- Genrikh Yagoda
Genrikh Grigor'evich Yagoda (born Yenokh (Enoch) Gershonovich Ieguda ; ; 1891 - March 15 1938) was the head of the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, from 1934 to 1936. Yagoda was born in Rybinsk in a Jewish family, and joined the Bolsheviks in 1907. After the October Revolution of 1917, he rose through the ranks of the "Cheka" (the NKVD's predecessor), becoming Felix Dzerzhinsky's second deputy in September 1923.
- Kim Philby
Harold Adrian Russell "Kim" Philby or H.A.R. Philby, (1 January, 1912 – 11 May, 1988) was a high-ranking member of British intelligence, a communist, and spy for the Soviet Union's NKVD and KGB. In 1963, Philby was revealed as a member of the spy ring known as the Cambridge Five, along with Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross. Of the five, Philby is believed to have done the most damage to British and American intelligence, …
- Nikolai Yezhov
Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov was a senior figure in the NKVD (the Soviet secret police) during the period of the Great Purge. His reign is sometimes known as the "Yezhovschina" (or "Yezhovshchina",, the "Yezhov era").
- Pavel Sudoplatov
Pavel Sudoplatov was a member of the intelligence services of the Soviet Union who rose to the rank of lieutenant general. He was involved in several famous incidents of the early Cold War, including the assassination of Leon Trotsky, and the Soviet espionage program which obtained information about the atomic bomb from the Manhattan Project. His autobiography, "Special Tasks", made him well-known outside Russia, …
- Richard Sorge
Richard Sorge (Russian: Рихард Зорге) (October 4, 1895 - November 7, 1944) is considered to have been one of the best Soviet spies in Japan before and during World War II, which has gained him fame among spies, and espionage enthusiasts. His NKVD codename was "Ramsay". He was also a journalist, working in Germany and Japan.
- Lavrentiy Beria
Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria (Georgian: ლავრენტი ბერია, Lavrenti Pavles dze Beria; Russian: Лаврентий Павлович Берия; 29 March, 1899 – 23 December, 1953) was a Soviet politician and chief of the Soviet security and police apparatus. Beria is now remembered chiefly as the executor of Joseph Stalin's Great Purge of the 1930s and 1940's, …
- Alexander Orlov
Alexander Mikhailovich Orlov (Leiba Lazarevich Felbing,) (21 August 1895-25 March 1973) was a Soviet espionage administrator. He defected to the U.S. in 1938. He warned Leon Trotsky of his impending assassination. His expertise made him an obvious candidate for the OGPU, the political police that preceded the NKVD.
- Ramón Mercader
Jaume Ramon Mercader del Rio Hernández was a Spanish Communist who became famous as the murderer of Leon Trotsky. Some allege he was a Soviet agent, while others suspect that he was simply a disgruntled former follower of Trotsky.
- Christian Rakovsky
Christian Rakovsky was a Bulgarian-born socialist revolutionary, a Bolshevik politician and Soviet diplomat; he was also noted as a journalist, physician, and essayist. Rakovsky's political career took him throughout the Balkans and into France and Imperial Russia; for part of his life, he was also a Romanian citizen. A lifelong collaborator of Leon Trotsky, he was a prominent activist of the Second International, …
- Harry Gold
Harry Gold (December 12, 1910-1974) was a laboratory chemist who was convicted of being the "courier" for a number of Soviet spy rings during the Manhattan Project. Gold was born in Switzerland to poor Russian Jewish immigrants. As a young man he became interested in Socialism which eventually led him to contacts within the Communist movement. After leaving school, Gold worked for the Pennsylvania Sugar Company as a laboratory assistant.
- Oleg Kalugin
Oleg Danilovich Kalugin, (born September 6, 1934) is a former KGB spy. He was the longtime head of KGB operations in the United States and later a critic of the agency.
- Leon Sedov
Leon Lvovich Sedov was the son of the Russian Communist leader Leon Trotsky and his second wife Natalia Sedova. Leon Sedov was born when his father was in prison facing life sentence for having led the first Soviet in the Revolution of 1905. He lived separately from his parents after the October Revolution in order not to be seen as privileged. He later supported his father in the struggle against Josef Stalin and became a leader of the Trotskyist movement in his own right.
- Walter Krivitsky
Walter G. Krivitsky (1899, - February 1941) was a Soviet spy who defected before World War II. Born Samuel Ginsberg in Podwoloczyska, Poland he adopted the name Krivitsky (a name based on the Slavic root for "crooked, twisted") as a revolutionary "nom de guerre" when he entered Soviet Military Intelligence around 1917. He operated as a "nelegal" (agent with false name and papers) in Germany, Austria, Italy and Hungary, …
- Naftaly Frenkel
Naftaly Aronovich Frenkel, Soviet citizen and Chekist (member of the Soviet secret police). Frenkel is best known for his role in the organization of work in Gulag, starting from the forced labor camp of the Solovetsky Islands, which is recognized as one of the earliest sites of the Gulag. Naftaly Frenkel was of Jewish origin of uncertain descent. In some documents he claimed that he was born in Haifa, then Ottoman Empire. Other sources mention Constantinople.
- Leonid Nikolaev
Leonid Nikolaev (1904-December 29, 1934) was the assassin of Sergei Kirov, the first secretary of the Leningrad branch of the Communist Party. He was a troubled young Soviet Communist Party member in Leningrad. He was a small, thin man, about five foot tall and even as an adult showing the effects of childhood malnutrition. He had difficulty holding a job, and had been reprimanded by the Party for having refused a posting that was not to his liking.
- Igor Kurchatov
Igor Vasilyevich Kurchatov (Russian: И́горь Васи́льевич Курча́тов was a Soviet/Russian physicist. He was the leader of the Soviet atomic bomb project. Kurchatov was born in "Simsky zavod", Ufa Guberniya (now city of "Sim", Chelyabinsk Oblast). After completing Simferopol gymnasium №1 he studied physics at Crimea State University and ship building at the Polytechnical Institute in Petrograd.
- Nadezhda Mandelstam
Nadezhda Yakovlevna Mandelstam was a Russian writer and a wife of poet Osip Mandelstam. Born in Saratov into a middle-class Jewish family, she spent her early years in Kiev. After the gymnasium she studied art. After their marriage in 1921, Nadezhda and Osip Mandelstam lived in Ukraine, Petrograd, Moscow, and Georgia. Osip was arrested in 1934 for his "Stalin Epigram" and exiled with Nadezhda to Cherdyn, Perm region and later to Voronezh.
- Lev Kopelev
Lev Zalmanovich Kopelev, German spelling Lew Kopelew: April 9, 1912 – June 18, 1997) was a Soviet Russian author and a dissident. Kopelev was born in Kiev, Ukraine, to a middle-class Jewish family. In 1926, his family moved to Kharkov. While a student at Kharkov State University in the philosophy faculty, Kopelev began writing in the Russian and Ukrainian languages; some of his articles were published in the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper.
- Samuel Dickstein
Samuel Dickstein (February 5, 1885 - April 22, 1954) was a Democratic Congressional Representative from New York, and a New York State Supreme Court Justice. He played a key role in establishing the committee that would become the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which he used to attack fascists, including Nazi sympathizers, and suspected communists. He is reported in Soviet archives as receiving a monthly stipend from the NKVD, …
- Leopold Okulicki
General Leopold Okulicki was a General of the Polish Army and the last commander of the anti-German underground Home Army during the World War II. He was murdered after the war by the Soviet NKVD, the forerunner to the KGB.
- Mark Zborowski
Mark Zborowski (January 27 1908 - April 30 1990) was an NKVD agent (Venona codenames TULIP and KANT) and an anthropologist. He was the NKVD's most valuable mole inside the Trotskyist organization in Paris during the 1930s and in New York during the 1940s. Zborowski was one of four children born into a Jewish family in Kuman, Kiev Gubernia, in 1908.
- Vladimir Dekanozov
Vladimir Georgievich Dekanozov (Dekanozishvili) (Владимир Георгиевич Деканозов (Деканозишвили), June 1898, Baku - 23 December 1953) headed the Soviet foreign intelligence service INO in (GUGB), part of the NKVD, from 1938 to 1939.
- Franz Borkenau
Franz Borkenau (December 15, 1900-May 22, 1957) was an Austrian writer. Borkenau was born in Vienna, Austria, the son of a civil servant. As a university student in Leipzig, his main interests were Marxism and psychoanalysis. In 1921, Borkenau joined the Communist Party of Germany and was active as a Comintern agent until 1929. After graduating from the University of Leipzig in 1924, Borkenau moved to Berlin.
- Kurt Landau
Kurt Landau (January 29, 1903-September ?, 1937) was an Austrian communist, member of the International Left Opposition, author, and Trotskyist. He was murdered by agents of Stalin's NKVD during the Spanish Civil War.
- John Scott
John Scott (1912-1976), was an American writer who worked in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II. The OSS was the predecessor organization to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Scott was alleged to be working for Soviet intelligence. Scott was the son of conservationist and peace activist Scott Nearing. Scott migrated to the Soviet Union in 1932 and worked for many years in Magnitogorsk.
- Martha Dodd
Martha Eccles Dodd (1908 - 1990) (Soviet code name "LIZA") was the daughter of William Dodd, who served as the United States ambassador to Germany between 1933 and 1937. Dodd was later accused of being a Soviet spy. Martha Dodd was born in Ashland, Virginia. She was in her early twenties when she accompanied her father to Berlin, and initially supported the Nazi government of the time.
- Grigory Sokolnikov
Grigory Yakovlevich Sokolnikov (May 21, 1939), born Girsh Yankelevich Brilliant, was an Old Bolshevik and a Soviet politician. He was born to a Jewish railway doctor in present-day Poltava Oblast but eventually moved to Moscow. After the Russian October Revolution he held various government positions. He was People's Commissar of Finance, as well as Soviet ambassador to England. He was a member of the delegation for peace negotiations with Germany, …
- Jacob Golos
Jake Golos (birth name Jacob Rasin or Jacob Raisen) (1890 - November 27, 1943), was a Ukrainian-born Bolshevik revolutionary and Soviet secret police operative in the USSR. He was also a longtime senior official of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) involved in covert work and cooperation with Soviet intelligence agencies.
- Boris Vladimirski
Boris Eremeevich Vladimirsky, (1878 - 1950), was a Soviet painter of the Socialist Realism school. Vladimirski was born in Kiev, Ukraine. He began his artistic studies at age 10, later attending (1906) the Kiev Art College. He exhibited his first painting in 1906. As an official Soviet artist, his work was well received and widely exhibited. His works were aimed at exemplifying the work ethic of the Soviet people; they were displayed in many homes and federal buildings.
- Gustaw Herling-Grudziński
Gustaw Herling-Grudziński was one of the greatest Polish essayists and thinkers. He is best known for writing a personal account of life in the Soviet gulag - "A World Apart". He was born in Kielce into a Jewish family. His studies of Polish literature at Warsaw University were interrupted by the outbreak of the Second World War. During the Fall of 1939 he co-founded an underground resistance organization "Polska Ludowa Akcja Niepodległościowa, PLAN".
- Duncan Lee
Lt. Col. Duncan Chaplin Lee was confidential assistant to Maj. Gen. William ("Wild Bill") Donovan, founder and director of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), World War II-era predecessor of the CIA, during 1942-46. Lee is identified in Venona as the Soviet double agent operating inside OSS under the cover name "Koch.", making him the most senior (known) agent the Soviet Union ever had inside American intelligence.
- Alexander Shelepin
Alexander Nikolayevich Shelepin (Russian: Александр Николаевич Шелепин, 18 August 1918, Voronezh - October 24, 1994) was the head of KGB from December 25, 1958 to November 13, 1961. A history and literature major while studying at the Moscow Institute of Philosophy and Literature, Shelepin was a guerrilla leader during World War II, becoming a senior official of the Communist Youth League in 1943, and at the head of the successor organization, …
- Maurice Halperin
Maurice Hyman Halperin (March 3, 1906-February 9, 1995) was an American writer, professor, diplomat, and Soviet intelligence source (NKVD code name "Hare").
- Vsevolod Nikolayevich Merkulov
Vsevolod Nikolayevich Merkulov, was the head of NKGB from February to July 1941, and again from April 1943 to March 1946. He was a member of the so-called "Georgian mafia" of Lavrenti Beria, head of the NKVD. In 1913, Merkulov graduated from the Tiflis Gymnasium with the gold medal and became a student at St. Petersburg University, Department of Physics and Mathematics. From 1921-1922, he worked as a detective at the Transportation Unit of the Cheka in Georgia.
- Johannes Vares
Johannes Vares, commonly known as Johannes Vares Barbarus, was an Estonian poet, doctor, and politician. Vares was born in Heimtali, current Viljandi County, and educated at Pärnu Gymnasium. He later studied medicine at the University of Kiev, in present-day Ukraine. Vares served as a military physician in World War I, and after that as a military physician for the Estonian army during the Estonian Liberation War (1918-1920), …
- Pavel Fitin
Pavel Mikhailovich Fitin (1907 Ozhogino, Kurgan Region, Soviet Union - 24 December 1971) was a Soviet intelligence officer. Fitin graduated from a program in engineering studies at the Timiryazev Agricultural Academy in 1932 after which he served in the Red Army, then became an editor for the State Publishing House of Agricultural Literature. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) selected him for a special course in foreign intelligence.
- J. Peters
Josef Peters or Joseph Peters also Jozsef Peter, more commonly known as J. Peters, best known for his work for the NKVD's "Inostrannyi Otdel" (special operations) section and the "secret apparatus" of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) underground in the 1930s and '40s. Among his other aliases were Alexander Goldfarb, Isador Boorstein, …
- Alexandru Nicolschi
Alexandru Nicolschi (born Boris Grünberg, his chosen surname was often rendered as Nikolski or Nicolski; Russian: Александр Сергеевич Никольский, "Alexandr Sergeyevich Nikolsky"; June 2, 1915-April 16, 1992) was a Romanian communist activist, Soviet agent and officer, and Securitate chief under the Communist regime.
- Vasily Zarubin
Vasily Mikhailovich Zarubin (1894-1972) was a Soviet intelligence officer. In the United States, he used the cover name Vasily Zubilin and served as Soviet intelligence Rezident from 1941 to 1944. Zarubin's wife, Elizabeth Zubilin, served with him. Zarubin was born in Moscow. He served with the Russian Imperial Army on the Western Front during World War I from 1914. For agitation against the war Zarubin served in a penal battalion.
- Justas Paleckis
Justas Paleckis was a Lithuanian journalist and politician. In 1926-1927, he was a director of the Lithuanian official news agency, ELTA. He later voiced opposition to the ruling elite in Lithuania; in this way, he became a suitable candidate for the Lithuanian communists (manipulated by Soviet envoy Vladimir Dekanozov) to become puppet Prime Minister of Lithuania in 1940 (June 17, 1940 - July 21, 1940), when Lithuania had been occupied by Soviet troops.