Konstantin Yurenev

[2] When his term of exile was completed, he settled in St Petersburg, but split with the Bolsheviks their leader Vladimir Lenin pronounced that all Mensheviks were to be expelled from the RSDLP.

Anticipating that the prosecutor would appeal, he hid out for two months, then moved to Simferopol, where he was arrested and drafted into the Imperial Russian Army, but absconded after about ten days and returned to Petrograd (St Petersburg) to live illegally.

He was in favour of creating a coalition government with other socialist parties, yet despite his concerns about one party rule, he helped found the Red Army as a member of the People's Commissariat for Military Affairs of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic from February 1918, and head of the All-Russian Bureau of Military Commissars, a predecessor of the Political Directorate of the Soviet Red Army from April 1918.

[5]In July 1924, he hosted a banquet in the embassy for Benito Mussolini, only a month after the murder of Giacomo Matteotti, which had revolted liberal and communist opinion in Italy.

This provoked a protest from the Central Committee of the Italian Communist Party, and from the Comintern representative in Italy, Jules Humbert-Droz, who demanded Yurenev's dismissal.

[6] Alexander Barmine claimed that Yurenev ignored advice from his own staff and from Moscow by entertaining Mussolini,[5] but his actions were in line with Soviet foreign policy, which was to build alliances with the countries that lost out from the Treaty of Versailles.