Aleksei Stetskii

[2] The family later moved to Chernihiv province of Ukraine, where as a teenager, he distributed anti-war literature early in the World War I.

He did not graduate from the university because he was expelled in 1916 for his revolutionary activities, and banned from living in Petrograd, though he returned illegally just before the February Revolution.

In 1924–27, Stetsky was a member of the Central Control Commission, chaired by Sergo Ordzhonikidze, which heard disciplinary cases against supporters of the Left Opposition.

In summer 1928, Stalin executed an abrupt change in party policy, sending detachments into villages to force the peasants to hand over grain to be used to finance a rapid expansion of industry.

When the Central Committee met in July, Stetsky was one of the main speakers opposing the new policy, along with Bukharin, but found himself in a minority, and was disowned by the delegation from Leningrad, of which he was a member.

[9] After the assassination of Kirov in December 1934, Stetsky sent a memo to party leaders, dated 23 January 1935, telling them that a painting created to mark the event by an artist named Nikolai Mikhailov (1898–1940) was 'counter-revolutionary' because it included an image of a skeleton whose "feet, limbs and so forth are given in different colours and patches", while the "shine and colour of the hard part of the skull is emphasised, and could not be a human head."