the Congress between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, Krasikov joined the Bolsheviks, and stayed in Switzerland to help Lenin create a separate the Bolshevik organisation Krasikov returned to Russia during the 1905 Revolution, and was in charge of the agitation department of the Petersburg Party Committee. At the III Congress of the RSDLP he was a delegate with an advisory voice. After the revolution had been suppressed, he drifted out of revolutionary politics to practise as a lawyer After the 1917 Russian Revolution his positions were related to legal issues and he is considered to be among the principal creators of the Soviet legal system, along with Andrey Vyshinsky. He was Deputy People's Commissar of Justice from 1918. He was the initiator of the first Soviet anti-religious publication, Revolution and Church. Krasikov was Prosecutor General of the Supreme Court from 1924, and Deputy Chairman of the Supreme Court from 1933 to 1938. He was removed from his seat on the Supreme Court during the Great Purge "without explanation." Krasikov died in 1939 in the city of Zheleznovodsk, where he was being treated for his illness, and was buried there. Personality Israel Getzler, in Martov: A Political Biography of a Russian Social Democrat (Cambridge U.P., 1967, p. 74), says he was "intensely disliked by all and sundry [with the exception of Lenin]... [Boris Nikolaevsky] sums him up as a drunken brawler... J. Steinberg, Als ich Volkskommisar war (Munich, 1929), has devoted an entire chapter... to Krasikov's misdeeds as co-chairman (together with the notorious M. Iu. Kozlovsky) of the Cheka of the Petrograd Soviet in the winter of 1917-18." References 1870 births 1939 deaths Politicians from Krasnoyarsk People from Yeniseysk Governorate Old Bolsheviks Russian Social Democratic Labour Party members Soviet lawyers Russian revolutionaries Russian atheists 20th-century Russian lawyers All-Russian Central Executive Committee members Central Executive Committee of the Soviet Union members Russian atheism activists Prisoners of the Peter and Paul Fortress