Varvara Yakovleva

Varvara Nikolaevna Yakovleva (; 19 December 1885 – 11 September 1941) was a prominent Bolshevik party member and Soviet government official who later supported Leon Trotsky's attempt to democratize the party. She was sentenced to 20 years in prison in 1938 for membership in a "diversionary terrorist organization." She was later shot in the Oryol Central Prison. Early life Yakovleva was born to the middle-class family of a tradesman of Jewish descent 1885 in Moscow. Her father was a convert to Orthodox Christianity. She joined the Bolsheviks in January 1904, aged 18, as a student at a women's college in Moscow, where she was studying mathematics and physics, and was immediately involved in the illegal distribution of party literature. During the 1905 Revolution, she was violently assaulted on the breasts, which damaged her health, and was a cause of the tuberculosis that she later contracted in exile in Siberia. She was first arrested in 1906, and again in 1907, and barred from living in Moscow. Arrested again in December 1910, she was sentenced to four years exile in Narym, in Siberia, but escaped, and emigrated to Berlin to get medical treatment. She returned via Cracow, where she met Vladimir Lenin and made arrangements to smuggle illegal literature and correspondence across the border. In October 1912, as an agent of the Central Committee in Moscow, but was arrested for the fourth time in 1913, and sent back to Narym, but escaped again, to St Petersburg, where she was soon arrested and deported to Astrakhan. Career post-1917 Yakovleva was able to return to Moscow late in 1916, and was appointed secretary of the Moscow regional committee of the Bolshevik party. In August 1917, she was elected a candidate for membership in the Bolshevik Central Committee, making her the third most prominent woman Bolshevik, after Alexandra Kollontai and Yelena Stasova. She took notes at the meeting that set the date for the October Revolution of 1917, and took a leading part in organising the takeover of power in Moscow. In December 1917, she appointed a member of the collegium of the NKVD, but a month later was transferred to economic work as head of Vesenka. In February 1918, Yakovleva supported the Left Communists, led by Nikolai Bukharin, who opposed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which ended the war between Russia and Germany at the cost of leaving most of Ukraine and the Baltic states under German occupation.