People of the Revolution and the USSR

Comintern Communism 1859–1933 ○ Natural causes

Japanese communist founder who shook Plekhanov's hand and shaped Comintern East Asia strategy

Amsterdam, 1904. When the chair announced that the vice-chairs were the delegates of the two warring powers — Plekhanov and Katayama — the two rose and clasped hands in silence. The hall answered with a standing ovation.

Father of Japanese communism. Born in Okayama, he studied in the United States and founded Japan's first trade union and Social Democratic Party. As a Comintern Executive Committee member he shaped anti-imperialist strategy for East Asia, and was buried in the Kremlin Wall.

Comintern Communism 1870–1932

French socialist and teachers’ union activist who led the Committee for the Third International

He organised internationalist socialists against the war and served as secretary of the Committee for the Third International during the founding of the French Communist Party.

A teacher, Loriot joined the Socialist Party in 1901 and became active in the teachers’ union. During the First World War he opposed support for the war and backed the Zimmerwald position, serving as secretary of the Committee for the Resumption of International Relations and later the Committee for the Third International. At the Tours Congress in 1920 he joined the leadership of the newly formed French Communist Party.

Comintern Communism 1877–1950 ○ Natural causes

Co-founder of Bulgarian communism, from the Comintern to head of state

On 22 September 1923, Kolarov and Dimitrov launched the anti-fascist armed uprising. Crushed, they led the survivors across the Yugoslav border — sentenced to death in absentia, beginning 22 years of exile.

Co-founder of the Bulgarian Communist Party and Comintern General Secretary (1922–24). He personally directed the failed September 1923 uprising, spent 22 years in Soviet exile as the Krestintern's agrarian theorist, then returned to lead Bulgaria's Stalinization as head of state and prime minister.

Comintern Communism 1878–1952 ✕ Executed

The Bolshevik who led the Profintern and was shot with the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee

I have said everything and ask for no leniency. I need full rehabilitation or death. But if it ever turns out that I was innocent, restore me posthumously to the party and publish my rehabilitation in the newspapers.

Born into a Jewish melamed family in Ekaterinoslav Governorate, he joined the RSDLP in 1901. After the 1905 revolution, arrest, and exile, he fled to Paris and worked in the French trade-union movement. As General Secretary of the Red International of Labour Unions (Profintern) from 1921 to 1937, he organized the left wing of the international labor movement. Appointed Deputy Commissar of Foreign Affairs in 1939, he led the Sovinformburo during the war and supervised the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. Arrested in 1949, he retracted his confession at the 1952 JAC trial and dismantled the prosecution's case point by point, but was sentenced to death and shot. Posthumously rehabilitated in 1955.

Comintern Communism 1878–1965 ○ Natural causes

The Comintern's first secretary, who taught Mussolini and branded him traitor

"I had never seen a more wretched human being" — on first meeting Mussolini in Lausanne

Russian-born Italian socialist. First secretary of the Comintern, she taught Mussolini Marxism and publicly denounced him as a traitor when he embraced fascism. She broke with Bolshevism in 1922 and led Italy's maximalist socialist faction.

Comintern Communism 1880–1966 ○ Natural causes

First woman to lead the Ukrainian Bolshevik party; delegate to all seven Comintern congresses

February 1917, Ekaterinoslav. The revolution, Gopner recalled, arrived in the city 'by telegraph.' Barely a year back from exile, she rushed straight to the Bolshevik committee and the editorial office of Zvezda.

The first woman to lead the Ukrainian Bolshevik party. From 1903 onward she moved across underground work, civil war, and the Comintern stage, serving as a delegate to all seven congresses. She survived the Great Terror and spent her later years as a historian.

Comintern Communism 1881–1964 ○ Natural causes

From Finnish labour leader to Comintern veteran and Khrushchev's theoretician

In February 1920 a false report of his death prompted memorial speeches by labour movement leaders in Finland and Russia and led Finnish communists in Petrograd to name their meeting place the 'Kuusinen Club', though he was in fact alive and hiding in Helsinki.

Born in Laukaa, Finland, to a village tailor's family, he joined the Finnish Social Democratic Party in 1904, chaired it in 1911-1913, and served as education commissioner in Finland's 1918 revolutionary government. After fleeing to Soviet Russia in 1918 he helped found the Communist Party of Finland and from 1921 to 1939 served as a secretary of the Comintern Executive Committee, directing the international communist movement. He headed the Finnish Democratic Republic during the Winter War, and at the height of the Great Purge, while his wife Aino and his son Esa were repressed, he kept his freedom and position, one of the few top Comintern figures to survive the 1937-1939 purges. Backing Khrushchev in 1957, he became a CPSU Central Committee secretary and Presidium member and theorized de-Stalinization through the 'all-people's state' thesis; he died in Moscow in 1964.

Comintern Communism 1882–1938 ✕ Executed

From Comintern underground courier to its organizational backbone, then devoured by the machine he built

At the June 1937 Central Committee plenum, when the resolution to grant NKVD chief Nikolai Yezhov emergency powers was tabled, Piatnitsky rose and said: "At this rate we will shoot the entire party." Silence fell over the hall. He was expelled from the plenum on 25 June.

An Old Bolshevik born to a poor Jewish tailor's family who taught himself to read. A virtuoso of the underground, he built Iskra's clandestine cross-border distribution network. Then, as Comintern secretary for twelve years, he became the organizational backbone of the International, managing liaison, finances, and cadre for communist parties worldwide. At the June 1937 Central Committee plenum he openly opposed granting the NKVD emergency powers; arrested a month later, he was tortured for a year and shot in July 1938. Rehabilitated in 1956.

Comintern Communism 1882–1949 ○ Natural causes; some details unconfirmed

From Leipzig defendant to Comintern General Secretary

"I am defending myself, an accused Communist. I am defending my political honor, my honor as a revolutionary. I am defending my Communist ideology, my ideals." Spoken in the Leipzig courtroom in 1933, the words were meant to defend the content and significance of his whole life.

A printer and trade unionist who led the failed 1923 uprising, he became an international symbol by defying the Nazis at the Leipzig Reichstag fire trial. Elected Comintern General Secretary in 1935, after the 7th World Congress, he headed the CPSU Central Committee's International Information Department after the Comintern was dissolved in 1943. During the Great Purge he took part in the destruction of the Polish Communist Party's leadership and in reprisals against old Bulgarian comrades, while also intervening to save some. He returned to Bulgaria in 1945 and became Prime Minister the next year; his Bulgarian-Yugoslav federation plans were undone by the Stalin-Tito split. He died near Moscow in 1949.

Comintern Communism 1883–1936 ✕ Executed by shooting

He opposed October, vouched for Stalin, and was shot by him

In May 1924 Lenin's testament was read to a plenum of the Central Committee. Kamenev read the document; Zinoviev then spoke for Stalin and moved to re-elect him General Secretary by show of hands, which carried with only Trotsky's small group against. The testament was not reported to the congress.

One of Lenin's long-standing companions in exile and the first chairman of the Comintern's executive committee, he was an early face of international communism. Born Ovsei-Gershon Radomyshelsky to a Jewish dairy-farming family in Yelizavetgrad, today Kropyvnytskyi in Ukraine, he opposed the October 1917 rising publicly alongside Kamenev, yet as chairman of the Petrograd Soviet he controlled the party's northern base and became a full Politburo member in March 1921. After Lenin's death he formed a triumvirate with Stalin and Kamenev to isolate Trotsky, but was defeated at the XIV Party Congress in December 1925 and lost the Leningrad Soviet and Comintern posts in 1926. He then joined Trotsky in the United Opposition; in August 1936 the first Moscow trial sentenced him to death and he was shot, and he was rehabilitated in 1988.

Comintern Communism 1883–1936 ✕ Executed

The party’s licensed voice of caution: his warnings outlived him

On 18 October 1917, Kamenev publicly called the coming armed rising ruinous for the revolution. Lenin demanded his expulsion; on 20 October the Central Committee instead accepted his resignation. On 25 October (7 November) he became head of state, but resigned on 4 November.

One of Lenin's oldest comrades, whom he met in Paris in 1902 and worked beside for over thirty years. He joined the RSDLP in 1901, endured arrest and Siberian exile, and by 1914 was directing Pravda. He opposed the October 1917 rising yet served the new state, chairing the Moscow Soviet from 1918 to 1926 and presiding over the Politburo during Lenin's illness. It was Kamenev who proposed Stalin as General Secretary in 1922, and with Stalin and Zinoviev he formed the triumvirate that blocked Trotsky. He broke with Stalin in 1925 and lost every post. Cut off from politics, he directed the Pushkin House and the Academia publishing house. In August 1936 he stood in the dock of the first Moscow trial and was shot on 25 August 1936, at fifty-three. He was rehabilitated in 1988, but never restored to the party.

Independent activity Communism 1883–1942 ✕ Shot

Swiss communist who organised Lenin’s sealed-train journey in 1917 and sat on the Comintern’s founding presidium

He organised Lenin’s party’s passage through Germany in 1917 and represented the Swiss communists at the Comintern’s founding congress in 1919.

From St. Gallen, he worked on the left of the Swiss Social Democrats and joined the Zimmerwald movement. After the February Revolution of 1917 he was the chief organiser of the sealed-train journey that took Lenin’s party from Switzerland across Germany back to Russia. At the Comintern’s founding congress in 1919 he represented the Swiss communists and sat on the presidium, and he helped found the Communist Party of Switzerland. A member of the National Council from 1917 to 1922, he later moved to the Soviet Union, was arrested in the purges in 1938 and was shot in a camp in 1942; he was rehabilitated in 1956.

Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) Communism 1883–1942 ✕ Executed

The Dutch revolutionary who planted communist seeds in Indonesia and China, then fought both Stalinism and Nazism

On the night of 12 April 1942 at Amersfoort camp, bound and facing the firing squad, Sneevliet refused a blindfold and together with seven comrades sang 'The Internationale.' He asked the executioners to untie his hands; they refused.

Dutch revolutionary. In the East Indies he co-founded the ISDV, forerunner of the Indonesian Communist Party; as Comintern envoy he brokered the founding of the Chinese Communist Party and the First United Front. He fought both Stalinism and Nazism before his execution in 1942.

Comintern Communism 1883–1959 ○ Natural causes

ECCI secretary who carried out the Stalinist purges (1928–1943)

In 1939 Stalin told Dimitrov: "Manuilsky is a toady! He was a Trotskyite! We criticised him for keeping quiet and not speaking out when the purges of Trotskyite bandits were going on, and now he has started toadying!" Almost every Old Bolshevik with a Trotsky link was killed or jailed except him.

A Bolshevik from Volhynia, born in the village of Sviatets to a priest's family (English sources say peasants) and a law graduate of the Sorbonne, he was a member of the Vpered group, joined the Mezhraiontsy in 1917, and held Ukrainian and Comintern posts. As ECCI secretary in the 1920s and 1930s he directed the Stalinist purges in the Comintern apparatus and foreign communist parties, and in 1945–46 he led the campaign against 'Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism'. In 1945 he headed Ukraine's delegation at San Francisco, chaired the committee that drafted the Preamble and Chapter 1 of the UN Charter, and from 1944 to 1952 was Ukrainian foreign minister.

Comintern Communism 1884–1951 ✕ Died in prison

Sun Yat-sen's political advisor, architect of the First United Front, and the Comintern's global emissary

When American KMT supporters warned Sun Yat-sen, asking 'Do you know that Borodin is a pseudonym? Do you know his real name — Gruzenberg?', Sun replied: 'I know. Lafayette.'

Sun Yat-sen's political advisor and the Comintern's global emissary who engineered the First United Front between the KMT and the Chinese Communist Party. Born into a Jewish family, he joined the Bund at sixteen and the Bolsheviks in 1903, then after the 1905 Revolution emigrated to Chicago, where he ran a school for exiled Russian revolutionaries. In 1919 he became the first Soviet consul in Mexico and helped found the Mexican Communist Party. From 1923 in Guangzhou, he reorganized the Kuomintang into a Leninist vanguard party and established the Whampoa Military Academy. The United Front he built gave the CCP a foothold in mass politics, but it collapsed when Chiang Kai-shek purged the communists in 1927.

Comintern Communism 1887–1954 ○ Heart attack

The Indian Marxist who debated Lenin on colonial revolution

"You are so young! I expected a grey-bearded wise man from the East." — Lenin's first words to the 27-year-old Indian revolutionary upon meeting him at the Kremlin, 1920.

Bengali Marxist. He debated Lenin on the colonial question at the 1920 Comintern Congress and founded the Mexican Communist Party (the first outside Russia) as well as the CPI. Expelled from the Comintern, he served six years in British prisons before turning to Radical Humanism.

Comintern Communism 1888–1938 ✕ Executed

The “favourite of the whole party,” killed in its name

In the mid-1920s Stalin told his comrades he and Bukharin were “the Himalayas; all the rest are little spots.” Ten years later he had him shot.

The brilliant theorist Lenin's testament called “the favourite of the whole party.” At Brest he was the far-left voice for revolutionary war; a decade later, defending NEP and the peasants against Stalin's Great Break, he became the “Right Deviation.” Removed from the Politburo in 1929, he returned to the Central Committee in 1934, edited Izvestia and helped draft the 1936 constitution, was arrested on treason charges in 1937 and shot after the 1938 trial. His note to Stalin, “Koba, why do you need me to die?”, is attributed through the Medvedevs' writing.

Comintern Communism 1889–1940 ✕ Mysterious death

The 'Red Millionaire' who exposed Nazi terror through publishing, the Comintern's greatest propagandist, who broke with Stalin

"Stalin, you are a traitor!" — Münzenberg's response to the 1939 Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact

The Comintern's most brilliant mass-propagandist. He founded Workers International Relief, co-founded the League Against Imperialism, and his Brown Book (1933) exposed the Reichstag fire as a Nazi frame-up. He broke with Stalin and died under mysterious circumstances.

Comintern Communism 1890–1938 ✕ Executed

Architect of Comintern propaganda and party history compiler

"We believe that Byelorussians are not a nation, and the ethnographic specifics that differentiate them from Russians must be erased" — in Zvyazda, the newspaper he edited, 6 October 1918.

A Latvian Bolshevik who built party organizations in Belarus and Latvia and twice served as First Secretary of the Communist Party of Byelorussia in the 1920s. As head of the Comintern Information-Propaganda Department he coordinated the ideological line of foreign communist parties, and as director of the Institute of Red Professorship (Party History) he authored the 1935 Short History of the CPSU, the direct precursor to the 1938 Short Course. Arrested in 1937, executed the following year, and rehabilitated in 1955.

Comintern Communism 1892–1924 ✕ Killed in action

Comintern agent known as Nenin who built revolutionary committees in southern Bessarabia and led the Tatarbunary Uprising

Born Vasily Surov and known as Nenin or Ninin, he was born in 1892 in a village of Ryazan Governorate, worked at the Putilov plant in Petrograd and, qualified as a military medical assistant, served on the Romanian Front in the First World War. After the war he joined the Bolsheviks, and from May 1922, as a Comintern agent, he led the Soviet-controlled party committee in southern Bessarabia, organising revolutionary committees in Cahul, Ismail and Cetatea Albă counties. He urged the participants to count on the Red Army once the rising began, and on the night of 15–16 September 1924 at Tatarbunary he proclaimed a Moldavian Soviet Republic as part of the Ukrainian SSR. In the suppression he was mortally wounded by a gendarme while fleeing, according to English Wikipedia, or fell in the last battle, according to Russian Wikipedia. His identity was established only in 1967.

Comintern Communism 1893–1953 ○ Natural causes

The Comintern's first envoy who midwifed the Chinese Communist Party

In 1920 Shanghai, discussing party-building with Chen Duxiu, he diagnosed: "The new-thought movement in China is surging but too complex — Anarchism, syndicalism, Social Democracy, guild socialism, a chaos without a mainstream. People write articles and speak empty words but take absolutely no practical action. This can never propel the Chinese revolution forward."

The Comintern's first envoy to China, who in 1920 worked with Li Dazhao and Chen Duxiu to lay the foundation for the Chinese Communist Party. After his recall, he became a founder of Soviet sinology in Moscow.

East Germany state institutions Communism 1893–1958 ○ Natural death

First East German Minister for State Security, purged in 1953 after trying to replace Ulbricht

Born in Gelsenkirchen to a gendarmerie sergeant’s family, he trained as a teacher and was a military leader of the Red Ruhr Army during the Kapp Putsch of 1920. As a GRU agent and Comintern military adviser he co-organised the Guangzhou Uprising in China, and in the Spanish Civil War, as “Gomez”, he led the International Brigades. He returned to Germany in 1947, joined the SED, and in 1950 became the first Minister for State Security and a Politburo member, building up the Stasi. After the uprising of June 1953 he moved to replace Ulbricht with Herrnstadt, but once Ulbricht had Khrushchev’s backing he lost his ministry and all his posts in July and was expelled from the party. He worked as a translator, died in East Berlin in 1958 and was rehabilitated after 1990.

Comintern Communism 1900–1974 ○ Natural causes

“Li De”, the only Westerner on the Long March and the Comintern military adviser blamed at Zunyi

Sent to China as a Comintern agent under the name Li De, he was nearly the only foreigner on the Long March, and the Zunyi Conference of 1935 removed him and Bo Gu from command. East Germany revealed only in 1964 that Li De was Otto Braun.

A German Communist from Munich who escaped prison in 1928 and studied at the Frunze Military Academy in the Soviet Union. Sent to Shanghai as Comintern military adviser in 1932, he entered the Jiangxi Soviet in 1933 and with Bo Gu directed a positional defence that lost the fifth encirclement campaign. On the Long March the Zunyi Conference of 1935 condemned his and Bo Gu’s military leadership and elevated Mao. He returned to Moscow in 1939 and after the war lived in East Germany as a translator and lecturer, publishing his memoir A Comintern Agent in China in 1973.