Mikhail Boguslavsky

Mikhail Solomonovich Boguslavsky (Russia: Михаил Соломонович Богуславский) (1 May 1886 – 1 February 1937) was Russian revolutionary and politician, who was tried and executed as a former supporter of Leon Trotsky.

The son of a poor Jewish tailor from a village in Poltava province, Ukraine, he left school at the age of 12 to work in a printing house in Kiev, and then Kharkiv.

He joined the Bolsheviks in March 1917, after the February Revolution, and was one of the leading figures in bringing communist rule to Ukraine he joined the RSDLP (b) after the October Revolution, as secretary of the Central Committee of the Ukrainian soviets, and a member of the board People's Commissariat of Finance, and as a leader of red Guard detachments.

He was expelled from the communist party of the Soviet Union at its Fifteenth Congress, in December 1927, and deported to Novosibirsk, where he was appointed a member of the Siberian Planning Commission.

Boguslavsky was arrested on 5 August 1936, just before the start of the great Moscow show trials, and after just nine days in the hands of his interrogators, began to confess to trumped up charges of sabotage and terrorism.