Profiles of Key Historical Figures
CHAPTER ONE: The Russian Empire’s “Black Gold”
Alexander I (1777–1825): Russian Emperor (1801–1825). Under the influence of liberal ideas, early in his reign he abolished the use of torture in judicial investigations, gave greater freedom in the performance of rites by religious minorities, permitted the operation of private printers, and encouraged the issuance of liberties to serfs (though only 0.5% of serfs were actually freed). He built new roads and canals in the center of the country and opened universities at Kazan, Kharkiv, Dorpat (Tartu), Vilnius, and St. Petersburg. He also made important changes in the structure of government administration. He expanded the powers of the Senate (1802), replaced the boards with ministries, and instituted the advisory State Council (1810). During the war of 1808–1809, he crushed Sweden, resulting in the annexation of Finland to the empire, and won a war against the Ottoman Empire from 1806 to 1812, capturing Bessarabia and several cities on the Black Sea coast of the Caucasus. In July 1812, Napoleon Bonaparte’s army invaded Russia, initiating the Patriotic War of 1812 in which Russia was victorious over the aggressors. Napoleon’s new army was crushed by the combined armies of Russia, Prussia, and Austria at the Battle of Leipzig in 1813. After Napoleon’s abdication in 1814, Emperor Alexander, along with representatives of Austria, Prussia, and Great Britain, participated in the Congress of Vienna. To keep order in Europe, the Russian and Austrian emperors, together with the king of Prussia, entered into the “Holy Alliance,” later joined by most European monarchs. Subsequently, Russia consolidated its positions in the Balkans, continuing to force out the Ottoman Empire. The emperor’s sudden death in December 1825 caused an armed uprising by several military units in St. Petersburg, which went down in history as the “Decembrist revolt.”
Alexander II (1818–1881): Russian emperor and reformer. He was tutored by the noted Russian poet Vasily Zhukovsky, who inculcated liberal views and a romantic attitude toward life. In 1837, he made a long trip through Russia, and in 1838 another through Western Europe. In 1841, he married the Princess of Hesse-Darmstadt, who took the name Mariya Aleksandrovna. He participated in the affairs of the Empire, becoming a member of the State Council, the Council of Ministers, and the Finance Committee. He assumed the throne on the death of his father on February 19 (March 3), 1855. One of his first signature acts was to forgive the exiled Decembrists, which he announced during his coronation in Moscow on August 26 (September 12), 1856. He ended the Crimean War with England and France by signing a peace treaty in Paris on March 30, 1856. On February 19 (March 3), 1861, he promulgated a manifesto emancipating the peasants from serfdom. This radical reform foreshadowed other equally substantial acts: administrative (a statute on provincial and district land institutions), judicial (public and open trials, independent judges, new court procedures), reorganization of the Military System (in particular, a Charter on Universal Military Service), and a reform of public education. Under his reign, the conquest of the Caucasus was completed. Russia expanded its influence in the east, annexing Turkestan, the Amur Valley, the Ussuri Territory, and the Kurile Islands in exchange for the southern part of Sakhalin. During the American Civil War, he opposed British and French policy, and decisively supported the Union. In 1867, he sold Alaska and the Aleutian Islands to the United States. Despite his liberal reforms, his reign was marked by a growth in the revolutionary movement, and the emperor was the target of several attempts on his life. In 1880 he barely escaped death when terrorists detonated a bomb in the Winter Palace. Members of the People’s Freedom movement succeeded in assassinating Alexander II on March 13, 1881.
Alexander III (1845–1894): Russian emperor. He was trained for a military career as he was not the heir to the throne through the line of succession. He became Tsarevich (Crown Prince) in 1865 after the death of his older brother, Grand Duke Nikolay Aleksandrovich, whereupon he began to receive a broader and more fundamental education. In 1866, he married the Danish Princess Marie Sophie Frederica Dagmar (1847— 1928), who took the name Mariya Fëdorovna when she adopted the Orthodox faith. The marriage produced six children, including the future last Russian emperor, Nicholas II (1868–1918). Alexander Ill’s political ideal rested on the concept of patriarchal autocratic rule, the inculcation of religious values in society, the strengthening of class structure, and ethnically distinctive social development. The beginning of his rule was characterized by a toughening of administrative and police repressions and censorship. By the mid-1880s, the government had instituted repressive measures to suppress the revolutionary movement, primarily the underground People’s Freedom organization. At the same time, it adopted a series of decrees easing the material position of the people and relaxing social tensions. He adhered to strict moral rules, was very devout, distinguished by thrift, modesty, and hostility to comfort, and spent his leisure time within a small circle of family and friends. He took an interest in music, art, and history, and promoted liberalization of exterior aspects of public activity by abolishing genuflection before the tsar, permitting smoking on the streets and in public places, etc. Russian economic life under Alexander III was characterized by economic growth, which was largely due to a policy of increased protectionism toward domestic industry. The Russian government encouraged growth of big capitalist industry, achieving noted successes. However, the rapid development of industry clashed with archaic sociopolitical forms, the backwardness of agriculture, peasant community, and small landholdings, which did much to prepare the ground for subsequent social and economic crises. Russia’s foreign policy under Alexander III was distinguished by pragmatism and an effort to protect the country from involvement in international conflicts. The main result of this policy was a turn away from traditional cooperation with Germany toward an alliance with France, signed in 1891–93. From 1880 to 1890, Russia waged practically no wars, and for this reason, the tsar was called the “Peacemaker.” His untimely death in 1894 was caused by nephritis.
Catherine II (Catherine the Great) (1729–1796): Russian Empress (1762–1796). Holds the distinction, among Russian emperors, of the longest life span and longest reign. She proved a wise and energetic monarch; her rule was characterized by an aggressive foreign policy and domestic reforms in the spirit of enlightened absolutism and the French Enlightenment. She reorganized the local administrative system, strengthening the position of the political, judicial, and financial bureaucracy. In 1785, she freed the nobles from mandatory service per the Table of Ranks by signing letters patent granting rights and liberty to the nobility. She waged two successful wars against the Ottoman Empire. In the first, (1768–1774), begun by Turkey, Russia acquired part of the Black Sea Coast near the mouth of the Dnipro [Dnieper]; in the second (1787–1791), these gains were expanded to the Dnister [Dniester] River. In 1783 she annexed the Crimea to Russia. She founded the port cities of Nikolayev, Kherson, Odessa, and Sevastopol along the lengthy Azov-Black Sea coast. Leading Russia’s alliance with Austria and Prussia, she participated in three partitions of Poland (1772, 1793, 1795), through which Russia not only recovered the western Russian lands lost in the 13th century, but expanded the territory of the Empire somewhat. The expansion of production, spurred by the empress’s manifesto on the freedom of enterprise (1775), promoted the development of trade. The number of factories grew from 663 in 1763 to 1,200 in 1796. The Ural industrial region put Russia in first place in the world in iron smelting (1 million barrels in 1790, 60% more than Great Britain). The Senate of the Russian Empire accorded her the titles “Catherine the Great” and “Mother of the Fatherland.” Some historians call her reign the “golden age” of the Russian Empire.
Golovin, Fëdor Aleksandrovich (1867–1937): chairman of the second State Duma in 1907, a lawyer, noted activist of the Zemstvo Movement, and one of the founders of the Constitutional Democratic Party. He was born into a well-known noble family. He graduated from the university branch of Crown Prince Nikolay’s Moscow Lyceum and Moscow University in 1891. He be came a member of the Dmitrev District Council in 1893 before joining the Moscow Province Council from 1898 to 1907 and becoming its chairman in 1904. He was in charge of the Office for District and City Councils from 1904 to 1905. He served as an honorary magistrate. He became a member of Tsar Nicholas IP’s deputation on June 6, 1905. He was elected chairman of the second State Duma on February 20, 1907 and took active part in its peasant commission. Following the Duma’s dissolution in June 1907, he became one of the founders of the Cooperation Society and a member of its executive council. He took part in several large railroad concessions. In 1912, he was elected mayor of Baku, although he was not confirmed as governor of the Caucasus because he belonged to the Cadet Party. During the war of 1914–1917, he took part in the All-Russian Union of Cities and was chairman of the War Victims Aid Association. On March 8, 1917, he was appointed commissar of the Provisional Government over the former Ministry of the Imperial Court and Domains, where he was responsible for former imperial theaters, museums, and other cultural institutions. He remained in this position until October 25, 1917, when he was removed by the new authorities. He served as a member of the All-Russian Committee for Aid to the Hungry in July and August 1921 before working in several Soviet institutions. He was shot in November 1937 as part of mass repressions carried out by the NKVD. He was rehabilitated in 1989.
Gubonin, Pëtr Ionovich (1825–1894): noted Russian industrialist, patron of the arts, and privy councilor to the Russian empire. Born in a serf family, he worked land for quitrent starting in 1847, and managed to save the required amount to buy his freedom from serfdom in 1858. Entering the merchant class in Moscow, he began producing various articles from stone. In 1868, he took up railroad construction. His successful projects included the Orël–Vitebsk, Gryazi–Tsaritsyn, Lozovo–Sevastopol, Ural Mining, and Baltic Railroads. In 1871, he became one of the founders of the Kolomna Machine-Building and Kulebaki Mining and Steel Mill Company, one of the leading Russian shipbuilding and steam locomotive manufacturing enterprises. In the late 1860s, he entered the oil business, founding Sakhansky & Co. Partnership to develop the Kerch oil fields. In 1882, he acquired a controlling stock interest in the Russian-American Petroleum Production Partnership, which owned a refinery at Kuskovo outside Moscow. In 1883, he founded the Neft Petroleum Products Production, Transportation, Storage and Trading Partnership, with an authorized capital of 2 million rubles. He was an active member of the Imperial Society of Lovers of Nature, Anthropology, and Ethnography and a contending member of the Russian Technical Society.
Guchkov, Aleksandr Ivanovich (1862–1936): chairman of the State Duma (1910–1911), a noted Russian politician, and leader of the Union of October 17 Party. He was born to a prominent merchant family, and graduated from the History and Philology Department of Moscow University in 1886 before studying at Berlin and Heidelberg Universities in Germany. He was a member of the Moscow City Duma from 1893 to 1897. He worked in the security department of the Chinese Eastern Railway in Manchuria from 1897 to 1899. He fought as a volunteer on the Boer side in the Boer War in South Africa in 1900. He served as director of the Moscow Discount Bank from 1902 to 1908. During the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905, he worked at the front as a representative of the Russian Red Cross. In March 1910, he was elected chairman of the State Duma. He spoke out against radical changes to the political system, arguing that they could lead to the collapse of the Russian state. He served as a member of the State Council in 1907 and from 1915 on. He was chairman of the Central Military and Industrial Committee from 1915 to 1917 and a member of the Special Defense Council. He was one of the organizers of the murder of Tsar favorite Grigory Rasputin in December 1916. Along with deputy Vasily Shulgin, he persuaded Tsar Nicholas II to abdicate the throne in February 1917. He served as minister of the military and navy under the Provisional Government from March to May 1917, and was elected in May 1917 to the State Council as a representative of trade and industry. He was one of the organizers of General Lavr Kornilov’s coup d’état in August 1917. He was an active member of the White Movement, and emigrated to France in 1919.
Kankrin, Count Yegor Frantsevich (1774–1845): noted Russian public figure, economist, and infantry general (1828). He was one of the biggest financiers in the history of Russia. He was educated at Hesse and Magdeburg Universities, and in 1800, was given the rank of collegiate adviser as an aide to the executive board of the Old Russian Salt Works. In 1803, he was appointed to the Ministry of Internal Affairs as an adviser to the State Economic Expedition. Starting in 1809, he was inspector of foreign colonies of Petersburg Province. His research works on economics attracted the attention of the emperor. In 1811, he was made Actual State Councilor and appointed aide to the Quartermaster General of the War Ministry. During the Patriotic War of 1812, he served as Quartermaster General of the First Western Army, and from 1813, of the whole active Russian army. After hostilities ended, he worked to settle accounts with foreign nations. The former allies and France had initially demanded nearly 360 million rubles of Russia, but through skillful negotiations, Kankrin reduced this amount to 60 million. He became a member of the War Council in 1820, and member of the State Council in 1821. From April 1823 to May 1844, he served as Minister of Finance, and carried out a reform of the monetary system, guilds, and several other important measures to revive the financial system. He was an honorary member of the Petersburg Academy of Sciences and the author of a large number of theoretical works on economics and finance.
Kerensky, Aleksandr Fëdorovich (1881–1970): a noted Russian public figure and politician, as well as prime minister of the Russian Provisional Government in 1917. He graduated from the St. Petersburg University School of Law in 1904, after which he worked as a lawyer’s assistant and made friends with members of the Liberation Union, which united the liberal supporters of zemstvo [a form of local self-government] and the intelligentsia. He was arrested in December 1905 for the possession of antigovernment leaflets and remained in prison until spring 1906. Not long after his release from prison, he became a popular lawyer and was involved in a number of political trials. In 1912, he was elected to the fourth State Duma from the Labor Group [Trudoviki] and became the leader of the faction. An active member of the 1917 February Revolution, he participated in the creation and the management of the Provisional Committee of the State Duma, proclaiming himself a proponent of the democratic republic system. He was deputy chairman of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ Deputies, joined the Provisional Government, and became a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party. He was the only member of the Provisional Government to be a part of all its different forms from February until October 1917, successively holding the posts of minister of justice, prime minister, and minister of war and the navy. His inability as head of the government to stabilize the country’s situation in the fall of 1917 soon led to his name being associated in the public consciousness with kerenki, a type of surrogate money that had no serial number, series, or year of issue and depreciated rapidly. On October 25, 1917, the eve of the October Revolution, he traveled to the front to meet soldiers he had summoned, but they never appeared. He dressed in a sailor’s uniform at the Gatchina Palace to escape from revolutionary sailors. In June 1918, he traveled abroad to organize intervention against the Bolsheviks. He lived in France for more than 20 years and worked actively with immigrant organizations. He published the newspapers Dni [“Days”] and Novaya Rossiya [“New Russia”] and regularly spoke out against the Stalinist dictatorship in the USSR. He moved to the US in 1940 and in 1956 began cooperating with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace at Stanford University, where he was a professor. Along with Professor Robert Browder, he published three volumes of documents called The Russian Provisional Government [Rossiyskoye Vremennoye pravitelstvo] in 1961. He is buried in the UK.
Khomyakov, Nikolay Alekseyevich (1850–1925): chairman of the State Duma (1907–1910) and one of the heads of the Union of October 17 Party (Octobrists). He was born to a noble family, and graduated from the Moscow University School of Physics and Mathematics in 1874. During the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878, he enlisted in the army as a volunteer and helped liberate Bulgaria from the Ottoman yoke. In 1880, he became the Sychëvka District head and was head of the Smolensk Province nobility from 1886 to 1895. He was appointed director of the Department of Agriculture under the Ministry of Agriculture and State Property in 1896. He served as a member of the Agricultural Council of the Ministry of Agriculture in 1904. He was a member of district congresses in 1904 and 1905 and became a member of the Central Committee of the Union of October 17 Party in 1906. Khomyakov was elected as a member of the State Council from the nobility of Smolensk Province in 1906. He served as a deputy from Smolensk Province in the second and fourth State Dumas and was a member of the office of the parliamentary bloc of the Union of October 17 Party. He was chairman of the third State Duma from November 1907 until March 1910. He served as chairman of the St. Petersburg Club of Public Figures from 1913 to 1915, and took charge of the Russian Red Cross in 1915. Khomyakov was evacuated from the Crimea along with units of the Volunteer Army in 1920, and lived the last years of his life in exile in the Croatian city of Dubrovnik.
Kokorev, Vasily Aleksandrovich (1817–1889): noted Russian entrepreneur, columnist, and business adviser. He became rich early in his business career as a wine tax commissioner, performing the instructions of the Ministry of Finance, and by the early 1860s, his worth had grown to 7 million rubles. In 1870, he founded the Volga-Kama Bank and Northern Insurance Company. He built the Ural Railroad. In 1857, he founded the Transcaspian Trading Partnership, and two years later, built an oil-distilling plant on the Absheron Peninsula. In 1862, the refinery’s petroleum products won a silver medal at the London International Exhibition on Industry and Arts. In January 1874, along with entrepreneur Pëtr Gubonin, he created the Baku Oil Company, the world’s first vertically integrated company. His last, unrealized project was a plan to establish a Caspian Commercial Bank to finance the oil industry and develop the Transcaspian Territory. He was a gifted writer and a sharp-tongued columnist, and was given the humorous nickname “Foggy Billion” by the press (from the title of an article in which he advocated the abolition of serfdom). Of his articles, printed mainly in Russky Vestnik [“Russian Herald”] of the 1850s and 1860s and in Russky Arkhiv [“Russian Archive”] of the 1880s, the best known are: “Economic Collapses,” “The Sevastopol Way,” “A Look at European Trade,” “Thoughts on Russian Domestic Trade,” and “Tax Farming.”
Lepëkhin, Academician Ivan Ivanovich (1740–1802): noted Russian traveler and naturalist. From 1760 to 1762, he studied at the university of the Academy of Sciences; from 1762 to 1767, at Strasbourg University, earning a doctorate in medicine. In 1771, he was elected academician of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences. From 1768 to 1772, he supervised an academic expedition to study the Volga region, the Urals, and northern European Russia; in 1773, he completed a trip through the Baltics and Belarus. He became permanent secretary of the Russian academy in 1783, and produced numerous studies in geography, botany, zoology, Russian philology, etc. He expressed innovative ideas regarding the constant changes in the Earth’s surface, the origins of caves, changes in the properties of plants and animals under environmental influences, etc. His principal four-volume work—a description of the 1768–1772 expedition (Travelogue... Through Various Provinces of the Russian State [Dnevnyye zapiski puteshestviya... po raznym provintsiyam Rossiyskogo gosudarstva], 1805)—contains extensive material on Russian geography and ethnography.
Mendeleyev, Dmitry Ivanovich (1834–1907): renowned Russian scholar and encyclopedist, chemist, and developer of the periodic table of the elements. He graduated from the Main Pedagogical Institute in 1855, and in 1863, took up the problem of refining and developed and introduced the technology of acid-base purification of kerosene distillate. In 1865, he successfully defended his doctoral dissertation, “On the Combination of Alcohol with Water,” and was soon approved for a position as an associate professor, and then a full professor in the Department of Technical Chemistry at St. Petersburg University. From March 1869 through December 1871, he worked out all the critical aspects of the doctrine of periodicity and set the direction for future research in this area. In late 1871, he turned to research on the physics of gases. From 1880 to 1885, he studied problems of the refining of oil, and proposed a principle for its fractional distillation. In 1888, he advanced the idea of underground gasification of coal, and from 1891 to 1892, he developed a technology for making a new type of smokeless powder. In November 1892, he accepted the government’s offer of a position as head of the Depot of Standard Weights and Measures (the Main Office of Weights and Measures from April 1893), and did much to promote the development of the metric system in Russia. The scope of the public, scientific organizational, and purely research activities in his life is striking. He made three trips to the Absheron Peninsula, where he studied the state of the oil business. On government assignment, he visited the Don Basin, where he studied the causes of a crisis in the coal industry, participated in a review of the customs tariff, published a substantially revised version of his work, Principles of Chemistry [Osnovy khimii], designed an icebreaker for high-latitude scientific research, participated in a Ural Expedition, etc. Dmitry Mendeleyev was a member of over 90 academies of science, scientific societies, and universities in various countries. He is one of the founders of the Russian Chemical Society (1868), and was elected its president several times (1883–1884, 1891, 1892, and 1894). The 101st element in the periodic table, mendelevium, bears his name. In 1962, the USSR Academy of Sciences established the Mendeleyev Prize and Gold Medal for the best work in chemistry and chemical engineering, and in 1964 Dmitry Mendeleyev’s name was entered on the Science Wall of Honor at Bridgeport University in the US, alongside the names of Euclid, Archimedes, Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, and Lavoisier.
Mordvinov, Count Nikolay Semënovich (1754–1845): noted Russian public figure, economist, and admiral. He was sent to England in 1774, where he spent three years improving his knowledge of the naval arts. He participated in the Russian-Turkish War. In 1792, he was appointed Chairman of the Black Sea Admiralty Board, then a member of the Russian Admiralty Board. He was involved in discussions of critical government issues raised by Emperor Alexander and his closest associates, and with the formation of the ministries in 1802, assumed the post of Minister of Naval Forces. In 1806, he was elected head of the Moscow Home Guard. With the institution of the State Council in Russia in 1810, he was appointed a member and chairman of the Department of the State Economy. In 1818, he was appointed chairman of the State Council’s Department of Civil and Spiritual Affairs; he was also a member of the Finance Committee and the Committee of Ministers, and retained these posts during the reign of Emperor Nicholas II. In 1823, he was elected president of the Free Economic Society and held that post until 1840, actively promoting scientific research in the field of economics and finance.
Muromtsev, Sergey Andreyevich (1850–1910): chairman of the first Russian State Duma in 1906 and a professor at Moscow University. He was born into an old aristocratic family and, as a ten-year-old boy, he invented a game of government in which he used sensible management procedures and released his own handwritten newspaper about the life of his father and the surrounding villages. In 1867, he graduated from secondary school with a gold medal and entered the School of Law at Moscow University. After graduating from the university in 1871, he began to prepare for a professorship. He attended lectures at several German universities in 1873 and 1874 to further his education and defended his master’s thesis in 1875 before successfully launching a research and teaching career. He took part in the constitutionalist Zemstvo Movement. In 1880, he became chairman of the Moscow Law Society and an editor of Yuridichesky Vestnik [“Law Herald”]. In 1882, he married Mariya Klimentova (1857–1946), an opera singer and soloist at the Bolshoy Theater. Acting as a writer and public political figure, he sought to protect individuals and society from revolutionary radicalism and the despotism of the authorities. He believed it was necessary to continue the reforms that would lead Russia to a constitutional system in a peaceful and evolutionary way. From 1904 to 1906, he became a recognized authority in constitutional and parliamentary law and began promoting the experience of Western parliaments. He was one of the founders of the Constitutional Democratic Party and a member of its Central Committee. He drafted the Russian Basic Law. Muromtsev was elected to the first State Duma as a deputy from Moscow. Following the Duma’s dissolution, he led a session of some Duma deputies in Vyborg. A court sentenced him to three months in prison for signing the Vyborg Appeal on July 10, 1906. Upon release from prison, he continued his research and lectured at Moscow University. The entire progressive community of Moscow turned out for his funeral in early October 1910. Russkiye vedomosti [“Russian Gazette”] wrote: “In life, Professor Muromtsev was a historic personality for all Russians and all Europeans because Russia’s constitutional history starts with his name.”
Nicholas II (1868–1918): the last Russian emperor, who ruled from 1894 through March 1917. His reign came at a time of sharply worsening political struggle in the country, as well as a deteriorating political situation (the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905; Bloody Sunday (1905); the Russian Revolution of 1905–1907; the First World War; the February Revolution of 1917; and the October Revolution of 1917). In 1894, he married the German Princess Victoria Alix Helena Louise Beatrice of Hesse-Darmstadt (1872–1918), who took the name Aleksandra Fëdorovna after adopting the Orthodox faith. The marriage produced five children: daughters Olga (1895–1918), Tatyana (1897–1918), Mariya (1899–1918), and Anastasiya (1901–1918); and a son Aleksey (1904–1918), who was heir to the throne. During Nicholas II’s reign as tsar, Russia was transformed into an agrarian-industrial country, cities grew, and railroads and factories were built. He supported decisions aimed at the country’s economic and social modernization, such as the introduction of the gold ruble, the Stolypin agrarian reform, laws on worker insurance, universal basic education, and religious tolerance. Not a reformer by nature, he was forced to make important decisions that did not conform to his personal convictions. He believed that Russia was not yet ready for a constitution, freedom of speech, or universal election rights. However, when a strong public movement arose in favor of political transformations, he signed the Manifesto of October 17, 1905 proclaiming democratic freedoms. A State Duma established by the tsar’s manifesto convened in 1906, suggesting that Russia had begun to transform itself gradually into a constitutional monarchy. But the emperor retained the right to promulgate laws (in the form of decrees), to appoint ministers (including a prime minister) who were answerable only to him, to define the course of foreign policy, and to be the head of the army and navy and the secular head of the Russian Orthodox Church. The turning point in the emperor’s fate was August 1914, the beginning of the First World War. In August 1915, during a period of military setbacks, he assumed military command (replacing Grand Duke Nikolay Nikolayevich), after which he spent most of his time at the General Headquarters in Mogilev. The war exacerbated the country’s domestic problems, and the tsar and his court began to receive most of the blame for military setbacks and the prolonged military campaign. In late February 1917, unrest broke out in Petrograd, growing into massive demonstrations against the government and the dynasty. Initially, the tsar intended to establish order in Petrograd by force, but when the scale of the disorders became clear, he abandoned the idea, fearing widespread bloodshed. He was convinced that pacifying the country required a change of government. On March 2, 1917, after torturous reflection, he signed his abdication from the throne in the lounge car of his train in Pskov. On March 9, 1917, he and the entire royal family were arrested. They spent the first five months under guard at Tsarskoye Selo, but in August 1917 they were transferred to Tobolsk. In April 1918, the Bolsheviks sent the Romanov family to Yekaterinburg. On the night of July 17, 1918, in the basement of a house in the center of town where the royal family had been incarcerated, they were shot without trial or sentence. In 1997, after many years of investigation of remains found near Yekaterinburg, they were ceremonially interred in the Peter and Paul Cathedral in St. Petersburg.
Nobel, Emanuel (1859–1932): a major oil industrialist, honorary production engineer, commercial adviser, and an actual state councilor. The eldest son of Ludvig Nobel, he was born in St. Petersburg, received his secondary education at the St. Anna School (one of the capital’s oldest and most prestigious educational institutions), and then graduated from the Stockholm Institute of Technology. Following his father’s death in 1888, he took over the Nobel Brothers Petroleum Production Partnership and remained in charge of the company’s operations for almost three decades. Emanuel was awarded the Order of St. Stanislav, third degree, in October 1888 after Tsar Aleksandr III visited the company’s oil fields. He became a Russian citizen in 1889. A talented manager who took up his father’s baton, he did everything possible to make the Nobel Brothers Partnership a leader not only in the Russian oil industry but on the global market as well, where the Standard Oil Company presented strong competition. The Nobel Brothers Partnership produced 5.4 million barrels of oil and 2 million barrels of kerosene in 1890, exporting more than 1 million barrels of kerosene, or 130% more than the 408,000 barrels shipped abroad in 1887. The company took part in the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, where it was awarded a certificate of merit and bronze medal, and also received prestigious honors at international exhibitions in Lyon (1894) and Antwerp (1894). Its achievements received high praise at the All-Russian Industrial and Art Exhibition in Nizhny Novgorod in 1896. Oil fields owned by the Nobel Brothers Partnership produced 9.6 million barrels of oil and 2.5 million barrels of kerosene in 1901, exporting 1.5 million barrels. In 1913, the company produced 7.9 million barrels of crude and refined 6.9 million barrels at its refineries, which produced 2.4 million barrels of kerosene alone. Oil production was under way at 479 drill holes, while oil fields were using 177 steam engines and 131 electric motors. The company had a total of 2,541 workers. The Nobel Brothers Partnership had 43 river boats, 14 schooners, 209 barges, and 1,400 rail cars at its disposal to transport crude oil and petroleum products. Emanuel Nobel initiated the full-scale production in Russia of internal combustion engines designed by Rudolf Diesel, and promoted their widespread use in shipbuilding. He actively participated in public affairs and engaged in charitable activities. He became the permanent St. Petersburg representative of the Congress of Baku Oil Industrialists in 1889. He served as a member of the Council of Trade and Manufactures, deputy chairman of the Anglo-Russian Trade Chamber, and a member of the accounting and loan committee of the St. Petersburg branch of the State Bank. In 1906, he was elected chairman of the provisional council for the organization of congresses for industry and trade representatives. From 1912 to 1916, he served as head of the St. Petersburg Society of Manufacturers and Industrialists. He was awarded the title of honorary industrial engineer. He was one of the founders of a St. Petersburg-based committee to assist young people in attaining moral, intellectual, and physical development (Mayak). He regularly made monetary donations to the Institute of Experimental Medicine in St. Petersburg in an effort to prevent epidemics from spreading throughout the country. In 1907, the Baku branch of the Russian Technical Society established a prize in honor of Emanuel Nobel, who represented the third generation of a famous family, in recognition of his contribution to the development of the oil business.
Nobel, Ludvig (1831–1888): a major oil industrialist, inventor, St. Petersburg merchant of the first guild, and an honorary production engineer. He was born in Stockholm. He was educated at home and received practical experience working at his father’s company in St. Petersburg. In 1862, he founded his own company where he successfully produced various types of products for the military department. From 1871 to 1875, he took part in the reconstruction and modernization of the Izhevsk Armory and set up large-scale production of modern small arms. He began working in the oil business in 1875. With the help of his older brother Robert, he initially acquired a small refinery on the Absheron Peninsula before later purchasing several oil properties. Nobel was the first Russian oilman who began to search for a fundamental solution to the problem of transporting oil. In 1878, the world’s first tanker, the Zoroastr, was built on Nobel’s design to navigate the Caspian Sea, and the first oil pipeline in Russia was constructed on the Absheron Peninsula. In 1879, Russia’s second vertically integrated joint-stock company, Nobel Brothers Petroleum Production Partnership, was established on the core of the family business with capital assets of 3 million rubles. The company’s charter was approved on May 18, 1879. The key aspects of the company’s strategy were the widespread introduction of scientific and engineering achievements into production and the development of its own transportation and sales infrastructure. The active efforts of the Nobel Brothers Partnership resulted in a definitive breakthrough in freeing the Russian domestic market from imported US kerosene. In 1883, the Nobel Brothers Partnership launched trade operations abroad and formed a foreign sales network: Deutsch-Russisches Nafta-Import-Gesellschaft was founded in Germany and Österreichisches Nafta-Import-Gesellschaft was established in Austria. Receiving warehouses were set up in Marseilles, Antwerp, Hamburg, Gothenburg, London, and other international ports. Ludvig Nobel took active part in public affairs, and was a member of numerous commissions under the Imperial Russian Technical Society, where his experience was highly sought after. In 1884, he was made a lifetime member of the Imperial Russian Technical Society and an honorary member of the society’s Permanent Commission on Technical Education. He was awarded the honorary title of Industrial Engineer by the learned council of the St. Petersburg Institute of Technology for his services to the domestic oil industry. Charitable work was particularly important for Ludvig Nobel. The Aleksandr Nevsky Cathedral, the Roman Catholic Cathedral of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and the Evangelical Lutheran Church were all built in Baku using the company’s money. A mosque was built for Muslims in the village of Balakhany, and considerable funds were regularly allocated for the upkeep of the Bibiheybet holy tomb in the village of Shikhovo. For his services to Russia and enormous contribution to the development of the domestic industry, Nobel was awarded the Orders of St. Anna, second and third degree. The Imperial Russian Technical Society held a special session on March 31, 1889 to establish a prize in memory of Ludvig Nobel, which was for many years one of the most honorary distinctions in the engineering community.
Ostermann, Count Andrey Ivanovich (Heinrich Johann) (1686– 1747): noted Russian public figure and diplomat. His father was a Lutheran pastor. Ostermann studied successfully at Jena University in Germany, but was forced to flee to Holland after a duel with a fatal outcome. He accepted Vice-Admiral Kornelius Cruys’s invitation to enter Russian service. He spoke five languages, learned Russian in a year, and was assigned to the Embassy Chancellery as a translator. Ostermann participated in the Prut campaign in 1711 and successfully conducted peace negotiations. In 1718 and 1719, he participated in the Congress of Aland, which resolved disputes between Russia and Sweden, and in 1721, he helped negotiate the terms of the Treaty of Nystad, ending the Northern War. That same year, he was granted the title of baron “for outstanding labors and fidelity.” He took part in the organization of the Board of Foreign Affairs, of which he became vice president in 1723. Thanks to his diplomatic experience and skillful intrigues, he made a successful career in the complex setting of palace coups. After the death of Peter the Great, he joined the Supreme Privy Council. In 1727, after the death of Catherine I, he became a tutor for the future Emperor Peter II. In 1730, after the death of Peter II, he declined to sign the “conditions” restricting the authority of Empress Anna Ivanovna, thereby gaining her sympathy, and on receiving the title of count, he became the actual director of the empire’s domestic and foreign policy. In 1734, he was appointed Chancellor of the Russian Empire. During the brief regency of Anna Leopoldovna, he managed to befriend her favorite, Burchard Christoph von Münnich, and gained the title of admiral-general. After a palace coup in 1741, which brought Empress Elizabeth Petrovna to the throne, he was sentenced to death, but the sentence was commuted to permanent Siberian exile in Berëzovo, where he died.
Paul I (1754–1801): Russian emperor (1796–1801), an impulsive and inconsistent ruler of the country who implemented a series of ambiguous reforms. After an attempt to aid the serfs by limiting their servitude (corvée) to three days a week, the emperor granted the nobles new lands, which led to the enslavement of state peasants. He successfully fought the French Directory (the Italian campaign of Field Marshal Suvorov and the Mediterranean victories of Admiral Ushakov in 1798 and 1799), and then in 1801, he formed an alliance with Napoleon Bonaparte and planned a large military expedition to conquer India. He was killed in 1801 as a result of a plot that indirectly involved his oldest son, Alexander, who inherited the throne.
Peter I (Peter the Great) (1672–1725): one of the outstanding government figures of world history, the first Russian emperor, military leader, diplomat, and reformer. He was the son of Tsar Aleksey Mikhaylovich (1629–1676) from his second marriage with Natalya Kirillovna Naryshkina (1651–1694). During his Northern War (1700–1721), he annexed lands to Russia along the Neva River, in Karelia, and the Baltic region that had previously been conquered by Sweden. He carried out reforms of government administration, creating the Senate, boards, and agencies of supreme state control and political investigation. Under his rule, the country was divided into geographic administrative provinces. He used the experience of Western Europe in developing industry, trade, and culture, and conducted a policy of mercantilism (creation of manufacturers, metallurgical, mining, and other factories, shipyards, anchorages, and canals). He supervised the construction of a navy and the creation of a regular army. During his reign, the economic and political status of the nobility was strengthened. He personally led the army in the Azov campaigns of 1695–1696, the Northern War of 1700–1721, the Prut campaign of 1711, the Persian campaign of 1722–1723, and others; and commanded troops at the capture of Noteburg (1702) and at the battles of Lesnaya (1708) and Poltava (1709). He initiated the opening of many educational institutions, the creation of the Academy of Sciences, adoption of a civil alphabet, etc. One of his major achievements was the construction of a new Russian capital at Saint Petersburg. As the creator of a powerful absolutist state, Peter the Great achieved Russia’s recognition as a great power by the countries of Western Europe.
Ragozin, Viktor Ivanovich (1833–1901): a noted Russian entrepreneur, inventor, honorary production engineer, and columnist. Hailing from the nobility of the Moscow Province, he completed a course at the Moscow University School of Physics and Mathematics in 1857. While working for various industrial companies in the Nizhny Novgorod Province in the 1870s, he began focusing on oil residues (residual oil), coordinating the organization of their transportation along the Volga River and, most important, studying their chemical properties. He became the first person in Russia to develop and introduce oil lubricant production technology. His method was put to practical use for the first time in 1875 in Nizhny Novgorod and then in Balakhna (Nizhny Novgorod Province), where he built the first refinery specializing in oil lubricants. In 1878, his “oleonaphthas” (as the Balakhna refinery called them) were awarded the gold medal at the Exposition Universelle de Paris. In 1879, he built a large lubricant refinery in the village of Konstantinovo, Yaroslavl Province. In addition to establishing a scientific formulation of oil lubricant production, he set up domestic and export trade. His creative legacy includes several original inventions in the refining industry, including the “universal” differential capacitor, refining machinery, and the “continuous pulverization rectifier.” He extensively researched the economic conditions of the Volga Basin’s industrial development and published his results in a two-volume work, Volga (St. Petersburg, 1880). His study Oil and the Oil Industry [Neft i neftyanaya promyshlennost] (St. Petersburg, 1884) was widely known. The St. Petersburg Institute of Technology awarded him the title of Honorary Industrial Engineer in 1888 for his outstanding work in oil technology.
Rodzyanko, Mikhail Vladimirovich (1859–1924): a major politician, one of the leaders of the Union of October 17 Party, and chairman of the State Duma (1911–1917). A hereditary nobleman, he graduated from the Page Corps in 1877. He served in the Cavalry Guards Regiment from 1877 to 1882, entering the reserves with the rank of lieutenant, and retired from the military in 1885. He was a district marshal of nobility in the Yekaterinoslav Province from 1886 to 1891. He then moved to Novgorod Province, where he served as a member of the district and provincial council. He was chairman of the Yekaterinoslav Province Council in 1901. From 1903 to 1905, he worked as the editor of Vestnik Yekaterinoslavskovo zemstva [“Yekaterinoslav Council Herald”]. He served as deputy from the Yekaterinoslav Province in the third and fourth State Dumas, as chairman of the land commission, and was also a member of the resettlement and local government affairs commissions. He was chairman of the office of the Octobrist parliamentary faction in 1910. Following the resignation of Duma Chairman Aleksandr Guchkov in March 1911, Rodzyanko agreed to be nominated for the post despite the protests of several Octobrist deputies. He was elected as chairman of the third State Duma and then the fourth Duma (where he remained until February 1917). In 1915, he was chairman of the committee that oversaw the distribution of government contracts. He was one of the initiators of the Special Defense Council and served as a council member. He was actively involved in logistical support for the army. He served as chairman of the All-Russian Public Assistance for Military Loans Committee in 1916. He was put in command of the State Duma’s Provisional Committee on February 27, 1917 and gave orders to the Petrograd garrison on the committee’s behalf. He also called on the residents of the capital to remain calm when the revolution began and conveyed this message to all Russian cities in telegrams. He took part in the Provisional Committee’s negotiations with the leaders of the Petrograd Soviet Executive Committee on the makeup of the Provisional Government and was involved in talks with Tsar Nicholas II on his abdication of the throne. He remained chairman of the Provisional Committee in name for only a few more months. During the first days of the revolution he claimed the Committee had supreme authority and tried to prevent the army from being further revolutionized. Following the October Revolution, he left for the Don region in southern Russia and became an active member of the White Movement. He spent the last years of his life in Yugoslavia.
Romanovsky, Gennady Danilovich (1830–1906): a noted Russian geologist, mining engineer, actual state councilor, and professor at St. Petersburg Mining Institute. Romanovsky initiated the introduction of machine drilling in Russia, and supervised deep drilling near Moscow, St. Petersburg, and in the Crimea. He was the inventor of many original drilling tools. In 1865, was the first Russian engineer to travel to the US to learn about the oil business, publishing the results of his trip in the study, On Mineral Oil Generally and North American Petrol in Particular [O gornom masle voobshche i Severo-Amerikanskom petrole v osobennosti]. He is known in the scientific community for his research on oil fields of European Russia, and for his many years of labor studying the geology and paleontology of Turkestan, which lasted from 1874 to 1879. His three-volume research work, Materials for the Geology of Turkestan Territory [Materialy dlya geologiya Turkestanskogo kraya] won the highest prize of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society, the Konstantin Medal. His studies provided a paleontological basis for understanding the geologic structure of Turkestan and clarified a number of practical issues on the occurrence of various minerals there.
Rychkov, Pëtr Ivanovich (1712–1777): naturalist and researcher of the Volga-Urals region. He was of a merchant family background, and worked with the Orenburg Expedition for over 40 years, rising through the service from ordinary clerk to head of the Main Orenburg Salt Board, and then commander-in-chief of the Yekaterinburg Factory Board. He is known in Russia primarily as a scholar who studied the history, ethnography, and economics of the Orenburg region, as well as the author of the famous studies Orenburg History [Istoriya Orenburgskoy gubernii] and Topography of the Orenburg Province [Topografiya Orenburgskoy gubernii] (1762). He was an active member of the Free Economic Society and first corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Sidorov, Mikhail Konstantinovich (1823–1887): entrepreneur, Krasnoyarsk merchant of the First Guild, titular adviser, and explorer of Siberia and the Russian North. He was born to a merchant family, and although he did not complete high school, in 1845 he passed an examination for the title of “home teacher” without attending classes. In 1859, he discovered a graphite deposit in the Turukhan Territory near the Kureyka River. In 1860, his expedition discovered gold placers near the Shchugor River. In 1863, together with Major General Pavel N. Volkov and Ust-Sysolye merchant Vasily N. Latkin, he formed the Pechora
Company to develop the natural riches of the Russian North. In August 1868, he successfully drilled the first oil well in the Pechora Territory, near the Ukhta River. He resumed drilling in September 1872, and obtained a small natural flow of oil. He was the only Russian industrialist to exhibit at four World’s Fairs: in London (1862), Paris (1867), Vienna (1873), and Philadelphia (1876). He wrote a series of books on the problems of developing the Russian North and Siberia: Plan for the Settlement of the North Through Industry and Trade and the Development of the Foreign Trade of Siberia [Proyekt o zaselenii Severn putëm promyshlennosti i torgovli i razvitii vneshney torgovli Sibiri] (1864), The Russian North [Sever Rossii] (1870), The Larch [Listvennitsa] (1871), Pictures from the Actions of Peter the Great in the North [Kartiny iz deyaniy Petra Velikogo na Severe] (1872), The Russian North: On Its Mineral Riches and the Obstacles to Their Development [Sever Rossii, o gornykh yego bogatstvakh i prepyatstviyakh k ikh razrabotke] (1881), On Oil in the Russian North [O nefti na severe Rossii] (1882), Studies for Familiarization with the Russian North [Trudy dlya oznakomleniya s severom Rossii] (1882), On the Richness of the Northern Margins of Siberia and Its Nomadic Peoples [O bogatstve severnykh okrain Sibiri i narodov tarn kochuyushchikh] (1882), etc. He participated actively in the Society for the Assistance of Russian Trade Navigation, which awarded him its Grand Gold Medal for many years of indefatigable labor and sacrifices in the exploration of the Siberian sea route and for experiments in marine shipbuilding on the Yenisey, and also for outfitting the schooner Morning Dawn for an expedition that came from the Yenisey via the Arctic Ocean with samples of Siberian produce. He was a contending member of the Imperial Russian Technical Society, a permanent member of the Imperial Society of Lovers of Nature, Anthropology, and Ethnography, an honorary member of the Society for the Assistance of Russian Industry, an honorary president of the African Institute in Paris, an honorary member of the Royal Geographical Society in Vienna, and a member of the Bremen Polar Geographic Society. His productive social activities earned him high Russian honors; in 1870 he was “all-mercifully bestowed” the Order of Saint Stanislav, Second Degree, and in 1882, the Order of Saint Vladimir, Fourth Degree. The highest mountain on Spitzbergen Island, in Norway, is named in his honor.
Tenishev, Prince Vyacheslav Nikolayevich (1843–1903): a noted Russian entrepreneur, engineer, ethnographer, sociologist, and philanthropist. He graduated from the Polytechnic Institute in Karlsruhe in 1864 before actively working in business from the 1870s to the 1890s. He was one of the founders of the Bryansk Rail, Iron, and Mechanical Plant (1873) and a member of the St. Petersburg International Banking Council. He owned an electromechanical plant and an electrical appliance sales office in St. Petersburg. He was a member of the directorate of the St. Petersburg Conservatory and chairman of the St. Petersburg branch of the Russian Music Society from 1883 to 1887. He devoted a great deal of time to scientific work. In 1898, he set up the Ethnographic Office, a research center that collected and processed information for his planned work, The Life of Great Russian Peasant Cultivators [Byt velikorusskikh krestyan-zemlepashtsev]. He developed the “Ethnographic Information Program” about peasants and urban residents of the educated class with the aim of collecting material on actions and behavior. The Tenishev Secondary School was built using his funds and embodied his educational ideas. He actively financed his wife’s charitable activities. In 1900, he served as general commissar of the Russian division at the Exposition Universelle de Paris. The tsar granted him the title of “Gentleman in Waiting to the Court of His Imperial Majesty,” and the French government awarded him the Order of the Legion of Honor for his enormous personal contribution to organizing and overseeing the work of the Russian exhibition.
Vronchenko, Count Fëdor Pavlovich (1780–1854): noted public figure, financier, and Russian Minister of Finance (1845–1851). He graduated from the School of Law at Moscow University (1801). In November 1810, he became head of the first division of the Chancellery of the Russian Ministry of Finance. In 1819, he became a member of the fifth division of the Chancellery of the Ministry of Finance, then temporary administrator of the third division (lending matters) and member of the Learned Committee of the Ministry of Finance. In 1824, he became director of the Special Chancellery of the Ministry of Finance, and a member of the Secret Committee on Foreign Loans (1828) and the Committee on the Reduction of Bank Interest (1829). He became deputy minister of finance and commander-in-chief of the Corps of Mining Engineers in 1840; in 1841, he was a member of the Committee on Credit Establishment Matters and the Finance Committee. In May 1844, he became administrator of the Ministry of Finance, and from March 1845, minister of finance. He implemented Count Kankrin’s monetary reform of 1839–1843 and focused his attention on the development of the manufacturing industry. In 1847, he replaced the tax-farming system in several industries with an excise-farming commission system. In 1850, a new customs rate structure that reduced tariff rates was introduced at his initiative.
Witte, Count Sergey Yulyevich (1849–1915): a distinguished Russian statesman, reformer, minister of finance, chairman of the Council of Ministers, and an actual privy councilor. He graduated from the Novorossiysk University School of Physics and Mathematics in Odessa before working at various positions in the railroad transportation system. During the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878, he successfully organized the transportation of troops to the scene of military operations, after which he was appointed director of the maintenance division of the Southwestern Railroad in St. Petersburg. His 1883 book, Principles of Rail Freight Tariffs [Printsipy zheleznodorozhnykh tarifov po perevozke gruzov], brought him fame among economists and the business community. In 1888, he was appointed director of the Railroad Affairs Department under the Ministry of Finance. Witte was appointed minister of railroads in February 1892, and became minister of finance six months later. With the goals of making Russia an advanced industrial nation, catching up with developed European nations, and gaining a foothold in Eastern markets, he developed conceptual and tactical approaches to the problem of establishing market relations and creating an independent national economy. In an effort to accelerate the country’s industrialization and accumulate domestic resources, he proposed actively attracting foreign capital and rationalized that industry needed customs protection from competitors and exports needed encouragement. During his time as minister of finance, Russia attracted more than 3 billion rubles in foreign capital. He linked the modernization of the country’s economy to the rapid development of transportation infrastructure. The Trans-Siberian Railway was built at his initiative (1891–1901), and passengers could see the inscription “Forward to the Pacific Ocean” on the rocks that had been cut for the railroad. New towns began to appear (such as Novo-Nikolayevsk, now Novosibirsk) as the construction of this railroad progressed. Western business circles recognized him as one of the creators of the Russian trade and industrial miracle. In August 1903, he was appointed chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Russian Empire. In this role, he continued to implement programs to strengthen Russia’s position in the Asian-Pacific region while seeking to counter Japan’s aggressive policy in the Far East and pursue a policy of rapprochement with China and Korea. Seeking a quick end to the war with Japan in late May 1905, the Russian tsar sent Witte as ambassador extraordinary to conduct the difficult peace negotiations. On August 23, 1905, he signed the Portsmouth Peace Treaty with Japan. He managed to extract everything he could from the lost war (with the active participation of US President Theodore Roosevelt as a mediator) and was granted the title of count for his efforts. On April 14, 1906, he tendered his resignation, which was accepted by a special writ by the tsar, who awarded Witte the Order of Aleksandr Nevsky with diamonds. He served as chairman of the State Council’s Finance Committee until his death, and his work was frequently published in the press. In 1912, he completed his memoir Recollections [Vspominaniya], which to this day remains a valuable eyewitness account of the turbulent events of the early 20th century.
CHAPTER TWO: Oil in the Land of the Soviets
Aliyev, Heydar Aliyevich (1923–2003): noted Soviet and Azerbaijani politician and public figure. Twice a hero of Socialist Labor (1973, 1983), he was born in 1923 in Nakhchivan City. In 1957, he graduated from the Baku State University Department of History. In 1944, he began working in the state security agencies of Azerbaijan. From 1964 to 1967, he was deputy chairman of the Committee for State Security of Azerbaijan. In 1967, he became chairman of the republic’s Committee for State Security [KGB]. Two years later, he was elected first secretary of the Central Committee of the Azerbaijan Communist Party. From 1974 to 1979, he served as deputy chairman of the Union Council of the USSR Supreme Soviet. From 1982 to 1987, he was first deputy chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers. From 1987 to 1988, he was government advisor in the USSR Council of Ministers. In 1991, he was elected chairman of Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic Parliament and deputy chairman of the Azerbaijan Parliament. From 1992 to 1993, he headed the New Azerbaijan Party. In 1993, he served as chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the Republic of Azerbaijan, simultaneously serving as acting president of the Republic of Azerbaijan. On October 3, 1993, he became president of the Republic of Azerbaijan. On October 11, 1998, he was re-elected president. He died in the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio on December 12, 2003. He is buried in Baku.
Andropov, Yury Vladimirovich (1914–1984): noted Soviet politician and public figure, and a Hero of Socialist Labor (1974). He was born in 1914 in Stavropol Territory to a white-collar family. He entered the work force in 1930 as a blue-collar worker. In 1936, he graduated from a water transportation technical school and worked as secretary of the Communist Youth League [Komsomol] organization of the Volodarsky Shipyard in Rybinsk. In 1937, he was elected secretary, and in 1938, first secretary of the Yaroslavl Regional Committee of the Komsomol. In 1940, he was elected first secretary of the Central Committee of the Karelian Komsomol In 1944, he switched to Party work, first serving as second secretary of the Petrozavodsk City Committee, and then, in 1947, as second secretary of the Central Committee of the Karelian Communist Party. In 1951, he transferred to work on the staff of the CPSU Central Committee. From 1953 to 1957, he served as USSR ambassador extraordinary and plenipotentiary to Hungary. In 1957, he became a department head in the CPSU Central Committee. From November 1962 to July 1967, he was secretary of the CPSU Central Committee. In May 1967, he became chairman of the Committee for State Security in the USSR Council of Ministers. From 1982 to 1984, he was general secretary of the CPSU Central Committee. From 1983 to 1984, he was chairman of the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet.
Baybakov, Nikolay Konstantinovich (1911–2008): noted Soviet public figure, doctor of technical sciences (1966), and Hero of Socialist Labor (1981). He was born in the village of Sabunchu in Baku Province to a worker’s family. In 1932, he graduated from the Azerbaijan Polytechnical Institute.1 That same year, he took a job at an oil field in Baku. From 1935 to 1937, he served in the Red Army. In 1937, he became chief engineer and then head of the Leninneft trust and head of the Vostokneftedobycha oil production association. In 1939, he was appointed head of the Main Administration of the Oil Production Industry of the East in the USSR People’s Commissariat of the Oil Industry. In 1940, he became USSR deputy people’s commissar, and on November 30, 1944, the USSR people’s commissar of the oil industry, and subsequently, minister of the oil industry. In 1955, he became chairman of Gosplan. From 1958 to 1963, he was Chairman of the Krasnodar and then the North Caucasus Regional Economic Council. From 1963 to 1964, he served as Chairman (at the rank of minister) of the Gosplan state committees for chemistry (March-May 1963), the petrochemical industry (May 1963–January 1964), and the oil production industry (January 1964–October 1965). In October 1965, he became deputy chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers. In July 1978, he became chairman of Gosplan. In October 1985, he was appointed government advisor in the USSR Council of Ministers. Baybakov retired in 1988.
Bogdanov, Pëtr Alekseyevich (1892–1939): noted Soviet public figure. Born to a merchant family, Bogdanov graduated from Moscow Higher Technical School2 in 1909. He participated in the revolutionary events of 1917 and in early 1918, he became the VSNKh ‘s authorized representative for nationalization of the chemical industry. From 1919 to 1921, he was chairman of the Council of the Military Industry in the Extraordinary Committee to Supply the Red Army. From 1925 to 1929, he worked in the US as director of the Soviet-American Amtorg Trading Corporation. During Stalin’s mass repressions of 1937, he was expelled from the Party, arrested, and sentenced to death. He was rehabilitated in 1988.
Brezhnev, Leonid Ilyich (1906–1982): noted Soviet politician and public figure. He was born in 1906 in Yekaterinoslav Province, Ukraine, to a worker’s family. In 1927, he graduated from the Kursk Land Management and Reclamation Technical School. In 1927, he became head of the land department, and then deputy chairman of the Bisert Regional Council (Sverdlovsk District, the Ural region). In 1931, he became deputy head of regional administration in Sverdlovsk. In 1935, he graduated from the Dnipropetrovsk Metallurgical Institute, and then served in the Red Army. In 1936, he served as director of a metallurgical technical school. In May 1937, he was promoted to deputy chairman of the Dniprodzerzhynsk City Executive Committee. A year later, he headed the Soviet trade department of the Dnipropetrovsk Regional Committee of the Ukrainian CP(b). In February 1939, he was confirmed as secretary of the Dnipropetrovsk Regional Committee of the Party. At the beginning of World War II, he was involved in mobilizing the population into the Red Army and evacuating industry. In mid-1941, he quit his job to join field forces as deputy head of the Political Administration on the southern front, and was given the rank of brigade commissar. In 1943, he headed the Political Department of the 18th Army. In 1944, he was promoted to major general. The following year, just several days after the end of the war, he was entrusted with the post of head of Political Administration of the Fourth Ukrainian Front and participated in the Victory parade in Moscow. In August 1946, he was elected first secretary of the Zaporizhia Regional Committee of the Ukrainian CP(b); in November 1947, first secretary of the Dnipropetrovsk Regional Committee; and in July 1950, first secretary of the Central Committee of the Moldovan CP(b). In February 1954, he became second secretary, and in August 1955, first secretary of the Kazakhstan Communist Party Central Committee. In February 1956, he again became secretary of the Central Committee and a candidate member of the Presidium of the CPSU Central Committee. From 1960 to 1964, he served as chairman of the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet. In 1963, he was again secretary of the CPSU Central Committee. On October 14, 1964, he became first secretary of the CPSU Central Committee, then general secretary of the CPSU Central Committee. Starting in 1977, he was also chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. He died November 10, 1982, having lived almost to the age of 76; during his life, he was named Hero of Socialist Labor, Hero of the Soviet Union (four times), and marshal of the Soviet Union. He was awarded the Lenin Prize, the Order of Lenin (eight times), and many other Soviet and foreign honors.
Chernenko, Konstantin (1911–1985): Soviet politician and public figure, and Hero of Socialist Labor (1976). He was born in the village of Bolshaya Tes, Krasnodar Territory, to a peasant family. He graduated from the Higher School for Party Organizers of the AUCP(b) Central Committee (1945) and from the Chisinau (Kishinëv) Pedagogical Institute (1953). In 1929, he began working in the Komsomol, government and the Party. From 1941 to 1943, he was secretary of the Krasnodar Territorial Committee, and from 1945 to 1948, the Secretary of the Penza Regional Committee of the Party. In 1948, he became head of the agitation and propaganda department of the Moldovan Communist Party Central Committee. From 1956 to 1960, he was section head of the department of agitation and propaganda of the CPSU Central Committee. From 1960 to 1965, he was head of the secretariat of the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet; and from 1965 to 1976, head of the general department of the CPSU Central Committee. On February 13, 1984, he became general secretary of the CPSU Central Committee, and on April 11, 1984, chairman of the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet.
Chicherin, Georgy Vasilyevich (1872–1936): noted Soviet diplomat. Born to a family of hereditary nobility, he graduated from the St. Petersburg University Department of History and Philology in 1896. In 1904, he joined the Social Democratic movement. From 1904 to 1917, he lived abroad. In August 1917, he was arrested in Great Britain as secretary of the Delegate Committee for Return of Political Exiles to Russia. He was freed in January 1918, at the insistence of the Soviet Russian government, and returned to Petrograd, where he was appointed deputy people’s commissar of foreign affairs. In March 1918, he participated in the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany. On May 30, 1918, he became People’s Commissar of Foreign Affairs. In 1921, he participated in the signing of friendship treaties with Persia, Afghanistan, and Turkey, who were Soviet Russia’s first diplomatic partners on equal terms. He led the Soviet delegations to the international conferences in Genoa and Lausanne. From 1925 to 1930, he was a member of the AUCP(b) Central Committee.
Dzerzhinsky, Feliks (1877–1926): noted Soviet public figure and founder of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission (VChK)–Joint State Political Directorate (OGPU), the Soviet secret political police. Born into the family of a minor Polish nobleman, he joined the Social Democrats in high school and on Gediminas’ Hill in Vilnius he swore to devote his life to the struggle against evil and injustice. He left high school in his senior year to become a professional revolutionary. In 1895, he became a member of the organization “Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania,” and became a part of its organizational center in 1900. On his initiative, the organization united in 1906 with the Russian Social Democrats while preserving its organizational independence. During the 1905 Russian Revolution, he organized labor strikes and led agitation efforts in the military. From 1907 to 1912, he was a member of the RSDLP Central Committee. Arrested numerous times, he spent a total of 11 years in prison and at hard labor, contracting tuberculosis in the process. He was exiled three times. Freed by the February Revolution of 1917, he joined the Moscow committee of the RSDLP(b). At the 6th Party Congress, he came out in favor of an armed uprising and was elected to the Central Committee, becoming a leader of organizational and military efforts. He participated actively in the 1917 October Revolution, assumed control of the postal and telegraph office, and provided communications to the Smolny Institute. At his initiative, a five-member commission was organized under the Military Revolutionary Committee to Combat Counterrevolution. That commission later became the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission (VChK), which was created on December 7 (20), 1917 by the Council of People’s Commissars to combat counterrevolution and sabotage. Dzerzhinsky led the VChK until his death. Starting in February 1918, the VChK became a special government entity that assumed the functions of surveillance, arrest, investigation, the office of the public prosecutor, and the court, as well as that of penal institution, thus carrying out the “Red Terror.” While remaining chairman of the VChK, and then the Joint State Political Directorate (OGPU), from 1919 to 1923 he headed the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD), and from 1921 to 1924 he headed the People’s Commissariat of Railroads. From 1924 to 1926, he combined his activity in the OGPU with leadership of the All-Union Council of the National Economy (VSNKh), the central state industrial agency. It was he who signed the Sakhalin oil concession allowing the Japanese to develop oil fields on northern Sakhalin Island. He participated in numerous Soviet committees and societies, was a member of the Presidium of the Society for Studies of Interplanetary Travel, chairman of VTsIK committees to improve the life of children and improve the life of workers, and was one of the founders of the Society of Political Convicts and Exiles, and also the sports club Dinamo. He died suddenly on July 20, 1926 after delivering a speech at a joint Plenum of the RCP(b) Central Committee and the RCP(b) Central Control Commission. During the Great Terror, all his relatives were victims of Stalinist repression.
Gorbachëv, Mikhail Sergeyevich (b. 1931): noted Soviet politician and public figure, Nobel Peace Prize laureate. He was born in 1931 in the village of Privolnoye, Krasnogvardeyskoye District, Stavropol Territory. In 1955, he graduated from the Lomonosov Moscow State University School of Law. From 1955 to 1962, he worked as department head of the Stavropol City Committee of the Komsomol, as first secretary of the Stavropol City Committee of the Komsomol, and then as second secretary and first secretary of the Territorial Committee of the Komsomol. In December 1962, he became department head for organizational and Party work of the Stavropol Rural Territorial Committee of the CPSU. In September 1966, he became first secretary of the Stavropol City Committee of the Party; in August 1968, he was elected second secretary; and in April 1970, first secretary of the Stavropol Territorial Committee of the CPSU. In November 1978, he went to Moscow and was confirmed as Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee on matters of the food and agriculture industry. In March 1985, he was elected general secretary of the CPSU Central Committee. From March 1990 to December 1991, he was president of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. On December 25, 1991, he resigned as president of the USSR. He retired in 1992 and is now president of the Gorbachëv Foundation.
Gubkin, Ivan Mikhaylovich (1871–1939): noted Soviet petroleum geologist, academician of the USSR Academy of Sciences, and author of the groundbreaking work The Science of Oil [Ucheniye o nefti]. He graduated from the St. Petersburg Pedagogical Institute in 1886. In 1910, he graduated from the St. Petersburg Mining Institute. From 1910 to 1917, he carried out a geological study of the oil-bearing areas of the North Caucasus. He spent 1917 and 1918 on a scientific mission in the US. In 1918, he became deputy chairman of the Main Petroleum Committee and head of the Main Shale Committee. In 1920, he was elected professor of the Moscow Mining Academy. In 1922, he was rector of the Moscow Mining Academy. In 1930, he was director of the Moscow Institute of Oil.3 In 1930, he was appointed chairman of the USSR Council for the Study of Productive Forces. In 1936, he was elected vice president of the USSR Academy of Sciences.
Kaganovich, Lazar Moiseyevich (1893–1991): noted Soviet politician and public figure, loyal comrade-in-arms of Joseph Stalin, and responsible for mass repressions in the country. He was a participant in the Civil War, and from 1922 to 1925, head of the Organization and Assignment Department of the RCP(b) Central Committee. From 1925 to 1930, he was general secretary of the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party. From 1930 to 1935, he was first secretary of the Moscow City Committee of the RCP(b). From 1935 to 1944, he was people’s commissar for railroads, and from 1939 to 1940, he was also USSR People’s Commissar of the Oil Industry. In 1944, he became deputy chairman of the USSR Council of People’s Commissars. From 1922 to 1957, a member of the CPSU Central Committee. In June 1957, a Plenum of the CPSU Central Committee decided to remove him from his leading post in the government for “participation in an antiparty group,” expelled him from the Party, and sent him to do managerial work in the provinces. His Memoirs of a Working Class Communist and Bolshevik, a Trade Union and Soviet Government Worker [Pamyatnyye zapiski rabochego, kommunista-bolshevika, profsoyuznogo i sovetskogo gosudarstvennogo rabotnika] was published in Moscow in 1996.
Khrushchëv, Nikita Sergeyevich (1894–1971): noted Soviet politician and public figure, a Hero of Socialist Labor (1954, 1957, and 1961) and Hero of the Soviet Union (1964). He was born in 1894 in the village of Kalinovka, the Kursk Province. He participated in the Civil War, and afterwards was involved in managerial and Party work. In 1929, Khrushchëv enrolled in the Industrial Academy in Moscow, where he was elected secretary of the Party committee. Starting in January 1931, he served as secretary of the Bauman and then the Krasnaya Presnya regional committees of the Party, and from 1932 to 1934, he was second secretary and then first secretary of the Moscow City Committee and second secretary of the local committee of the AUCP(b). In 1938, he became first secretary of the Central Committee of the Ukrainian CP(b) and a candidate member of the Politburo, becoming, a year later, a member of the Politburo of the AUCP(b) Central Committee. During World War II, he was a member of the military councils of the Southwestern Direction and the Southwestern, Stalingrad, Southern, Voronezh, and First Ukrainian fronts. From 1944 through 1947 he worked as chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Ukrainian SSR, and then was reelected first secre-tary of the Central Committee of the Ukrainian CP(b). In December 1949, he became first secretary of the Moscow Regional Committee and again the secretary of the AUCP(b) Central Committee. In September 1953, he was elected first secretary of the CPSU Central Committee. In 1956, at the 20th CPSU Congress, he delivered a speech in which he denounced Joseph Stalin’s cult of personality. Starting in 1958, he was chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers. He continued to hold leadership posts until October 14, 1964, and retired from public life when the October Plenum of the CPSU Central Committee relieved him of Party and government posts “for health reasons.” He died September 11, 1971, and is buried in Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow.
Kirov (Kostrikov), Sergey Mironovich (1886–1934): noted Soviet politician and public figure. He participated in revolutionary actions from 1905 to 1907 in Siberia. During World War I, he headed an underground communist organization in Vladikavkaz. After the February Revolution of 1917, he was a member of the Vladikavkaz Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies. Kirov participated in the October Revolution in Petrograd in 1917, and was delegate to the second All-Russian Congress of Soviets. In 1919, he became chairman of the Military Revolutionary Committee of the Astrakhan Province and a member of the Revolutionary War Council of the 11th Army, the southern group of troops of the Red Army. In May 1920, he became authorized representative of the RSFSR to the Democratic Republic of Georgia, and in October 1920, he headed the Soviet delegation at the negotiations to reach a peace treaty with Poland. In July 1921, he became secretary of the Communist Party Central Committee in Soviet Azerbaijan and actively directed work to restore the oil fields on the Absheron Peninsula. In 1926, he became first secretary of the Leningrad Regional Committee of the Party. In 1930, he was elected member of the Politburo of the RCP(b) Central Committee. At the 17th Party Congress in February 1934, he was elected secretary of the RCP(b) Central Committee. He was killed on December 1, 1934, in the building of the Leningrad Regional Committee of the Party. This marked the beginning of the “Great Terror” in the USSR, involving mass repression of all strata of Soviet society.
Kosior, Iosif (1893–1937): Soviet public figure. Born to a worker’s family, Kosior participated actively in revolutionary actions in 1917 and in the Civil War from 1918 to 1920. From March 1920 to April 1922, he was commander of the Caucasus Army of Labor, and simultaneously head of Grozneft Production Association. In 1928, he became deputy chairman of the VSNKh. From 1919 to 1936, he was a member of the RCP(b) Central Committee. During Stalin’s mass repressions in 1936, he was expelled from the Party, arrested, and sentenced to death. He was rehabilitated in 1988.
Kosygin, Aleksey Nikolayevich (1904–1980): noted Soviet public figure and Hero of Socialist Labor (1964, 1974). He graduated from the Leningrad Textile Institute in 1932. From 1940 to 1953, he was deputy chairman of the USSR Council of People’s Commissars, and from 1943 to 1946, he was also chairman of the RSFSR Council of People’s Commissars. In June 1941, he became deputy chairman of the Evacuation Council; from January to July 1942, he was authorized representative of the Leningrad State Committee for Defense. In 1948, he served as USSR minister of finance; from 1949 to 1953, as minister of light industry. From 1953 to 1954, he was minister of consumer goods. From 1959 to 1960, he was chairman of Gosplan. In 1964, he became chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers.
Krasin, Leonid Borisovich (1870–1926): noted Soviet politician and public figure and diplomat. Krasin came from a family of minor nobleman and his father was a civil servant on the Tyumen district council. After graduating from a technical high school, he entered the St. Petersburg State Institute of Technology. While a student, he became interested in Marxism and joined the Social Democrats. In 1891, he was expelled from the institute, and arrested and imprisoned the next year. He was then called up for military duty. He was arrested a second time in 1895 and sentenced to exile in East Siberia. After completing his term of exile, he finished Kharkiv Polytechnic Institute in 1900. He worked as an engineer in the oil fields of the Absheron Peninsula. In 1904, Krasin wrote the work Power Consumption for Petroleum Bailing Using Electric Motorized Bailers [K voprosu o raskhode energii na tartaniye nefti zhelonkami pri rabote eletromotorami], published independently in Baku. In 1905, he went to St. Petersburg and worked as an engineer at Elektricheskoye obshchestvo 1886 g. [“1886 Electric Company”], and edited the Party newspaper Novaya zhizn [“New Life”]. From 1905 to 1907, he participated actively in revolutionary actions in St. Petersburg and Moscow. From 1908 to 1912, he lived abroad, returning in 1912 to work as director of the Russian department of the German company Siemens-Schuckert, while simultaneously engaging in active underground Party work. From December 1917 to March 1918, he was a member of the Soviet delegation at the negotiations with Germany in Brest-Litovsk. In August 1918, in Berlin, he signed a follow-up agreement to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. He was then appointed member of the Presidium of the VSNKh, and in November 1918, he became chairman of the Extraordinary Committee to Supply the Red Army and the people’s commissar for trade and industry. From March 1919 to March 1920, he was people’s commissar for railroads. From 1922 to 1923, he was a member of the Soviet delegations at the international conferences in Genoa and The Hague. In 1924, he was authorized representative of the USSR in France. In 1925, he was authorized representative of the USSR in Great Britain.
Lenin (Ulyanov), Vladimir Ilyich (1870–1924): noted Soviet politician and public figure, organizer of the Bolshevik Party, and founder of the USSR. Born to a noble family, he became interested in Marxism in his youth. In 1891, he passed the examinations of the St. Petersburg University School of Law as an independent study student. He briefly practiced law in Samara, then became a professional revolutionary. In 1895, he united a series of St. Petersburg Marxist and workers’ groups into a single organization, the League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class. In December of 1895, he was arrested and sentenced to exile to the Yenisey Province in Siberia. There he wrote a series of works, including the book The Development of Capitalism in Russia [Razvitiye kapitalizma v Rossii]. He left Russia on a forged passport, and from July 1900 through April 1917 lived as an émigré in Germany, Great Britain, France, and Switzerland. In 1903, at a conference of Russian Social Democrats in London, Ulyanov, who had assumed the pseudonym Lenin in 1901 after his exile, laid the foundation for creation of the Bolshevik Party and elaborated its first platform and rules. When World War I broke out, he proposed the Party slogan “Make the imperialist war a civil war.” With the cooperation of the German authorities, who arranged his free passage through German territory in a sealed railroad car, he returned from emigration with a group of like-minded people through the Baltic states and Finland, arriving in Petrograd in April 1917. At the First All-Russian Congress of Soviets (June 1917), he gave speeches about the war and the relationship to the bourgeois Provisional Government. In July 1917, threatened with arrest, he was forced underground and hid until mid-August 1917 in a shelter of branches near the Razliv railway station close to Petrograd, and then traveled to Finland at the beginning of October. He continued to direct the Bolshevik Party’s preparations for an armed coup d’état. At the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets, which opened on October 25 (November 7), 1917 in Petrograd, he declared the transfer of all power in the capital and the provinces to the Soviets, and gave speeches on peace and land. The Congress accepted Lenin’s decrees on peace and land, and formed a workers’ and peasants’ government: the Council of People’s Commissars, headed by Vladimir I. Lenin. Having become head of the government, he directed essentially all aspects of life in Soviet Russia and initiated all major government and Party decisions and measures. Under his leadership, the first constitution of the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic was developed, and in 1922 the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was created. In May 1922 he fell seriously ill, and among his closest comrades-in-arms a fierce struggle began for “Lenin’s legacy,” which was decisively won by Joseph Stalin (Iosif Dzhugashvili). In 1924, a sarcophagus with the embalmed body of Lenin was set up in a mausoleum built on Red Square in Moscow.
Lomov (Oppokov), Georgy Ippolitovich (1888–1938): noted Soviet public figure. Born to a merchant family, Oppokov graduated from the St. Petersburg University School of Law in 1913. In his youth, he became interested in Marxism, and participated actively in revolutionary actions from 1905 to 1907 and in the October Revolution of 1917. He was people’s commissar for justice in the first Council of People’s Commissars. In January 1918, he became deputy chairman of the VSNKh. From 1921 to 1923, he was chairman of the Siberian Industrial Office of the VSNKh. From 1923 to 1926, he worked as chairman of the USSR Neftesindikat. From 1926 to 1929, he was chairman of the Donugol [“Don Coal”] Production Association. From 1931 to 1934, he was deputy chairman of Gosplan. From 1927 to 1934, he was member of the RCP(b) Central Committee. During Stalin’s mass repressions in 1937, he was expelled from the Party, arrested, and sentenced to death. He was rehabilitated in 1988.
Pervukhin, Mikhail Georgiyevich (1904–1978): Soviet public figure, lieutenant general (1944), and Hero of Socialist Labor (1949). In 1938, he became deputy, then first deputy USSR people’s commissar of heavy industry. In 1939, he became USSR people’s commissar of power plants and the electrical industry. From 1940 to 1944 and again from 1950 to 1955, he was deputy chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers. From 1942 to 1950, he was USSR minister of the chemical industry. From 1952 to 1957, he was a member of the Presidium of the CPSU Central Committee, and from 1957 to 1961, a candidate member of the Presidium of the CPSU Central Committee. In 1953, he became USSR minister of power plants and the electrical industry. From 1955 to 1957, he served as first deputy chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers. From 1957 to 1958, he was both USSR minister of medium machine building and chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers Government Committee for Foreign Economic Relations. From 1958 to 1963, he served as USSR ambassador to the GDR. Starting in 1963, he worked in leading posts in the USSR Council of National Economy and in Gosplan.
Radek (Sobelson), Karl Bernhardovich (1885–1939): Soviet Party figure and journalist. He graduated from the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland, with a major in history, and then studied at Humboldt University of Berlin and the University of Leipzig. In 1902, he joined the Social Democrats, and participated actively in revolutionary actions in Poland from 1905 to 1907. From 1903 to 1917, he worked at a series of Polish, German, and Swiss newspapers. After October 1917, he went to Soviet Russia and was appointed head of the European department in the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs. In November 1918, he traveled illegally to Germany to organize revolutionary actions, was arrested, and freed in December 1919. After returning to Soviet Russia, he held a series of leadership posts in Soviet periodicals. In 1927, he was expelled from the Party and sentenced to three years of exile for “anti-Soviet activity.” In 1936, he was arrested again and sentenced to 10 years of incarceration, but was killed in prison. He was rehabilitated in 1988.
Rykov, Aleksey Ivanovich (1881–1938): noted Soviet public figure and chairman of the USSR Council of People’s Commissars (1924–1930). Born to a peasant family, Rykov studied at Kazan University after graduating from high school. He became interested in Marxism, and was arrested and exiled in 1901. He participated actively in revolutionary actions from 1905 to 1907 and in the October Revolution of 1917. He was people’s commissar of internal affairs in the first Council of People’s Commissars. From 1918 to 1921 and from 1923 to 1924, he was chairman of the VSNKh. In 1921, he became simultaneously deputy chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars and of the Council of Labor and Defense. In the late 1920s, he spoke out openly against the use of extraordinary measures to carry out collectivization and industrialization. From 1924 to 1930, he was the chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR. From 1931 to 1936, he was people’s commissar for post and telegraph. During Stalin’s mass repressions of 1936, he was expelled from the Party, arrested, and sentenced to death. He was rehabilitated in 1988.
Sedin, Ivan Korneyevich (1906–1972): noted Soviet public figure, Hero of Socialist Labor, (1944), and candidate of technical sciences. Born in 1906 to a Cossack family in the Kuban region, he graduated from Maykop Pedagogical School in 1928. From 1928 to 1931, he worked as principal of an elementary school. In 1937, he graduated from the Dmitry Mendeleyev Moscow Chemical Engineering Institute4 with a major in production engineering. From 1937 to 1938, he worked in leading posts in industry. From March 1928 to September 1939, he performed Party electoral work in the Tambov and Ivanovo regions. In October 1939, he became first deputy USSR people’s commissar of the oil industry. From July 1940 to November 1944, he served as USSR people’s commissar of the oil industry. In 1944, he was named Hero of Socialist Labor. From May 1945 to December 1948, he was USSR people’s commissar of the textile industry. After 1949, he worked in various posts in industry. From 1959 to 1964, he was deputy director of the Institute of Petrochemical Synthesis of the USSR Academy of Sciences. In 1964, he became director of the Scientific Research Institute for Paint and Varnish Products.
Stalin, Joseph Vissarionovich (Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili) (1879–1953): noted Soviet politician and public figure, general secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR (1922–1953), head of the Soviet government (1940–1953), and Generalissimo (1945). Under his many years of leadership, the country underwent industrialization and collectivization, experienced the Great Terror and the purges of the 1940s and 1950s, the difficult ordeal of World War II, and the joy of victory over the Nazis in May 1945. He was born in the town of Gori, Georgia, to the family of a poor cobbler. After finishing a church school, he entered a seminary, from which he was expelled in 1899. He then decided to become a professional revolutionary, organized workers’ demonstrations and strikes, and disseminated forbidden literature. After the Russian Social Democrats split into Bolshevik and Menshevik factions in 1903, he joined the former, since their political platform more closely met his expectations. In the period between April 1902 and March 1913, he was arrested, imprisoned, or exiled to Siberia seven times, but managed to escape every time. Political obsession and a great capacity for work helped him advance through the Party hierarchy. In 1913, he published his article about Marxism under the pseudonym Stalin. He edited the Party newspaper Pravda for some period. From July 1913 to March 1917 he was in long-term exile in Siberia. On March 25, 1917, Stalin returned from exile to Petrograd and resumed his editorial activity. In October 1917, he assumed the post of people’s commissar for ethnic affairs in the Council of People’s Commissars, the first Bolshevik government. In 1922 he was appointed general secretary of the RCP(b) Central Committee. During this period, this particularly technical post was not especially interesting to the brilliant Party figures such as Leon Trotsky, Lev Kamenev, and Nikolay Bukharin, but it was precisely this position that allowed Stalin to compile a dossier on every influential Party member and made it easy for him to put his people in key posts. Moreover, it was precisely this access to compromising information about leading Party functionaries that played an essential role in his fierce political struggle within the Party for its top post. After Vladimir Lenin died in 1924, Stalin assumed the duties of ideologist for building socialism in one country: the USSR. In 1928, he declared the beginning of collectivization in the government and the First Five-Year Plan for developing the country. In 1934, the USSR entered the period of the Great Terror and of the show trials. Stalin gradually did away with all prominent figures in the communist movement, old Bolsheviks, “heroes of the October Revolution,” and the top military leadership. Once the upper echelons of state and Party power had been “renovated,” mass repression began against the rank-and-file citizens of the country, affecting all strata of Soviet society. In May 1941, Stalin became chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars (the Soviet government), concentrating all political and state power in his own hands. His role in World War II (1941–1945) is viewed as quite mixed. On the one hand, he tried to put off the beginning of the fight with Nazi Germany for as long as possible, understanding the country’s unpreparedness for war. But on the other hand, his strategic and tactical miscalculations were largely to blame for the USSR’s near defeat in the first months of the war. Victory was achieved over Nazism at the bloody price of 27 million Soviet lives. In the postwar period, despite the devastation in which the Soviet state found itself, he sanctioned the allocation of significant resources to support so-called “people’s democracies.” At the end of the 1940s, at his initiative, a new wave of repression was begun in the Soviet Union, the best known of which were the “Doctors’ Plot,” in which doctors were accused of attempting to kill Stalin, and the trial concerning the journals Leningrad and Star [Zvezda], after which figures such as the writer Mikhail Zoshchenko and the poet Anna Akhmatova were subjected to persecution and ostracism from public life. The death of the “leader of the peoples” on March 5, 1953 was a shock to the country’s population, many of whom blindly believed that Stalin’s rule was unshakable, and even that he was physically immortal. A sarcophagus with Stalin’s embalmed body was set up in the mausoleum on Red Square in Moscow. However, three years later, Nikita Khrushchëv began to unmask Stalin’s cult of personality at the 20th Congress of the CPSU. In 1961, his body was removed from the mausoleum and buried next to the Kremlin wall. Stalin’s name was also removed from the many provinces, cities, enterprises, and institutions of the USSR that had been named in his honor.
Tomsky (Yefremov), Mikhail Pavlovich (1880–1936): noted Soviet public figure. Born to a petty bourgeois family, Tomsky became a blue-collar worker in St. Petersburg at the age of 18. Taking an interest in Marxism, he became a professional revolutionary, participating actively in revolutionary actions from 1905 to 1907 and in the October Revolution of 1917. From 1918 to 1921 and 1922 to 1929, he was chairman of the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions. In the late 1920s, he spoke out openly against the use of extraordinary measures to carry out collectivization and industrialization. From 1929 to 1930, he was deputy chairman of the VSNKh. From 1919 to 1934, he was a member of the RCP(b) Central Committee. In an environment of political persecution and mass repression, and faced with the prospect of inevitable arrest, he committed suicide in 1936.
Trotsky (Bronstein), Lev (Leon; Leyba) Davidovich (1879– 1940): noted Soviet Party and public figure, one of the organizers of the 1917 October Revolution, and one of the founders of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army. Born to a prosperous Jewish family, he was the son of a well-to-do landholder and lessee. He completed the technical high school in Nikolayiv, and in his youth, became imbued with the ideas of the narodniks [revolutionary populists]. In 1896 in Nikolayiv, he participated in the creation of the South Russian Workers’ Union, which had the goal of politically enlightening workers and struggling for their economic interests. In January 1898, he was arrested and sentenced by a court to four years’ exile in Siberia. In August 1902, he escaped exile and left the country on a forged passport in which he wrote the last name Trotsky, which later became his Party pseudonym. He settled in London and became friends with the leaders of the Russian Social Democratic Party. In October 1902, he befriended Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin, on whose recommendation he was co-opted into editing the Marxist newspaper Iskra [“The Spark”]. He returned to Russia illegally in February 1905, soon after the 1905 Russian Revolution began. He actively engaged in revolutionary propaganda in the press and at workers’ meetings. In October 1905, he was elected deputy chairman, and then chairman of the St. Petersburg Soviet of Workers’ Deputies and edited its print publication, the newspaper Izvestia. He was arrested in December 1905, and in prison, wrote the book Results and Prospects [Itogi i perspektivy], in which he formulated the theory of permanent revolution. In late 1906, he was permanently exiled to Siberia and deprived of all civil rights. He fled the country while in transit and lived abroad until May 1917. After returning to Petrograd, he joined a group of adherents of the Bolshevik tendency. He severely criticized the Provisional Government and came out in favor of the metamorphosis of the bourgeois democratic revolution into a socialist one. He was arrested and imprisoned. He was accepted as a member of the Bolshevik Party in absentia, as a victim of repressions of the Provisional Government, at the 6th Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (bolshevik) or RSDLP(b) in late July to early August 1917 and immediately elected to its governing body, the Central Committee. He was released on September 2 (15), 1917, and on September 25 (October 8), 1917, elected chairman of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies. He actively supported Lenin’s proposal to organize an armed uprising immediately. On October 12 (25), he initiated the creation of a Military Revolutionary Committee to protect Petrograd from counterrevolutionary forces. He headed preparations for the October Revolution and was its actual leader. After the Bolshevik victory on October 25 (November 7), 1917, he joined the first Soviet government as people’s commissar for foreign affairs. On March 14, 1918, he was appointed people’s commissar for military affairs; on March 19, chairman of the Supreme Military Council; and on September 6, chairman of the Revolutionary War Council of the Republic. He headed efforts to create the Red Army, making energetic efforts to professionalize it by actively recruiting former officers (“military specialists”). He established strict discipline in the army, decisively coming out against its democratization. He employed severe repressive measures, being one of the theoreticians and practitioners of the “Red Terror.” In March 1919, he joined the first Politburo of the RCP(b) Central Committee. He was involved in the creation of the Comintern, authoring its Manifesto. From March 20 to December 10, 1920, he served as acting people’s commissar of railroads, using harsh measures to restore railroad transportation. On his death bed, Vladimir Lenin wrote a letter to the Congress characterizing Trotsky “as the most capable member of the Central Committee, and one of two outstanding leaders.” After Lenin’s death in January 1924, Trotsky ended up politically isolated among the highest Party and government leaders of the USSR. On January 26, 1925, he was removed from his post as chairman of the Revolutionary War Council and appointed member of the Presidium of the All-Union Council of the National Economy (VSNKh), the central state industrial agency. In 1927, he was expelled from the AUCP(b). In January 1928, he was exiled to Almaty, in Kazakhstan, and was deported from the USSR early in 1929 along with his family. He lived as an émigré in Turkey, France, Norway, and Mexico. In 1938, he united a group of his supporters throughout the world to form the so-called Fourth International. He was sentenced to death in absentia in the USSR, and his first wife and youngest son Sergey Sedov were shot in the Soviet Union in 1937. On August 20, 1940, he was fatally wounded by Spanish communist Ramón Mercader, who had become a close associate. Trotsky died the following day, and after cremation was buried on the grounds of his house in Coyoacán, Mexico.
CHAPTER THREE: The New Russia’s Oil
Bogdanov, Vladimir Leonidovich (b. 1951): General Manager of Surgutneftegaz. He was born in 1951 in the village of Suyerka, Uporovo District, Tyumen Region. He graduated from Tyumen Industrial Institute in 1973. From 1973 to 1976, he worked as an assistant toolpusher and as a toolpusher at Nizhnevartovsk Drilling Administration 1. From 1976 to 1978, he worked as a production engineer at Surgut Drilling Administration 2. From 1978 to 1989, he was deputy director of a drilling administration at Yuganskneftegaz Production Association. From 1980 to 1983, he was deputy general manager for drilling at Surgutneftegaz Production Association. From 1983 to 1984, he was deputy director for drilling at Glavtyumenneftegaz Association. In 1984, he became head of Surgutneftegaz Production Association, later reorganized as a joint-stock company. In June 1999, he became a member of the presidium of the Political Council of the Yugra Interregional Sociopolitical Association. In October 2000, he became a member of the Russian Government Council on Entrepreneurship. He has been elected several times as deputy to the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous District Duma. He is a member of the Standing Commission on Region Policy, an active member of the Academy of Mining Sciences, and an active member of the Academy of Natural Sciences. He is a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Technological Sciences. He has been awarded the Order “For Service to the Fatherland,” Fourth Degree (1997), and the All-Russian Business Olympus Prize.
Khodorkovsky, Mikhail Borisovich (b. 1963): Russian entrepreneur, and former president of Yukos Oil Company. He was born in 1963 in Moscow, and graduated from the D. I. Mendeleyev Moscow Chemical Engineering Institute in 1986 with a major in production engineering. From 1986 to 1987, he was deputy section head at the Frunze District Committee of the Communist Youth League. From 1987 to 1989, he was director of the Youth Scientific and Technical Creativity Center, later renamed the Interdisciplinary Scientific and Technical Program Center (MENATEP). From May 1989 to 1990, he was chairman of the Executive Board of the MENATEP Commercial Innovation Bank of Scientific and Technical Progress. From 1990 to 1991, he was general manager of the MENATEP Interbank Association. In 1992, he became chairman of the Investment Fund for Assistance to the Fuel and Energy Industry. In March 1993, he became Russian deputy minister of fuel and energy. In September 1995, he became chairman of the Board of Directors of Rosprom. In April 1996, he became first vice president of Yukos Oil Company, and was elected chairman of the Board of Directors three months later. In February 1997, he became chairman of the Executive Board of the management company formed by Rosprom and Yukos to manage the oil company. In 1998, after the reorganization of Yukos, he became chairman of the Executive Board of Yukos-Moscow LLC. He was arrested by Russian law-enforcement agencies in October 2003 after numerous investigations of various Yukos entities and the filing of serious charges against a number of company managers. In November 2003, he voluntarily resigned as head of Yukos. The Russian Attorney General’s office charged him with numerous offenses, including fraud and tax evasion. In late April 2005, the Meshchansky District Court in Moscow found the former Yukos head guilty under nine articles of the Russian Federation Criminal Code and sentenced him to nine years incarceration, to be served in a standard prison colony.
Medvedev, Dmitry Anatolyevich (b. 1965): Current president of the Russian Federation. He was born 1965 in Leningrad [now St. Petersburg], and graduated from the School of Law at Leningrad State University in 1987. From 1987 to 1990, while a graduate student at Leningrad State University, he worked as an assistant in the Civil Law Department of that institution. In 1990, he became a candidate of law after defending his dissertation on “Problems in the Exercise of Civil Rights by a State Enterprise.” From 1990 to 1991, he was an assistant to the chairman of the Leningrad Council of People’s Deputies. From 1991 to 1996, he was a legal expert at the Committee on Foreign Relations of the St. Petersburg Mayor’s Office. From 1996 to 1999, he was an assistant professor at Leningrad (later St. Petersburg) State University. In November 1999, he was appointed deputy director of the Russian Government Administration, and on December 31, 1999, he was appointed deputy director of the Russian President’s Administration. On June 3, 2000, he was approved as first deputy director of the President’s Administration. In October 2003, he was appointed director of the Russian President’s Administration. In June 2005, he became first deputy prime minister of the Russian Government. In March 2008, he won a strong victory in the election for president of Russia.
Miller, Aleksey Borisovich (b. 1962): chairman of the Board of Gazprom since May 2001 and candidate of economics. He was born January 31, 1962 in Leningrad [now St. Petersburg], and graduated from the Leningrad Finance and Economics Institute with a major in economics. From 1984 to 1986, he worked as an engineer economist; from 1986 to 1989, as a graduate student; and in 1990, as a junior research associate at the Leningrad Scientific Research and Design Institute for Housing and Civil Construction [LenNIIproyekt]. From 1990 to 1991, he worked at the Committee for Economic Reform of the Leningrad City Council Executive Committee. From 1991 to 1996, he worked at the Committee on Foreign Relations of the St. Petersburg Mayor’s Office. From 1996 to 1999, he was director for development and investments of St. Petersburg Seaport. From 1999 to 2000, he was general manager of Baltic Pipeline System. In July 2000, he was appointed Russian deputy minister of energy, supervising the ministry’s foreign economic activities and international cooperation in the fuel and energy industries. On May 30, 2001, he was elected chairman of the board of Gazprom. In July 2006, he was appointed a member of the Presidium of the RF President’s Council for the Realization of Priority National Projects and Demographic Policy; he is a member of the Governing Board of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs (RSPP). He has been awarded the Order “For Service to the Fatherland,” Fourth Degree (2006), and Kazakhstan’s Order of Dostik, Second Degree, for his contribution to the development of relations between Russia and Kazakhstan (2006). He is married, with one son.
Putin, Vladimir Vladimirovich (b. 1952): noted Russian public figure, President of the Russian Federation (2000–2008). He was born 1952 in Leningrad [now St. Petersburg], and graduated from the School of Law at Leningrad State University in 1975. He holds the degree of candidate of economics. From 1985 to 1990, he served on the USSR Committee for State Security [KGB]. In 1990, he worked at Leningrad State University as a vice president for international affairs. In 1991, he became an adviser to the chairman of the Leningrad City Council, then chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations of the St. Petersburg Mayor’s Office. From 1994 to 1996, he was first deputy head of the Administration of St. Petersburg. From 1996 to 1997, he was deputy chargé d’affaires of the Russian Federation President. In 1998, he became first deputy director of the Russian President’s Administration. In 1999, he became director of the Russian Federation Federal Security Service and Secretary of the Russian Security Council. From December 1999 to March 2000, he was acting president of Russia. From 2000 to 2008, he served as president of the Russian Federation. In May 2008, he became chairman of the Russian Government [prime minister]. His high confidence rating among the people and favorable competition for Russia on world commodity markets give him, as the most prestigious representative of the government, the ability to successfully promote the rapid development of the nation’s economy.
Takhautdinov, Shafagat Fahrazovich (b. 1946): general manager of Tatneft since June 1999 and doctor of economics. He was born in 1946 in the village of Abdrakhmanovo, Almetyevsk District, the Republic of Tatarstan. He graduated from the I. M. Gubkin Moscow Institute of Petrochemical and Gas Industry. His labor biography begins in 1965 with a position as assistant toolpusher at the Almetyevsk Drilling Administration. Subsequently, he rose consistently through the ranks from oil production operator to supervisor of well servicing to shop director. In 1978, he began working as head of the Dzhalilneft Administration, and then as head of the Almetyevneft Oil and Gas Production Administration. In 1990, he became chief engineer and first deputy general manager of Tatneft. On June 21, 1999, he became general manager of Tatneft. In March 2004, he became a deputy to the third Republic of Tatarstan State Council. He is a member of the Republic of Tatarstan State Council Committee on Ecology, Natural Resources, and Land Use. He has been awarded the Republic of Tatarstan State Prize, is an Honored Worker of the Russian Oil and Gas Industry, an Honored Worker of the Russian Ministry of Fuel and Energy, and an Honored Worker of the Republic of Tatarstan. He has been awarded the Order “For Service to the Fatherland,” Fourth Degree, the Order of the Red Banner of Labor, the Order of Friendship, the medal “For Distinguished Labor,” and other honors. He is married, with a son and a daughter.
Trutnev, Yury Petrovich (b. 1956): Russian Federation minister of natural resources and ecology since March 2004. He was born in 1956 in Perm, and graduated from Perm Polytechnic Institute in 1978 with a major in mining engineering. From 1978 to 1981, he worked as an engineer and a junior research associate at the Perm Scientific Research and Design Technological Institute of the Oil Industry [PermNIPIneft]. From 1981 to 1988, he worked in elective posts in public youth organizations. In 1989, he became deputy general manager of the company Yevraziya [“Eurasia”]. From 1989 to 1996, he served as general manager of E.K.S. Limited, and president of E.K.S. International. From 1996 to 2000, he was mayor of Perm. On December 3, 2000, he was elected governor of Perm region. On March 9, 2004, he was appointed Russian minister of natural resources by presidential decree. He is a member of the Russian State Council. He has received the Order of Merit. He is married, with two sons.
Yeltsin, Boris Nikolayevich (1931–2007): noted Soviet politician and public figure, and first president of the Russian Federation. He graduated from the School of Construction at the S. M. Kirov Urals Polytechnic Institute (Sverdlovsk, now Yekaterinburg) in 1955, and worked in his field for nearly 13 years, rising through the ranks of the official hierarchy in the construction industry, from supervisor of a construction trust to director of the Sverdlovsk Home Building Integrated Works. He joined the CPSU in 1961, and began his Party career in 1968 as head of a construction section at the Sverdlovsk Regional Party Committee. He was then elected secretary (1975–1976) and first secretary (1976–1985) of the Regional Party Committee. He worked briefly as head of the construction section of the Central Committee, then was elected secretary of the CPSU Central Committee (1985). In December 1985, he became first secretary of the Moscow City Committee of the CPSU and a candidate for membership in the Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee (1986–1988). In 1987, his political destiny took a major turn: at the October plenary session of the CPSU Central Committee, he delivered a speech demanding more decisive reforms. The resolution of the Party plenary session was to characterize the speech as politically erroneous. From 1987 to 1989, he worked as first vice-chairman of the USSR State Committee for Construction, with the rank of minister. In the first free elections in March 1989, he became a USSR people’s deputy, and then chairman of the Construction Committee of the Supreme Soviet. He was elected co-chairman of the Interregional Deputies Group (over 300 USSR People’s Deputies), the first parliamentary opposition in many years. In 1990, he was elected chairman of the RSFSR Supreme Soviet, and on June 12, 1991, President of the RSFSR. On December 8, 1991, at a meeting in the Bialowieza Forest in Belarus, the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus signed an agreement abolishing the USSR and creating the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). On December 25, 1991, the RSFSR was renamed the Russian Federation. By then, the president of Russia had already formed a government, whose actual leader was Yegor Gaydar. In April 1993, Russia held a referendum, in which the majority of the voters supported the president. On December 31, 1999, after State Duma elections were won by the pro-government Unity bloc, he retired. He died on April 23, 2007 in Moscow, and is buried in Novodevichy Cemetery.
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