People of the Revolution and the USSR

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1878–1938 ✕ Executed

'The countryside is against us': the deputy finance commissar who said it to the Politburo

'The countryside, except for a small section of the poor peasants, is against us.' One sentence from Deputy Finance Commissar Frumkin's letter to the Politburo, 15 June 1928. It became the starting pistol for the crackdown on the Right Opposition.

An Old Bolshevik who joined the Bund in 1898 before entering the RSDLP, Frumkin served in the Food Commissariat during the Civil War and as deputy commissar for foreign trade and finance under NEP. In June 1928, at the height of the grain-procurement crisis, he sent a letter to the Politburo declaring that 'the countryside, except for a small section of the poor peasants, is against us': a direct indictment of Stalin's forced-requisition policy and its destruction of the smychka, the worker-peasant alliance. That single letter made him the first man formally accused of the 'Right Deviation,' the opening salvo of Stalin's liquidation of the NEP coalition. Arrested in October 1937, he was shot in July 1938 and rehabilitated in 1956.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1878–1938 ✕ Executed

The commissar who steered from famine's shadow to NEP finance, then fell under industrialization's demands

At the 5 April 1930 Politburo meeting Stalin passed an obscene note mocking Bryukhanov, who had proposed nickel alloy coinage, and Mezhlauk appended a drawing of the hanging commissar; both were shot in 1938.

A Bolshevik from 1902, born in Simbirsk as the son of a land-surveyor official; he studied at Moscow and Kazan universities without graduating and was expelled for revolutionary activity. Under the Tsar he endured repeated arrests and exile, headed the Bolshevik committee in Ufa and chaired the Ufa Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies, and was a delegate to the Seventh (April) All-Russian Conference. During the Civil War he helped organize mass grain requisitions and directed the food detachments and punitive expeditions, and became People's Commissar of Finance on 16 January 1926. Removed on 18 October 1930 and relegated to secondary posts, he was arrested on 3 February 1938, shot on 1 September 1938 and rehabilitated in 1956; some reference works give his death as 30 June 1942.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1878–1938 ○ Perforated ulcer

The Cheka executioner who personally shot the last Tsar

I told Nicholas the Soviet of Workers' Deputies had resolved to shoot them. He asked 'What?' and turned toward Alexei — at that moment I shot him and killed him outright.

Born to a Jewish working-class family in Tomsk province, he trained as a watchmaker and joined the Bolsheviks in 1905. As commandant of Ipatiev House in July 1918, he personally directed the execution of Nicholas II and the Romanov family, shooting the Tsar with his Mauser pistol and overseeing the concealment and destruction of the bodies. After the Civil War he served as head of Yekaterinburg Gubernia Cheka and a Moscow district Cheka chief, then from 1921 headed the Gold Department of Gokhran, where he earned a reputation for fighting corruption. He ended his career as director of the Polytechnical Museum in Moscow and died of a perforated ulcer in 1938, shortly after his daughter Rimma was arrested as a Trotskyite during the Great Purge.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1878–1941 ✕ Executed

Old Bolshevik who led the Cheka Special Department, building the Red Terror in the North and the earliest Soviet camp system

“I suffer innocently. Please believe me. Time will testify to the truth.” — from his letter to Andreyev from Lefortovo prison, 1939, read aloud by Khrushchev at the 20th Party Congress Secret Speech in 1956.

A Bolshevik military organiser who became head of the Cheka's Military Section (later the Special Department) in September 1918, he directed the Red Terror across the Northern Front: executing thousands in Arkhangelsk and Vologda, establishing the Kholmogory extermination camp, and closing the Solovetsky Monastery to found one of the earliest Soviet forced-labour camps. His wife Olga's sisters married Nikolai Podvoisky and were the mother of Artur Artuzov, placing Kedrov at the centre of a Chekist family network. After leaving the Cheka in 1921 due to ill health, he drifted through peripheral economic and health posts before his arrest in 1939; acquitted in July 1941, he was shot on Beria's order in Saratov that November.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1878–1943 ○ Stomach cancer

The Party's Chief Atheist, Called 'the Soviet Priest'

Khrushchev recalled: "In the Party we called Yaroslavsky 'the Soviet priest.'" His own maxim: "The struggle against religion is the struggle for socialism."

Yaroslavsky was the supreme ideologue of Soviet anti-religious policy. As chairman of the League of Militant Atheists (1925–1943), he directed the USSR's organized campaign against religion. Joining the RSDLP in 1898, he led the Moscow armed uprising in October 1917 and served as Military Commissar of the Moscow Military District. As Secretary of the Party Collegium (1924–1934), he helped enforce party discipline and purges. He authored The Bible for Believers and Unbelievers, was Stalin's loyal supporter and the official interpreter of Party history, and was elected to the Academy of Sciences in 1939.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1878–1945 ○ Illness

IMEL director and the first Marxist philosopher to publicly anoint Stalin as a theorist

"Lenin teased me as 'Aduracky' — foolish — for my naivety." — family memoirs

A Bolshevik philosopher from Kazan. In 1929 he was the first to publicly hail Stalin as 'theoretician of Leninism.' As IMEL director (1931–1939), his Marx-Engels edition defined how the communist world read the classics for decades.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Soviet communism 1879–1947 ○ Natural causes

Organizer of Presnya’s workers’ fighting squads

“We are ending our struggle… we are alone in this world.”

Zinovy Litvin-Sedoy was a Bolshevik revolutionary from the working class of the Russian Empire who became a practical organizer through factory work, arrests, and exile. During the 1905 Moscow uprising he commanded the Presnya fighting squads, directing barricade defence and the organization of armed workers. His memoirs acknowledged the uprising’s unfavorable conditions while insisting that workers themselves had decided to fight and had carried the struggle. After 1917 he worked in Soviet transport administration and education.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1880–1936 ✕ Suicide

Chief of the Soviet trade unions, third man of the Right Opposition

"They accuse us abroad of a one-party regime. Not true. We have many parties. Only one is in power, and the rest are in prison." At the 11th Party Congress in 1922, the hall answered Tomsky with a storm of applause.

A leading figure of the Soviet trade-union movement, he headed the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions from 1918 and entered the Politburo in 1922. In the trade-union controversy of 1920–1921 he defended union autonomy against Trotsky's program of militarizing the unions, and in 1929 fell with Bukharin and Rykov as the "Right deviation." A lithographer with minimal formal schooling, he shot himself at his Bolshevo dacha on 22 August 1936 as news of an investigation against him was published. His family too was repressed in the late 1930s, and he was fully cleared only in 1988.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1880–1937 ✕ Executed

The pragmatic Bolshevik who designed and led the Far Eastern Republic

After Krasnoshchyokov was dismissed during an illness, Lenin protested in a letter to Molotov: "We have harassed this man, who undoubtedly has brains, energy, knowledge and experience."

The first head of the Far Eastern Republic (1920–1921) and a key architect of the early Soviet mixed-economy experiment. After emigrating to America in 1902, he graduated from the University of Chicago Law School and worked as a labour attorney before returning to Russia in 1917 and immediately joining the Bolsheviks. He persuaded Lenin to create a buffer state in the Far East to secure Japan's withdrawal during the Civil War, personally drafting the republic's constitution in English and securing the Gongota Agreement with Japan as premier and foreign minister. He later served as Deputy People's Commissar for Finance, joined the Presidium of Vesenkha, and founded Prombank, laying the institutional foundations for industrial finance under the NEP.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1880–1945 ✕ Death under torture

The Soviet Union's greatest fortification scientist, who chose martyrdom at Mauthausen over collaboration with the Nazis

His reply to Nazi recruiters: "My convictions do not fall out with my teeth. I am a soldier and remain faithful to my duty."

A military engineer veteran of the Russo-Japanese War, World War I, and the Civil War, Karbyshev founded Soviet fortification science through over 100 publications and taught a generation of Red Army commanders at the Frunze and General Staff academies. He engineered the defensive infrastructure of Brest Fortress, the Stalin Line, and the Mannerheim Line breach. Captured in 1941, he refused every Nazi attempt to recruit him, including an offer to command the 'Russian Liberation Army' in place of Vlasov, led the camp resistance for three and a half years, and was tortured to death under ice water at Mauthausen in February 1945.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1880–1949 ○ Natural causes

Founder of Soviet firearms design, creator of the DP-27, DShK, and PTRD

In May 1943, Stalin asked him which machine gun to adopt. Degtyaryov chose not his own DS-39 but Goryunov's rival SG-43: 'The SG-43 is unquestionably the superior model.'

The son of hereditary Tula gunsmiths with three years of parish schooling, Degtyaryov rose from tsarist army private to founder of Soviet firearms design. Learning automatic weapons as Fyodorov's assistant, he headed the USSR's first firearms design bureau at Kovrov from 1918 and completed the DP-27 light machine gun in 1927, the Red Army's standard squad automatic through 1945. Nineteen of his designs entered service including the DShK, PPD, PTRD-41, and RPD, while his bureau became the Degtyaryov Plant (ZiD), still a major Russian arms manufacturer. Second-ever Hero of Socialist Labour after Stalin, four-time Stalin Prize winner, and Major General, Degtyaryov drew the genealogy of Soviet infantry weapons from the 1920s through 1945.