People of the Revolution and the USSR

Poland state institutions Counter-revolutionary forces 1867–1935 ○ Illness

The soldier-politician who began as a socialist, became Head of State of reborn Poland, broke the Red Army's westward drive at Warsaw in 1920, and later ruled through a coup-built authoritarian regime

To be defeated and not to yield, that is victory; to be victorious and to rest on one's laurels, that is defeat.

Born 5 December 1867 at Zułowo manor (now Zalavas, Lithuania, then Vilna Governorate of the Russian Empire), second son of a noble szlachta family that sources characterize either as Polish or as Polonized Lithuanians. Arrested in March 1887 over the plot against Alexander III and sent to five years of Siberian exile, he joined the Polish Socialist Party in 1893, led it, and edited its underground organ Robotnik from 1894. In the First World War he raised the Polish Legions on Austria's side, was imprisoned at Magdeburg after the 1917 Oath crisis, became Chief of State of reborn Poland in November 1918, and broke the Red Army's drive at Warsaw in 1920. He ruled as the strongman of the Sanacja regime after the May 1926 coup, jailed opponents in the Brest trials and Bereza Kartuska, signed a non-aggression pact with the USSR in 1932, and died of liver cancer in Warsaw on 12 May 1935.

Action Française Counter-revolutionary forces 1868–1952 ○ Died

The brain of Action Française, the royalist theorist who denied the republic itself in the name of integral nationalism

'It is the revenge of Dreyfus!', on hearing his life sentence in the court at Lyon, 27 January 1945

A poet and polemicist from Martigues in Provence, deaf from his youth, who led Action Française for half a century after the movement formed out of the Dreyfus affair. His 'integral nationalism' called for the restoration of the monarchy and the abolition of the parliamentary republic, and named Jews, Protestants, Freemasons and foreigners as the 'four confederate states' eating France from within. The movement survived the Vatican's condemnation of 1926, and in 1938 he was elected to the Académie Française. Through January 1934 his paper named 'the thieves' day after day, and on the morning of 6 February it called on its readers to come to the Chamber that evening. He welcomed Pétain's accession in 1940 as a 'divine surprise', backed Vichy, and denounced resisters and Jews in print throughout the occupation. In January 1945 he was sentenced to life imprisonment and national degradation for collusion with the enemy.

Hungary state institutions Counter-revolutionary forces 1871–1947 ○ Died

Conservative aristocrat who set up the counter-revolutionary government in Szeged in 1919 and was prime minister of Hungary in 1931–1932

Born into an old aristocratic family in Nyírbakta, he was a first cousin of Mihály Károlyi. He entered the House of Magnates and was ispán of Arad County from 1906 to 1910. In May 1919 he formed a counter-revolutionary government against the Soviet Republic in Arad but was interned by the Romanians; after his release he reorganised it on 30 May in French-occupied Szeged, asking Miklós Horthy to set up the National Army as war minister, and the two became lifelong friends. After serving as foreign minister in Bethlen’s government in 1930–1931 he became prime minister in August 1931, and after the Biatorbágy viaduct bombing he imposed martial law and imprisoned Communists. He resigned in September 1932, and in 1939 he gave up all his posts in protest against the second Jewish law. He died in Budapest in 1947.

Hungary state institutions Counter-revolutionary forces 1874–1946 ○ Died in prison

Transylvanian aristocrat who, as prime minister in 1921–1931, consolidated the Horthy regime with a restricted franchise and a League loan

Scion of an old Transylvanian noble family, he entered parliament as a liberal in 1901. He joined the counter-revolution in Szeged in 1919 and became prime minister in April 1921, after King Charles’s first return attempt. He founded the Unity Party, secured its victories by restoring the open ballot in the countryside with the Franchise Act of 1922, concluded a pact with the Social Democrats, and stabilised the economy through League of Nations membership and a loan. He resigned in the Depression in 1931 and in 1941 opposed war with the Soviet Union. Arrested by the Soviets in 1945, he died in a Moscow prison in 1946.

United Kingdom state institutions Counter-revolutionary forces 1874–1965 ○ Stroke

Britain's wartime prime minister who divided Europe with Stalin on a half-sheet of paper

Churchill's memoir account of the October 1944 Moscow meeting: 'I wrote on a half-sheet: Romania, Russia 90%… I pushed this across to Stalin. He took his blue pencil, made a large tick, and passed it back.' Soviet authorities denied in 1958 that Stalin accepted such a proposal.

A British statesman, army officer and writer, Churchill was born in 1874 at Blenheim Palace into the wealthy aristocratic Spencer family, of mixed English and American parentage. After army service in India, Sudan and the Boer War he entered Parliament in 1900. As a Liberal minister he was President of the Board of Trade, Home Secretary, and First Lord of the Admiralty, where he oversaw the failed Gallipoli campaign; in 1924–1929 he was Chancellor of the Exchequer. Prime minister from May 1940, he led Britain through the Second World War, warned in 1946 of an 'iron curtain', and held office again in 1951–1955. An imperialist, anti-communist and opponent of Indian self-government, he remains a contested figure; he died in 1965.

Hungary state institutions Counter-revolutionary forces 1879–1941 ✕ Suicide

Geographer of the “Red map” who was twice prime minister and killed himself in 1941 as German troops crossed Hungary

Born in Budapest to an aristocratic family from Transylvania, he was a geographer, university professor, member of the Academy of Sciences and chief scout of the Hungarian Scout Association. In 1918–19 he compiled the “Red map” of ethnic distribution based on the 1910 census. As foreign minister he attended the signing of the Treaty of Trianon in 1920, became prime minister in July and led the government of the numerus clausus period until April 1921. Prime minister again from 1939, he wrote the preamble to the Second Anti-Jewish Law and prepared the Third. He killed himself on 3 April 1941 when German troops were about to cross Hungary to invade Yugoslavia.

Hungary state institutions Counter-revolutionary forces 1883–1951 ○ Died in prison

Factory owner who was prime minister of Hungary for three months after the August 1919 coup against the Peidl government

Born into a pharmacist’s family of German origin in Malacka (now Malacky, Slovakia), he studied engineering, worked for AEG in Berlin and then ran his own machinery works outside Budapest. He joined Mihály Károlyi’s Independence Party in 1912 and became one of his closest friends; after the Aster Revolution he was state secretary for war, but he drifted to the right and was dismissed in February 1919. Arrested under the Soviet Republic and sentenced to death, he had the sentence commuted and escaped. In August 1919 he joined the right-wing White House Comrades’ Association in ousting the Peidl government; on 7 August he was named prime minister, with Archduke Joseph August as regent, and held office until 24 November. Arrested by Rákosi’s regime in 1951 and sentenced to fifteen years, he died the same year; he was rehabilitated in 1990.

Czechoslovakia state institutions Counter-revolutionary forces 1884–1975 → Died in exile

National Socialist leader who led the ministers’ resignation in February 1948 and headed the exile Council of Free Czechoslovakia

In February 1948 he resigned with non-Communist ministers in an attempt to halt unconstitutional measures by the Communist interior minister. After the coup, he escaped surveillance to the West and led the political exile movement.

Born to a small tradesman in Tábor in Bohemia, he became a teacher and was mayor of Prague from 1937 to 1939. Arrested after the German occupation, he was held in Dachau and Buchenwald until American troops freed him in 1945. As postwar chairman of the National Socialists he was again mayor of Prague and, after leading the second party in 1946, deputy prime minister. In September 1947 he, Masaryk and Drtina received boxes of explosives. He resigned with the other non-Communist ministers in February 1948, escaped surveillance after the coup and chaired the exile Council of Free Czechoslovakia from 1949 to 1974.

Counter-revolutionary forces 1885–1946 ○ Internment-related illness

The colonel of the Croix-de-Feu who turned his columns away from the Chamber

That night his columns reached the rear of the Chamber and he ordered them to disperse rather than storm it. The left saw a dress rehearsal for fascism in the same night; the far right called him a traitor. Both verdicts followed him for the rest of his life

The son of a general, trained at Saint-Cyr, who served in Morocco and the First World War and retired as a lieutenant-colonel. From 1931 he led the veterans' association Croix-de-Feu and built it into a mass movement of several hundred thousand, whose discipline and motorised rallies looked to the French left like the face of fascism. On the night of 6 February 1934 his columns reached the rear of the Chamber and he ordered them to disperse rather than storm it, a caution for which the far right called him a traitor. When the Popular Front government dissolved the leagues in 1936 he founded the Parti Social Français and turned toward electoral politics, building what became the largest party of the French right by the late 1930s. He backed Pétain and sat on Vichy's National Council while running an intelligence network that passed information to the British, was arrested by the Gestapo in 1943 and interned in Germany, and after the liberation was detained again by the French authorities as a Vichy man before dying of illness in 1946. Whether he was a fascist or the French form of authoritarian conservatism has been the central argument in the study of the French right from Sternhell onward.

Hungary state institutions Counter-revolutionary forces 1886–1939 ○ Illness

Gömbös’s successor as prime minister in 1936–1938, who announced the Győr programme and introduced the First Jewish Law

Born in Budapest, he began his civil-service career in Pest County in 1909 and after the revolutions was head of Győr and Komárom counties. He entered parliament in 1927 and became Gömbös’s minister of agriculture in 1935. Succeeding Gömbös as prime minister in October 1936, he promised a return to Bethlen’s constitutional course and in 1937 banned the Party of National Will and had Szálasi imprisoned. In March 1938 he announced the Győr programme, but after the Anschluss he brought pro-German politicians into the cabinet and negotiated with the extreme right, and resigned in May. The First Jewish Law his government introduced passed under Imrédy, and from December 1938 until his death he was Speaker of the House of Representatives.

Counter-revolutionary forces 1887–1965 ○ Illness

The deputy who founded the Jeunesses Patriotes, holding a street force and a seat in the Chamber at once

He kept a parliamentary seat and a paramilitary organisation at the same time, on the principle that the street belonged to his side too. The Jeunesses Patriotes were among the columns that reached the Concorde on the night of 6 February 1934, and several of the fifteen dead were their members

A First World War veteran turned deputy who founded the Jeunesses Patriotes in 1924 against the incoming Cartel des Gauches and built it into a paramilitary body tens of thousands strong. Equipped with blue raincoats and berets, it broke up Communist meetings and fought for the streets, while its leader kept his seat inside parliament: a doubleness characteristic of the French leagues. On 6 February 1934 the Jeunesses Patriotes formed one of the main columns on the Place de la Concorde, and some of the dead came from its ranks. He voted full powers to Pétain in 1940, presided over the Paris municipal council under the occupation, and was detained and then released after the liberation.

Kuomintang Counter-revolutionary forces 1887–1975 ○ Natural causes

Nationalist leader who combined resistance to Japan with anti-communist rule

After signing the pact with the Soviet Union in 1937, he insisted that it did not mean permitting communism to grow, explaining that Nanking could not fight Japan and the Communists simultaneously.

Chiang Kai-shek was the Nationalist Party's military and political leader, rising through the Northern Expedition of the 1920s to consolidate much of China under a government based in Nanjing. He had prioritised the civil war against the Communists, but after the Xi'an Incident accepted a united front against Japan and secured Soviet arms and aircraft through the 1937 Sino-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact. He led China's wartime resistance, then moved the Republic of China's government to Taiwan after defeat in the civil war, where he built a long authoritarian rule under martial law.

Counter-revolutionary forces 1911–2000 ○ Died in Paris

Cambodian anti-communist resistance leader

On 22 June 1982 in Kuala Lumpur he joined Sihanouk and the Khmer Rouge in forming the Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea, became its prime minister, and helped it retain Cambodia's UN seat.

Cambodian politician and anti-communist resistance leader. Born at Phnom Penh in 1911 into a Khmer Krom family, he studied in Paris and entered the civil service in 1935. He held the vice-premiership and finance posts in 1946–48, was foreign minister in 1950–51, president of the National Bank of Cambodia in 1955–68, and prime minister of Cambodia in 1967–68. Placed under house arrest after the 1970 coup, he later left for France, formed the Khmer People's National Liberation Front (KPNLF) in 1978–79 and became prime minister of the 1982 Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea. He founded the Buddhist Liberal Democratic Party in 1992, was elected in 1993, served as President of the National Assembly that year, and left for Paris in 1997, dying there of heart failure on 19 December 2000.

United States state institutions Counter-revolutionary forces 1911–2004 ○ Natural causes

The Cold War's last American president, who genuinely believed in nuclear abolition but would not yield on SDI

On the afternoon of October 12, 1986, Reagan and Gorbachev agreed to eliminate every nuclear weapon on earth by the year 2000. Forty minutes later, the talks collapsed when Reagan refused Gorbachev's condition that SDI research be confined to the laboratory.

Ronald Reagan went from Hollywood actor to governor of California to the 40th president of the United States, inaugurating the 1980s with Reaganomics and the largest peacetime military buildup in American history. Early in his first term he denounced the Soviet Union as an 'evil empire,' yet he also held a genuine, long-standing conviction that nuclear weapons should be abolished, a conviction he brought to four summit meetings with Mikhail Gorbachev. At Reykjavik in October 1986 the two leaders came within reach of eliminating all nuclear weapons, only for the talks to collapse when Reagan refused to confine his Strategic Defense Initiative to the laboratory. A year later they signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, the first abolition of an entire class of nuclear weapons, and the Cold War ended months after he left office.