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.

Japanese Communist Party (JCP) Communism 1892–1993 ○ Natural causes

International communist who founded the JCP, ran the Comintern's Pacific networks, and led the party for 24 years

On his arrival at JCP headquarters in January 1946, one newspaper reported that 'young girls in both kimonos and Western dress gathered like fans awaiting a star at the stage door.'

An international communist who helped found both the CPGB in London (1920) and the JCP in Tokyo (1922), he served on the Comintern Executive Committee and ran intelligence networks against Imperial Japan from the United States and China. From 1940 to 1945 in Yan'an, he led the Japanese People's Emancipation League, converting captured Japanese soldiers into communist forces, and after the war he crafted the JCP's 'lovable party' strategy of peaceful revolution, winning up to 35 Diet seats. As JCP Chairman from 1958 to 1982, he steered the party through the Anpo protests and the Sino-Soviet split, but in 1992 the discovery of his 1939 letter denouncing a comrade to the NKVD led to his expulsion from the party he had founded.

Japanese Communist Party (JCP) Communism 1894–1953 ○ Died

First JCP chairman who endured 18 years in imperial prisons

At the 1956 20th Party Congress, Khrushchev asked delegates to rise in memory of Stalin, Gottwald, 'and the little-known Kyuichi Tokuda'—and the entire congress rose.

A founding member of the Japanese Communist Party (1922), he was arrested in 1928 under the Peace Preservation Law and spent 18 years in prison without recanting, emerging in 1945 to rebuild the party as its first secretary-general. When the Cominform condemned the JCP's peaceful-revolution line in 1950, Tokuda swung the party toward armed struggle aligned with Moscow and Beijing; purged from public office, he defected to China and directed the party from his Peking Organization until his death in 1953.