People

Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) Non-Bolshevik socialists 1895–1952 ○ Natural death

SPD leader who survived ten years in Nazi camps and, after the war, refused the merger with the Communists

Born in Kulm in West Prussia, he lost his right arm in the First World War and joined the SPD in 1918. As a member of the Württemberg Landtag and the Reichstag he fought the Nazis. Arrested in July 1933, he refused to sign a renunciation of political activity and spent ten years in concentration camps. In 1945 he rebuilt the party from Hanover, rejected the merger with the Communists urged by Otto Grotewohl in the Soviet zone, and called the KPD “red-painted Nazis”. Elected SPD chairman in 1946 and the Bundestag’s first leader of the opposition in 1949, he called for the nationalisation of heavy industry and a united Germany and opposed Adenauer’s integration with the West. He died in Bonn in 1952.

French Section of the Workers' International (SFIO) Non-Bolshevik socialists 1895–1958 ○ Illness

The Socialist left's tribune who wrote 'Everything is possible', the Popular Front's left frontier

'Everything is possible', the title and the conclusion of his front-page article in Le Populaire as the strikes surged, 27 May 1936

A schoolmaster who became the leader of the Socialist SFIO's left. In 1935 he founded the Revolutionary Left tendency, supporting the Popular Front while arguing for a revolutionary way beyond it, and at the height of the strikes in May 1936 he planted himself at the centre of the argument with 'Everything is possible' in Le Populaire. He ran the premier's press service under Blum without ceasing to radicalize, and when the party expelled him in 1938 he founded the Workers' and Peasants' Socialist Party (PSOP). Exiled in Mexico during the war, he returned to the SFIO afterward and stood on its left and in the anticolonial camp until his death.

France state institutions Non-Bolshevik socialists 1900–1940 ✕ Killed in action

The undersecretary for leisure and sport who designed the workers' first holidays

'Our simple and human aim is to let the mass of French youth find joy and health in sport, and to organize the leisure of the workers so that they may enjoy the joy of life and the dignity regained', radio address on taking office, 10 June 1936

A lawyer and Socialist deputy who took the post the Blum government created first in the world: undersecretary for leisure and sport. With the railways' 40-per-cent-discount 'popular tickets', a boom in youth hostels and a popular sports certificate, he organized 600,000 first paid holidays in the summer of 1936, defining leisure policy as the restoration of dignity to workers. Volunteering for service in 1939, he was killed by shellfire on the Aisne front on 9 June 1940. Thousands of stadiums and gymnasiums across France carry his name today.

Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) Non-Bolshevik socialists 1901–1963 ○ Pulmonary embolism

Exiled SPD functionary who succeeded Schumacher as SPD leader and leader of the West German opposition

Born in Magdeburg, the son of a bricklayer, he joined the SPD in 1918 and led the Socialist Workers’ Youth. In May 1933 he went into exile in Prague with the party executive, helped form the exiled SPD (Sopade), and by way of Paris and Lisbon spent the war in London. Returning in February 1946, he worked in Kurt Schumacher’s office in Hanover and that year became his deputy, running the party organisation and its international contacts. After Schumacher’s death in 1952 he became party chairman, parliamentary leader and leader of the opposition. He lost to Adenauer as candidate for chancellor in 1953 and 1957, and backed the 1959 Godesberg Programme, with which the SPD broke with Marxism. He died in Bonn in 1963.

Non-Bolshevik socialists 1903–1950 ○ Tuberculosis

The democratic socialist who came back wounded from the POUM militia and dissected the language of totalitarianism

Homage to Catalonia, on reaching Barcelona in December 1936: “It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle.”

Born Eric Arthur Blair. Five years in the Indian Imperial Police in Burma and his reportage on destitution in Paris and London made him a writer; in December 1936 he went to Spain, joined the POUM militia through the Independent Labour Party, spent four months on the Aragon front and was shot through the throat at Huesca. The street fighting he witnessed in Barcelona while convalescing in May 1937, and the outlawing of the POUM that followed, broke him with Soviet communism for good, and he crossed the border with his wife with a warrant out for him as a Trotskyist. Homage to Catalonia, his account of it, sold 683 copies in its first six months. Orwell called himself a democratic socialist to the end, and Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four anatomize the hardening of a revolution into a new rule, and the language that holds it up.

Chile state institutions Non-Bolshevik socialists 1908–1973 ✕ Suicide

First elected Marxist head of state; pursued the peaceful 'Chilean road to socialism' (copper, land, cybernetics) until the 1973 coup

“I am not going to resign! Placed in a historic transition, I will pay for loyalty to the people with my life.” — last radio address, La Moneda, 11 September 1973

The world's first democratically elected Marxist head of state. His 'Chilean road to socialism', nationalizing copper, redistributing land, and building the Cybersyn cybernetic planning system, was cut short by the 1973 military coup.

Germany state institutions Non-Bolshevik socialists 1913–1992 ○ Natural causes

A social democrat who made reconciliation a politics of divided cities

After the Wall was built, he said: “The Wall must go, but until it goes, the city must live.”

Willy Brandt was a German social-democratic politician shaped by exile and resistance to the Nazi dictatorship. As Governing Mayor of West Berlin, he defended the city’s morale after the Wall was built and pressed the West to honor its responsibilities, helping popularize the name “Wall of Shame.” As chancellor, he pursued Ostpolitik and “change through rapprochement,” easing Cold War confrontation and earning the 1971 Nobel Peace Prize.

Labour Party (United Kingdom) Non-Bolshevik socialists 1930–2019 ○ Natural causes

Harvard sinologist whose Origins of the Cultural Revolution trilogy and Mao’s Last Revolution dissected China’s elite politics

A journalist in London through 1961 who covered Chinese developments from afar, he first reached mainland China only in 1972; he went on to study elite Chinese politics from the founding of the People's Republic through the Cultural Revolution.

A Briton born in India, he was a journalist and a Labour MP before becoming a scholar, and founded and edited The China Quarterly. The three volumes of The Origins of the Cultural Revolution (1974–1997) traced the line struggles inside the top leadership from the Hundred Flowers of 1956 to 1966, showing the Cultural Revolution as the outcome of political conflicts accumulated since the failure of the Great Leap rather than a personal whim of Mao. Mao’s Last Revolution (2006, with Michael Schoenhals) is the standard narrative of 1966–1976. He was a professor at Harvard and director of its Fairbank Center.

Non-Bolshevik socialists 1939–

American sociologist who reopened the debate on the Cuban Revolution

In The Origins of the Cuban Revolution Reconsidered (2006) he cast the revolutionary leaders as autonomous actors pursuing their own ideological vision rather than a master plan, challenging the dominant reading.

Born in Marianao, Cuba, to Jewish immigrant parents from Poland. He joined the anti-Batista movement as a high school student, moved to the United States in 1958 and took his PhD in sociology at UC Berkeley in 1969. He taught at UCLA, SUNY-Old Westbury, Fairleigh Dickinson and Brooklyn College (CUNY), retiring in 2007, and has written on the Cuban Revolution, the Castro government, Soviet history and US politics from a left-wing, radical-democratic standpoint. No death record is confirmed.

Non-Bolshevik socialists

Malagasy feminist socialist leader of the 1972 student movement

From 24 April 1972 she advanced abolition of the 1960 Cooperation Agreement and Malgachisation as a 'second independence', which the 1972-1975 military government did not implement. Ranjanoro calls it a 'third independence', and the FAEM general secretaryship is disputed.

A feminist socialist born and raised in Madagascar, from a petit bourgeois family in which politics was considered a man's preserve. The Student Christian Movement (SCM-MPIKRIMA) exposed her to socialist ideas and politicised her. In 1972, a third-year student of Malagasy literature and language, she led the nationwide movement that began on 24 April as general secretary of the FAEM student federation, demanding abolition of the 1960 Cooperation Agreement and Malgachisation as a 'second independence'; on the night of 12 May she was arrested and detained on Nosy Lava. In Nairobi she led the WSCF 'Liberation' programme; in 1975 family life took her first to Geneva, and she returned to Nairobi in 1978 before moving to Canada after her husband's arrest and release. From 1991 in the UK, she headed UNIFEM's Africa section and retired in 2010.

Socialist Revolutionary Party (PSR/SR) Non-Bolshevik socialists ?–1921 ✕ Killed in action

Peasant-born officer who commanded the United Partisan Army of Tambov and chaired the Union of Working Peasantry

Born in the village of Inokovka in Kirsanov district, Tambov province, he was conscripted in 1904 during the Russo-Japanese War and stayed on for extended service in St Petersburg. In the First World War he fought in Galicia, winning the full set of four St George Crosses and four St George Medals; he was commissioned in 1915 and made lieutenant in 1917. After the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk he returned home, worked in the local militia and in 1918 formed a partisan detachment. In June 1920 he took command of the 2nd Insurgent Army and in November of the United Partisan Army of the Tambov region, while also chairing the Union of Working Peasantry. The Russian-language source says he was killed in a clash near the village of Bogoslovka on 28 February 1921; the English-language source places his death around June 1921.