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1894–1938 ✕ Executed

The control commissar who ran Stalin's personnel-appointment machinery

At the March 1937 Central Committee plenum he denounced Trotskyists, Zinovievists, and Rightists as having 'fused into one bloody clot of saboteur-murderers in the service of German and Japanese fascists.' Four months later he himself was arrested.

A Bolshevik from 1912, he served in the Petrograd factory committee leadership during the October Revolution and headed the Petrograd Cheka during the Civil War. In 1924, as head of the Central Committee's Organizational-Distribution Department (Orgraspred), he played a central role in building Stalin's nomenklatura appointment system, then served as Ural and Leningrad regional party secretary and People's Commissar for Posts and Telegraphs before becoming Chairman of the Commission of Soviet Control and Deputy Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars in 1935. From the apex of the party-state oversight apparatus he supervised planning discipline, but was expelled from the Central Committee at the June 1937 plenum, arrested, and shot in July 1938; he was rehabilitated in 1956.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1894–1940 ✕ Executed

The 'North Caucasian' Chekist who opened the mass operations in West Siberia

A stenographic record survives of his briefing to subordinates in the summer of 1937, as Order No. 00447 was being prepared: 'The limit for the first operation is 11,000... You may take 12,000, or 13,000, or 15,000. I am not restricting you to that figure. You may take 20,000 in the first category.'

A Chekist born into a Jewish family in Kiev, originally surnamed Korol and often written Mironov-Korol, he made his career in the North Caucasus under Yevdokimov as one of the 'North Caucasians' and was Frinovsky's closest associate. As head of the West Siberian NKVD he opened the mass operations of summer 1937, chairing the regional troika formed with prosecutor Barkov and party secretary Eikhe and telling his men not to feel bound by their quotas. Transferred in August 1937 to Mongolia as Soviet plenipotentiary, he organized the Mongolian purge in which some eight thousand lamas perished, then headed the Second Eastern Department of the foreign affairs commissariat until his arrest in January 1939; placed on the execution list sent to Stalin on 16 January 1940, he was shot.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1894–1949 ○ Diabetes

The marshal who liberated the Balkans and prized soldiers' lives above glory

"Marshal Tolbukhin regarded war not as craft but as exact science. He fused Western rationality with Eastern intuition, winning by skill, not numbers." — Boris Slutsky

A peasant-born officer who distinguished himself commanding the 57th Army at Stalingrad and led the 3rd and 4th Ukrainian Fronts to liberate the Balkans. Meticulous in planning and sparing of his men's lives, he was the only Marshal of the Soviet Union awarded the Hero title posthumously.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1894–1953 ○ Natural causes

Mordvin carpenter's son who rose to Army General and led the Manchurian offensive

On November 7, 1941, with German forces closing on Moscow, Purkayev was appointed commander of the Revolution Day military parade in Kuibyshev — a show of force before the entire diplomatic corps, meant to demonstrate to allies and potential enemies alike that the Soviet Union was still standing.

A Mordvin by ethnicity, Purkayev rose from tsarist praporshchik to Army General in the Red Army. During the Second World War he commanded the Kalinin Front through the grueling Rzhev battles, then took over the Far Eastern Front in 1943, leading the 2nd Far Eastern Front in the Manchurian Strategic Offensive of August 1945, the final major Soviet campaign of the war. He was removed from Kalinin Front command after 76 soldiers died of starvation due to supply failures in early 1943, a blemish on an otherwise distinguished career. Postwar he served as commander of the Far Eastern Military District.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1894–1960 ○ Stroke

The tank army commander who first entered Berlin, sidelined after Stalin's death

"On the fronts fighting the enemies of our Soviet State, my son, three brothers, and sister perished" — from his 1956 retirement petition, as Khrushchev pushed him out

One of the most accomplished field commanders of the Soviet armored forces. A Putilov factory worker who rose through the Red Army via World War I and the Civil War, he was arrested and imprisoned in 1938 before being reinstated in 1939. As commander of the 2nd Guards Tank Army, he led the decisive breakthrough at Korsun–Shevchenkovsky, Uman–Botoșani, Lublin–Brest, the Vistula–Oder, East Pomeranian, and Berlin offensives; his army was the first Soviet formation to fight its way into Berlin in April 1945. Post-war, as Chief Commander of Armored and Mechanized Forces (1948–1953), he directed the entire Soviet tank arm, but after Stalin's death he was demoted by Khrushchev and retired in 1956 due to deteriorating health. Twice Hero of the Soviet Union and Marshal of Tank Forces.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1894–1960 ○ Natural causes

The finance technocrat who led Gosbank through the post-war reconstruction years

In 1933, as famine ravaged the Soviet countryside, Golev was dispatched to Kharkov to chair the State Interdistrict Commission on Crop Yields — tasked with measuring harvests whose shortfall the state refused to acknowledge.

Yakov Golev was a Soviet finance and banking technocrat who served as chairman of the USSR State Bank (Gosbank) from 1945 to 1948. Born into a working-class family, he followed a classic Soviet career path: tsarist artillery service in the First World War, Red Army service during the Civil War, then a steady rise through regional finance departments into the central financial apparatus. His Gosbank tenure spanned the critical transition from wartime economic management to peacetime reconstruction, the credit and emission regime in the years immediately preceding the 1947 monetary reform, laying the technical groundwork for post-war Soviet financial stabilization.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1894–1964 ○ Natural causes

The academic organizer who tried to make central planning a mathematical science

August 1948, VASKhNIL session. Nemchinov declared the chromosome theory of heredity "has entered the golden fund of human science." Someone shouted: "You should resign!" He replied: "Perhaps I should. I don't cling to my position." Dismissed the next day — the sole public speech against Lysenko at the entire session.

Founder of the Soviet school of mathematical economics. After the Moscow Commercial Institute (1917), he studied the class structure of the Soviet countryside in the 1920s. At the August 1948 VASKhNIL session he delivered the sole public speech against Lysenko's persecution of genetics, dismissed the next day as director of the Timiryazev Academy. He signed the 'Letter of Three Hundred' (1955). In 1958 he organized the USSR's first laboratory for economic-mathematical research, which became TsEMI in 1963. Stalin Prize (1946) and Lenin Prize (1965, posthumous). With Kantorovich and Liberman, he formed the intellectual tripod of the thaw-era economic reform debates.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1894–1965 ○ Natural causes

The Vesyegonsk chronicler of Soviet power whose book Lenin called 'remarkable'

Lenin wrote in Pravda (1919) that Todorsky's account of local Soviet work contained 'fine and absolutely true words' that should be 'carved in stone and displayed in every Economic Council and factory.'

A Soviet military educator whose chronicle of local Soviet construction, A Year — with Rifle and Plough (1918), earned Lenin's high praise. Headed the Zhukovsky Air Force Academy; arrested in the Great Terror and imprisoned 15 years, he was rehabilitated in 1955 and wrote a biography of Marshal Tukhachevsky.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1894–1971 ↓ Removed 1964

He opened the coffin lid, and became the first leader to die in bed

On 18 November 1956, at a reception at the Polish embassy in Moscow, he told Western ambassadors: "Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you!" Envoys of twelve NATO nations and Israel walked out.

He rose through the party apparatus in Stalin's shadow, and after Stalin's death won the power struggle of 1953 to become First Secretary. On 25 February 1956 his Secret Speech to a closed session of the 20th Party Congress denounced Stalin's purges and launched de-Stalinization. He crushed the 1956 Hungarian uprising with Soviet troops, and in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis withdrew the missiles in exchange for a U.S. pledge not to invade Cuba. His colleagues voted him out on 14 October 1964; in retirement he wrote memoirs, and he died in Moscow on 11 September 1971.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1894–1972 ○ Natural causes

The NKVD rezident who ran a Gestapo mole and coordinated Soviet atomic espionage in America

On 12 October 1941, as German troops reached the outskirts of Moscow, Stalin personally summoned Zarubin and gave him one task in Washington: 'Find out if the Americans will try to arrange a separate peace with Germany.'

A leading officer of Soviet foreign intelligence, Zarubin spent 13 of his 23 years of service as an illegal rezident operating under deep cover across Europe and Asia. As illegal rezident in Berlin from 1933 to 1937, he personally ran Gestapo officer Willy Lehmann (codename 'Breitenbach'), whose reporting on the structure, personnel, and operations of the RSHA and Gestapo, as well as German military plans, was rated among the most valuable Soviet intelligence of the prewar period. From 1941 to 1944 he served as chief NKVD rezident in the United States, coordinating the atomic espionage network that fed critical nuclear research data to Moscow during the Manhattan Project. After the war he became deputy chief of foreign intelligence (1945–1948), overseeing illegal operations worldwide before retiring and training future KGB officers.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1894–1977 ○ Natural causes

Founder of Ilyushin OKB. His Il-2 Sturmovik remains the most-produced combat aircraft in history

In late 1941, as Il-2 production lagged, Stalin telegraphed the factory: "The Il-2 is as necessary to the Red Army as air, as bread."

Youngest son of a Vologda peasant, he left home at fifteen and first encountered aviation as a field hand leveling an aerodrome in 1910. After graduating from the Zhukovsky Air Force Academy, he founded his own design bureau in 1933 and produced the Il-2 Sturmovik: 36,183 built, the decisive ground-attack weapon of the Eastern Front. Postwar he rebuilt Soviet civil aviation with the Il-12, Il-14, Il-18, and the jet-era Il-62. The only person to receive seven Stalin Prizes and three Hero of Socialist Labor stars, he led the Ilyushin OKB for 37 years.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1894–1980 ○ Natural causes

Soviet biochemist who traced life's origin to a primordial soup

"There is no fundamental difference between a living organism and lifeless matter." — 1922, in an early paper that would grow into The Origin of Life.

A Soviet biochemist and science administrator who laid the institutional foundations of Soviet biochemistry. In 1924 he proposed the 'primordial soup' hypothesis (that life on Earth arose through the chemical evolution of abiotic matter), opening a new paradigm in origin-of-life research that later culminated in the Miller–Urey experiment. In 1935 he co-founded the Biochemistry Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences with Aleksei Bach, and from 1946 served as its director for 34 years, making it the central axis of Soviet biochemistry. As the first president of the International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life (ISSOL) in 1970, he helped institutionalize the field globally, yet his support for the pseudoscience of Trofim Lysenko and Olga Lepeshinskaya etched the tension between science and politics into his own career.