Ya

Yakovleva, Varvara Nikolayevna (1884-1944?)

Old Bolshevik, candidate member of Bolshevik Central Committee in 1917. Yakovelva was the minute-taker at the meeting which set the date for the October Revolution.

Born into a middle-class family in Moscow, Yakovleva joined the Bolsheviks in 1904. In 1916-18, she was secretary of Moscow provincial bureau of the Central Committee and a member of Party centre. In 1917-18, she was a candidate for member of the Central Committee of Bolsheviks; from March 1918, a member of board of the NKVD, worked in the Moscow Cheka.

From January 1919 member of the board of the People’s Commissariat of Food. Yakovleva led the food inspection and punitive operations of food-requisition detachments, and had a reputation for the serverity of her operations. In 1918, she spoke against conclusion of a peace with Germany, and was regarded as a “Left Communist.”

During the discussion about trade unions (1920-21) she came out in the support of Bukharin. In 1923 she was a signatory to the October 1923 “Letter of the 46” in support of Trotsky’s program of democratisation of the Party. In 1922, she was an Actingf Minister for Education for the Russian Federation. In 1929 Minister of Finance of the RSFSR.

On 12 September 1937, after the Third Moscow Trial, she was arrested and on 14 May of 1938 sentenced to 20 years in prison for belonging to a “diversionary terrorist organisation.” After the beginning of World War II on the instructions of Beria she was shot in the Orel central prison. Reports differ as to whether she was shot on 11 Sep 1941 or 21 December 1944.

She was posthumously rehabilitated in 1958.

Yaroslavsky, Emilian (1878-1943)

Leader of "The Society of the Godless," an organization designed to produce anti-religious propaganda. He was a member of the presidium of the Central Control Commission, and co-authored its official charges against Trotsky, 1927. Denounced by Stalin in 1931 for mentioning Trotskyism into his textbook on the history of Bolshevism.