People of the Revolution and the USSR

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1875–1933 ○ Natural causes

Russian revolutionary, first People's Commissar of Enlightenment, and literary critic

On 15 November 1917, eight days into his post, Lunacharsky resigned over reports that bombardment during the storming of the Kremlin was destroying St Basil's Cathedral. The next day he withdrew the resignation after the commissars judged it inappropriate, and stayed in office until 1929.

Born in 1875 in Poltava. His adoptive father Vasily Lunacharsky, from whom his surname and patronymic derive, is described as a nobleman of Polish origin, though no basis exists to assert Lunacharsky's own Polish ethnicity. He joined the RSDLP in 1895, adhered to the Bolsheviks in 1903, and after helping found the Vpered group in 1909 was expelled from the faction; he ran party schools on Capri and in Bologna. In 1917 he passed through the Mezhraiontsy and after the October Revolution became the first People's Commissar of Enlightenment, serving until 1929. Elected to the USSR Academy of Sciences in 1930, he died in 1933 at Menton, France, while preparing to take up the post of ambassador to Spain.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1875–1946 ○ Natural causes

The long-serving formal head of state

On 1 March 1921, before the Kronstadt uprising, Kalinin entered the fortress unarmed with his wife, was met with applause at Anchor Square, but the sailors derailed his speech with jeers and catcalls.

A peasant-born Bolshevik metalworker who became the Soviet Union's formal head of state from 1919 until his death in 1946, serving 27 years as the country's nominal president. He signed the key laws of the mass-repression period, including the 7 August 1932 decree on state property, the 1 December 1934 decree on simplified terror cases, and the 7 April 1935 decree lowering criminal responsibility to 12. He also approved a cipher from the Belarusian first secretary proposing to shoot 3,000 and expel 9,800 people, and in March 1940 signed the order to execute 25,700 Polish officers and prisoners. Yet on 4 May 1932 he voted against the expulsion of 38,000 peasant families as unfounded, and the reversal halted the operation.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1876–1921 ○ Cholera

Founder of Rabotnitsa and organizer of Russia's first International Women's Day

On the eve of Rabotnitsa's first issue in February 1914, police raided the editorial office and arrested the entire board, Samoilova included. The publication permit had been a trap. But Anna Yelizarova, who arrived late and escaped the sweep, got the first issue out on 23 February — International Women's Day.

Daughter of an Irkutsk priest, she studied philosophy at the Bestuzhev Courses. In Paris in 1902 she met Lenin and joined Iskra, then spent a decade as an underground propagandist, arrested three times. As Pravda's editorial secretary, the letters from working women moved her to organize Russia's first International Women's Day in 1913. In 1914 she co-founded Rabotnitsa, the first Marxist newspaper for working women; she revived it after the February Revolution. She headed Zhenotdel in Ukraine, served on Kommunistka's board, and led the political department of the Volga agit-steamer Red Star before dying of cholera in Astrakhan in 1921.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1876–1937 ✕ Executed

The revolutionary-historian who seized the railways in October and wrote the party's history

After his 1935 arrest, fellow prisoners recalled, he never renounced his Bolshevik views and delivered lectures to inmates on party history and the October Revolution.

An Old Bolshevik active in the revolutionary movement from 1897. As a member of the Petrograd Military Revolutionary Committee in October 1917 he led the seizure of the railway stations, then served as the first People's Commissar of Railways (1918–1919), managing transport through the Civil War. He became the founding rector of Sverdlov Communist University and a central figure in party historiography, directing the Lenin Library from 1925 to 1935. He authored over 500 works on the history of the revolutionary movement. Arrested in 1935, he was shot in 1937.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1876–1941 ✕ Executed

The revolutionary who led Kazakhstan's 'Little October'

In December 1925, at the party conference in Kyzyl-Orda, he declared that "before my arrival, no Soviet power existed in Kazakhstan," opening his "Little October" course.

A Bolshevik who joined the party in 1903, he was elected to the Central Committee and its Russian Bureau at the 1912 Prague Conference and took part in the October uprising through the Petrograd Military Revolutionary Committee. He led the establishment of Soviet power in the Urals from Ekaterinburg and was among those responsible for organizing the execution of the tsarist family at the Ipatiev House in July 1918. As First Secretary of the Kazakh autonomous republic's party organization from 1925 to 1933 he ruled with virtually no outside interference, pushing radical collectivization and forced sedentarization under the slogan "Little October," which is recorded together with the Kazakh famine of 1930–1933. Sacked in 1933, he served as USSR Chief State Arbitrator (1933–1939) before his arrest in 1939; he was shot in 1941 and rehabilitated in 1961.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1876–1946 ○ Stroke

Founder of Soviet neurosurgery and Chief Surgeon of the Red Army

During an air raid, he refused to take shelter, replying: "The wounded cannot hide. A doctor's place is beside the patient's bed."

Nikolai Burdenko founded Soviet neurosurgery and served as Chief Surgeon of the Red Army through the Great Patriotic War, serving in four wars and revolutionizing field surgery. He abandoned the priesthood for medicine, volunteered for the Russo-Japanese War, and was shot carrying wounded under fire, earning the Cross of St. George. In 1932 he created the world's first Central Neurosurgical Institute in Moscow, pioneered brain-tumor surgery, and developed bulbotomy. As Surgeon-General from 1937, he performed thousands of front-line operations, introduced penicillin, and oversaw a service that returned 72.3% of wounded to duty without a single epidemic. He became the first president of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences in 1944. He died in 1946 at seventy, having suffered three strokes but completing his final report from his hospital bed.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1877–1937 ✕ Executed

Stalin's close friend and the 17-year organizational backbone of the Soviet state, the first fall that opened the Great Purge

"Coco, they are old Bolsheviks like me, like you. You won't shed the blood of old Bolsheviks!" Yenukidze tried to dissuade Stalin from putting Kamenev and Zinoviev on trial and executing them. Stalin replied: "Remember, Avel — whoever is not with me is against me."

An Old Bolshevik (party member since 1898), co-founder of the Baku Social-Democratic organization and the underground 'Nina' press in the Caucasus. As Secretary of VTsIK (1918–1922) and then the TsIK of the USSR (1922–1935), he managed the apparatus of the Soviet state's highest formal body for 17 years, across the formation and consolidation of the Union. A close member of Stalin's inner circle and godfather to Nadezhda Alliluyeva, he was the first individual recipient of the Order of Lenin (No. 3). His expulsion in 1935, the first member of the XVII Congress Central Committee to fall, was a significant prelude to the Great Purge.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1877–1938 ✕ Executed

The peasant's son who ran the Krestintern and rose from NEP agriculture to the party Secretariat

Born a peasant's son who herded cattle as a boy and taught himself to read, this Old Bolshevik became simultaneously RSFSR Agriculture Commissar and General Secretary of the Peasant International — the face of Bolshevik peasant policy on the eve of collectivization.

An Old Bolshevik who joined the League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class in 1896, Smirnov spent five years in tsarist prisons and exile. After serving as chairman of the Bogorodsk Soviet and a delegate to the Constituent Assembly in 1917, he became Deputy Food Commissar during the Civil War, then RSFSR Agriculture Commissar and General Secretary of the Krestintern from 1923: simultaneously directing Soviet agricultural policy under NEP and the Comintern's international peasant work. Promoted to CC Secretary and Orgburo member in 1928, he reached the top tier of party leadership before his association with the Smirnov–Eismont–Tolmachyov opposition group led to his expulsion in 1934 and execution in the Great Purge.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1877–1974

The economist who designed socialism in numbers

"Better to stand for high tempos than to sit for low ones" — Strumilin's famous riposte to the geneticists during the 1920s planning methodology debates.

Soviet economist and statistician who laid the intellectual foundations of the planned economy. He developed the world's first system of material balances, formulated the 'Strumilin index' for labor productivity, and pioneered the measurement of economic returns to education. Active in the revolutionary movement from 1897, he was a Menshevik through three arrests and exiles before joining the Bolshevik Party in 1923 and serving as deputy chairman of Gosplan. Elected a full member of the Academy of Sciences in 1931, he received the Lenin and Stalin Prizes and was named a Hero of Socialist Labor (1967).

Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) Soviet communism 1878–1924 ○ Illness

First commissar to resign demanding a coalition, buried on Red Square

「A socialist government must be formed from all Soviet parties… the only other path is to preserve a purely Bolshevik government by means of political terror.」 — Resignation statement, 4 November 1917

A Bolshevik from the Iskra agent network. As Moscow Soviet chairman in 1917 he led the October uprising and became the first People's Commissar for Trade and Industry, but resigned demanding a multi-party socialist coalition. Later returned to economic administration; buried on Red Square.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1878–1937 ○ Cerebral arteriosclerosis

Lenin's youngest sister who edited the revolution with a pencil: press organizer in her own right

Spring 1917, the Pravda editorial office in Petrograd — Maria Ulyanova sat before a pile of manuscripts, pencil in hand, the only Ulyanov editing the revolution's newspaper.

Lenin's youngest sister. She joined the RSDLP in 1898, enduring six arrests and exiles in underground work. From 1917 to 1929 she served on Pravda's editorial board as responsible secretary, organizing the rabkor and selkor (worker-peasant correspondent) movement that became a foundation of Soviet press.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1878–1938 ✕ Executed

“The Russian Clausewitz”. Theorist of strategy and operational art

In the great debate that split Soviet military thought in the 1920s, Tukhachevsky declared of Svechin: "Svechin was not a Marxist and never wanted to be one... Consciously or unconsciously he is an agent of imperialist intervention." The scholarly dispute had turned into a political indictment. Svechin never recanted.

A former Tsarist general who became the Soviets' foremost military theorist, Svechin's Strategy (1927) established 'operational art' as the bridge between strategy and tactics. He foresaw future war as economic total struggle, but his warnings were ignored and he was shot in 1938.