Nikolai Uglanov

Nikolai Aleksandrovich Uglanov (; 5 December 1886 – 31 May 1937) was a Russian Bolshevik politician and Soviet statesman who played an important role in the government of the Soviet Union as a Communist Party leader in the city of Moscow during the 1920s. Uglanov was closely associated with the so-called "Right Opposition" associated with Soviet party leader Nikolai Bukharin and he fell from his leadership position during the mass collectivization campaign of 1929. Uglanov was arrested in the summer of 1936 and was executed the following spring during the secret police terror of 1937–1938.

Biography

Early years

Nikolai Aleksandrovich Uglanov was born 5 December 1886 to an ethnic Russian peasant family in the village of Feodoritskoye in Yaroslavl Governorate, located approximately 250 kilometers (160 mi) northeast of Moscow. His father Aleksander Uglanov supplemented the family income by working seasonally in the city of St. Petersburg and at the age of 12 Nikolai followed him there, working as an apprentice metal worker. Nikolai moved between jobs with some regularity and often returned home to Yaroslavl in between jobs. as secretary of the Petrograd guberniia committee of the Russian Communist Party [RKP(b)].

Uglanov was sent to the city of Nizhny Novgorod in 1922 where he was made the head of the regional party organization. One of the eight, Mikhail Tomsky committed suicide, and six of the other seven were defendants at the subsequent show trials in 1937 and 1938.

The exception was Uglanov, who was arrested on 23 August 1936, and whose name was included on a death list signed by Stalin and three others on May 15, 1937. He was sentenced to death at a closed trial on 31 May, and shot the same day. It can be assumed that he was tried in secret because he could not be relied on to 'confess' in open court to crimes that he had not committed. The historian Robert Conquest, in his history of the Great Purge, comparing him with those who were pressured into making false confessions, wrote:

Footnotes