Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

Sverdlov returned to Petrograd following the February Revolution and became secretary of the Bolshevik Central Committee. This was a role for which he was very well suited: he was possessed of a phenomenal memory, seemed to know personally almost every member of the party, and was a meticulous administrator. Following the October Revolution (from 8 November 1917), he became chairman of the VTsIK of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, making him the de facto head of state of Soviet Russia. In November 1917, he was elected to the Constituent Assembly, as a representative of the Simbirsk region, but he was one of the main instigators of the assembly’s dispersal on 6 January 1918. He became a close and trusted ally of V. I. Lenin (in effect, his “right-hand man”), playing a key role in persuading party members to accept such unpopular measures as the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918), and it was he who, on 16 July 1918, signed the order for the execution of the Romanov family at Ekaterinburg. He was also, in 1918, the chairman of the editing commission for the Constitution of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and chairman of the Central Bureau of Communist Organizations of the Occupied Territories.

The enormous workload that Sverdlov accepted, however, undermined his health. He died of influenza at Orel, in March 1919, and was buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis. In Soviet times, there was scarcely a town or city anywhere in the USSR that did not have a street or square named in his honor. In Moscow, the central square outside the Bolshoi Theater was renamed Sverdlov Square, and the nearby Metro station was given the same appellation when it opened in 1938. In 1990, the square was renamed Theater Square (and the following year the statue of Sverdlov that adorned it was removed). From 1924 to 1991, the city of Ekaterinburg was renamed Sverdlovsk in his honor (and an imposing statue of him still stands there); a new city in the Lugansk oblast′ of Ukraine was named Sverdlovsk in 1938; and the town of Aydarbek in the Lori province of Armenia was renamed Sverdlov. The destroyer Novik (commissioned for the Imperial Russian Navy in 1913) was also renamed The Iakov Sverdlov in 1923, and the first ship of the Sverdlov class of cruisers (launched on 5 July 1950) was also named after him. He was also the subject of the fawning Stalinist biopic Iakov Sverdlov (dir. S. I. Iutkevich, 1940), from which scenes depicting Stalin were excised upon the film’s reissue in 1965.

SVINHUFVUD, PEHR EVIND (15 December 1861–29 February 1944). The Finnish lawyer, judge, and rightist politician Pehr Svinhufvud (popularly known as Ukko-Pekka, “Old Man Pete”) was born in the village of Sääksmäki, in southwest Finland, into an ancient Swedish noble family. He was the son of a merchant seaman. After attending the Swedish-language Gymnasium in Helsingfors (Helsinki), he graduated in 1881 from the Imperial Alexander University in the Finnish capital (obtaining his MA the following year). He then began a legal career, becoming famous for using his position as a judge in the Finnish court of appeal to resist the creeping Russification of the Grand Duchy during from the 1890s, a stance that earned him dismissal from his post in 1902. He subsequently served as speaker in the Finnish parliament (1907–1912), and from 1908 worked as a judge at Lappee. In November 1914, he was dismissed from that latter post for refusing to obey the Russian authorities and was exiled to Tomsk. Following the February Revolution, he returned to Helsingfors and was hailed as a national hero.