Leader
Moisei Uritsky
Moisei Solomonovich Uritsky · 1873–1918
Portrait photograph. Wikimedia Commons.
Uritsky’s death was used, with the attempt on Lenin the same day, as the public pretext for declaring the Red Terror.
Origin and religion
Born to a Jewish merchant family in Ukraine. A Social Democrat who ended up with the Bolsheviks. His assassin, Leonid Kannegiser, was also Jewish — a military cadet and poet tied to Socialist Revolutionary circles. The murder was not an ethnic morality play. It was a political killing inside a collapsing empire.
Jewish family. Atheist.
Responsibilities
- Chairman of the Petrograd Cheka
He ran the Petrograd Cheka in the spring and summer of 1918, when that city was shooting hostages and officers. He was killed on 30 August 1918.
The record
The Sovnarkom decree “On Red Terror” is dated 5 September 1918. It ordered mass shooting of White Guards and bourgeoisie, isolation of class enemies in concentration camps, and the publication of the names of the executed. Uritsky became a martyr on posters. The policy did not need a martyr. Lenin had already called for public hangings in Penza.
What they said
No short quotation is filed here. A line that cannot be tied to a book, a decree, or a named archive does not get invented to make the page symmetrical. The record above is the case.
Others filed as Jewish
- Leon Trotsky — Chairman of the Petrograd Soviet (1917)
- Yakov Sverdlov — Chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee
- Grigory Zinoviev — Party boss of Petrograd
Evidence marks such as Opened archive are explained in How to read.