Yakov Sverdlov is sometimes regarded as the first head of state of the Soviet Union, although it was not established until 1922, three years after his death.
36 Facts About Yakov Sverdlov
2.
Yakov Sverdlov was active in the Urals during the failed Revolution of 1905, and in the next decade, he was subjected to constant imprisonment and exile.
3.
Yakov Sverdlov was elected chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee in November 1917.
4.
Yakov Sverdlov worked to consolidate Bolshevik control of the new regime and supported the Red Terror campaign and the decossackization policies.
5.
Yakov Sverdlov is considered to have played a major role in authorising the execution of the Romanov family in July 1918.
6.
Yakov Sverdlov died in March 1919 during the Spanish flu at the age of 33 and was buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis.
7.
Yakov Sverdlov's father was a politically active engraver who produced forged documents and stored arms for the revolutionary underground.
8.
The Sverdlov family had six children: two daughters and four sons.
9.
Yakov Sverdlov's father was sympathetic to his children's socialist tendencies and 5 out of his 6 children would become involved in revolutionary politics at some point.
10.
Yakov Sverdlov's eldest brother Zinovy was adopted by Maxim Gorky, who was a frequent guest at the house.
11.
Yakov excelled at school, and after 4 years in gymnasium left to become a pharmacist's apprentice and a "professional revolutionary," Sverdlov joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1902, and then later the Bolshevik faction, supporting Vladimir Lenin.
12.
Yakov Sverdlov was involved in the 1905 revolution while living in the Ural Mountains.
13.
Yakov Sverdlov became a major activist and speaker in Nizhny Novgorod.
14.
In 1906, Yakov Sverdlov was arrested and held in the Yekaterinburg prison until his release.
15.
In March 1911, Yakov Sverdlov was held in the St Petersburg House of Pretrial Detention.
16.
In 1914, Yakov Sverdlov moved to a different village, moving in with his friend Filipp Goloshchyokin, known as Georges.
17.
In early 1917, Yakov Sverdlov received news of the Putilov strike of 1917 in Petrograd.
18.
Yakov Sverdlov first met Lenin in April 1917 and subsequently usurped Elena Stasova as the chairman of the Central Committee Secretariat, and became the secretary of the Central Committee of the Party.
19.
Yakov Sverdlov is sometimes regarded as the first head of state of the Soviet Union, although it was not established until 1922, three years after his death.
20.
Yakov Sverdlov had a prodigious memory and was able to retain the names and details of fellow revolutionaries in exile.
21.
Yakov Sverdlov promoted his friend and suite-mate Varlam Avanesov to second-in-command at the Central Executive Committee, and would later become a top official of the secret police.
22.
Yakov Sverdlov installed Vladimir Volodarsky as commissar of print, propaganda, and agitation until his assassination in 1918.
23.
Yakov Sverdlov was elected chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee in November 1917, of which his wife was a part, becoming thereby de jure head of state of the Russian SFSR until his death.
24.
Yakov Sverdlov played important roles in the decision in January 1918 to end the Russian Constituent Assembly and the subsequent signing on 3 March of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.
25.
In March 1918, Sverdlov and the Central Executive Committee discussed how to best remove the "ulcers that socialism has inherited from capitalism" and Yakov advocated for a concentrated effort to turn the poorest peasants in the villages against their kulak brethren.
26.
Yakov Sverdlov oversaw the interrogation of Lenin's would-be assassin, Fanny Kaplan, and even moved Kaplan from the Cheka headquarters to be held in a basement room underneath Sverdlov's apartment.
27.
Yakov Sverdlov supported the Red Terror campaign, specifically when it came to the policy of decossackization that was started in 1917 as a part of the Russian Civil War.
28.
Yakov Sverdlov wrote that "not a single crime against the revolutionary military spirit will remain unpunished," and that the release of Cossack prisoners was unacceptable.
29.
Yakov Sverdlov is most commonly attributed to have died of either typhus or more likely the Spanish flu, after a political visit to the Ukraine and Oryol.
30.
On 14 March 1919 Yakov Sverdlov lost consciousness and on the 16th he died at the age of 33.
31.
Yakov Sverdlov is buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis in Moscow.
32.
Yakov Sverdlov was succeeded in an interim capacity by Mikhail Vladimirsky, and eventually by Mikhail Kalinin as Chairman of the Central Executive Committee, and by Elena Stasova as Chairwoman of the Secretariat.
33.
Yakov Sverdlov was married to a meteorologist, Klavdia Novgorodtseva, who had joined the Bolsheviks in Yekaterinburg, her home town, in 1904, and was arrested for organising an illegal printing press.
34.
Yakov Sverdlov was arrested again when she returned to Perm, and spent a year in prison.
35.
Yakov Sverdlov and Novgorodtseva had had two children: a son Andrei, who joined the NKVD and became notorious for persecuting other children of eminent Old Bolsheviks, and daughter Vera, born 1915.
36.
Yakov Sverdlov was arrested on 13 October 1938, accused of belonging to the counter-revolutionary terrorist organisation, and shot on 16 April 1939.