Activities and affiliations

Government and administration France state institutions 1890–1970 ○ Natural causes

A statesman who declared that France would continue the war amid defeat

“Must hope disappear? Is the defeat final? No!”

Charles de Gaulle was a French soldier, resistance leader, and statesman who claimed to represent France’s continued war effort after the defeat of 1940. From London he organized Free France and challenged Vichy’s claim to legitimacy, then led the provisional government after liberation while confronting disputes over the shape of reconstruction. He prized a strong executive and national autonomy, founding the Fifth Republic, but his rule also left enduring tensions over personal power and the colonial wars.

Political and party leadership Affiliation unconfirmed 1890–1974 ○ Natural causes

The labor organizer who read Trotsky's critique in Moscow and founded the American Trotskyist movement

“They had expelled the heart of their party; Trotsky had won over all the serious young activists, leaving only a dead husk.” — after the Socialist Party expelled the Trotskyists, 1937

A Kansas-born labor organizer of Irish descent, James P. Cannon helped found the Communist Party of America in 1919 and was elected to the Comintern Presidium in 1922. In 1928, after reading a misdirected critique of the Comintern by Trotsky in Moscow, he turned to the Left Opposition, was expelled from the CPA, and co-founded the Communist League of America. He led the landmark 1934 Minneapolis Teamsters strike, and in 1938 founded the Socialist Workers Party, becoming its first National Secretary. Imprisoned for 18 months under the Smith Act for opposing U.S. entry into World War II, he remained a central leader of the Fourth International and shaped the American Trotskyist tradition across four decades.

Diplomacy and international organization Soviet Union state institutions 1890–1986 ○ Natural causes

“Stone-arse”: the man who never changed his mind

His wife Polina Zhemchuzhina was arrested for treason in December 1948 and forced into divorce, and was released only after Stalin's death in 1953. Throughout, Molotov is said to have had dinner set for two every evening. 'She suffered because of me,' he said later.

An Old Bolshevik who joined the RSDLP in 1906 and was arrested and internally exiled twice before 1917. A full Politburo member from 1926, he became premier in 1930, overseeing collectivisation and the Great Purge; in 1939 he signed the Nazi–Soviet pact. As deputy chair of the State Defence Committee he attended the Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam conferences, and he initiated the 'Molotov Plan' against the Marshall Plan. In 1957 he failed to oust Khrushchev; sources date his expulsion to 1961 or 1962. Readmitted in 1984, he died in 1986.

Ideology and propaganda Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks 1891–1918 ✕ Assassinated

Petrograd's press commissar whose assassination helped trigger the Red Terror

“Comrades, do you think I am looking at my watch? No — I am looking at the clock of humanity, the clock of the world revolution.”

Petrograd's Commissar for Press and Propaganda and a magnetic crowd orator who built the Bolshevik censorship apparatus and founded Krasnaya Gazeta. Shot dead by an SR militant on 20 June 1918, his assassination, alongside Uritsky's murder and the attempt on Lenin, became the spark for the full-scale Red Terror.

Military command Soviet Union state institutions 1891–1920 ○ Typhus

The Left SR figurehead chairman of the MRC, lending a non-Bolshevik face to the Bolshevik insurrection while Trotsky directed operations

On the night of 21 October 1917 Lazimir, as MRC chairman, went with Sadovsky and Mekhonoshin to military district headquarters to claim supreme authority over the garrison; Colonel Polkovnikov refused, saying he did not recognise their commissars and would arrest them if they broke the law.

A feldsher at the Petrograd military hospital who turned to SR agitation among soldiers, Pavel Lazimir rose after the February Revolution to chair the soldiers' section of the Petrograd Soviet. In October 1917 the Bolsheviks installed him, a Left SR, as chairman of the newly created Military Revolutionary Committee to give the body a non-Bolshevik front; the real direction came from Trotsky, while Lazimir himself drafted the MRC's founding statute. He joined the Bolsheviks in 1918 and served on the Revolutionary Military Council of the Southern Front, organizing supply and sanitation, before dying of typhus in 1920 at twenty-nine.

Literature and arts 1891–1926 ○ Meningitis

The commissar-writer who turned Chapaev into a Soviet myth

During the June 1920 Verny garrison mutiny, Furmanov walked alone into rebel headquarters to negotiate, playing for time. When rebel commanders threatened his life, he held his ground — long enough for loyal troops to arrive and suppress the uprising without bloodshed.

A writer who served as political commissar of the Chapaev division. His novel Chapaev (1923) set the template for revolutionary hero narrative and, adapted into a 1934 film by the Vasilyev brothers, became a monument of Soviet popular culture.

Political and party leadership Communist Party of Italy / Italian Communist Party (PCdI/PCI) 1891–1937 ○ Illness

The brain a prison was meant to stop: theorist of hegemony

“The old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” — Prison Notebooks

Italian Marxist philosopher who theorized hegemony: the insight that rule is maintained not by force alone but through consent organized in civil society. From a fascist prison he wrote the Prison Notebooks, laying foundations for Western Marxism.

Security, intelligence and policing Soviet Union state institutions 1891–1937 ✕ Executed

Co-founder of Soviet intelligence & counterintelligence; brain of Operation Trust

In 1925, as Sidney Reilly was surrounded by GPU agents at a Moscow safe house, Artuzov is said to have watched the entire operation unfold from the next room.

He founded the Cheka's counterintelligence arm (KRO) and designed Operation Trust, which neutralized White émigré networks. As head of foreign intelligence (INO) from 1931, he expanded illegal networks abroad. Arrested and shot during the Great Purge in 1937.

Government and administration Soviet Union state institutions 1891–1937 ✕ Executed

The Marxist legal philosopher who argued the legal form corresponds to commodity exchange: the most radical critic of Soviet law from within

In November 1936 he was appointed Deputy People's Commissar of Justice. On 20 January 1937, barely two months later, the NKVD arrested him at the pinnacle of the Soviet legal system he had theorized — the Marxist jurist who had argued law would wither away now stood before the most direct form of state power.

The most important Marxist legal theorist of the twentieth century. In his 1924 work The General Theory of Law and Marxism, he argued that the legal form derives from the commodity-exchange relation and, following Marxist premises, will wither away together with the state under communism. With Pyotr Stuchka he co-founded the law section of the Communist Academy (1922) and later became its vice-president and director of the Institute of Soviet Construction and Law. Appointed Deputy People's Commissar of Justice in 1936, he clashed openly with Andrey Vyshinsky's doctrine of 'proletarian law.' Arrested in January 1937 and executed that September, he was posthumously rehabilitated in 1956. His commodity-form theory remains widely studied in critical legal theory worldwide.

Security, intelligence and policing Soviet Union state institutions 1891–1938 ✕ Executed

NKVD chief who signed the Romanov execution and joined the Left Opposition

"Inform Sverdlov the whole family have shared the same fate as the head. Officially the family will die at the evacuation." — coded telegram to Lenin's secretary after the Romanov execution, 17 July 1918

A Bolshevik who rose to prominence in the Urals, he signed the Ural Soviet's decision to execute Nicholas II and the Romanov family in 1918 as its chairman. As People's Commissar of Internal Affairs of the RSFSR (1923–1927), succeeding Dzerzhinsky, he oversaw Soviet police and penal administration. He joined the Left Opposition by signing the Declaration of 46 in 1923, was expelled from the party in 1927, recanted in 1930, but was arrested during the Great Purge and executed in 1938.

Military command Russian White movement 1891–1938 ✕ Executed

The 27-year-old White general whose Yakut expedition closed the Civil War

'I do not know my political convictions. I am not a party man. I want good and happiness for the people, I want the Russian people to be a kind, peaceful, but strong and mighty people': diary entry during the Yakut expedition

One of the youngest White generals of the Russian Civil War, he became a major-general at 27 and was nicknamed 'the Siberian Suvorov.' In December 1918 his troops captured Perm, taking 20,000 Red Army prisoners whom he released to their homes, and he went on to command the 1st Siberian Army under Admiral Kolchak. After the White collapse, he lived in exile in Harbin working as a carpenter and cab driver, then in September 1922 led a volunteer druzhina into Yakutia: the last military operation of the Civil War, ending with his surrender at Ayan in June 1923. His death sentence was commuted to ten years, but he was rearrested in the Great Purge and shot in Novosibirsk in 1938.

Security, intelligence and policing Soviet Union state institutions 1891–1938 ✕ Executed

The NKVD chief who expanded the Gulag and became a purge defendant

In April 1937, Yagoda was dismissed as NKVD commissar. When Stalin summoned him, Yezhov was already seated. 'You are four years late,' Stalin said. Accounts of Yagoda's last words at his execution diverge: one version says he shouted 'Long live Comrade Stalin!', another that he met death in silence. Either way, the architect of the Gulag had become a Gulag defendant.

A practical power inside OGPU and NKVD, he oversaw forced-labour projects such as the White Sea-Baltic Canal and was the architect of the Gulag system. As the first NKVD commissar, he consolidated the security organs. He opened the first purge phase after Kirov's murder, but Stalin replaced him with Yezhov for not purging enough. He became a defendant in the Third Moscow Trial and was shot.

Agriculture and land policy Soviet Union state institutions 1891–1938 ✕ Executed

The commissar who ran agriculture through the second Five-Year Plan, from grain procurement to VDNKh

On February 17, 1935, at the Congress of Collective-Farm Shock Workers, Chernov proposed 'an All-Union Agricultural Exhibition in Moscow in 1937.' Stalin and Molotov signed the decree organizing it that same day — the birth of what would become VDNKh.

Born to a weaver's family, he began as a Menshevik in 1909 and joined the Bolsheviks in 1920. Rising through the grain procurement apparatus, he succeeded Yakov Yakovlev as People's Commissar for Agriculture in 1934 and guided the second Five-Year Plan's agricultural policy, strengthening the kolkhoz system's technical base. In 1935 he proposed the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition (VDNKh) and chaired its organizing committee, while also leading the drafting of the Model Charter of the Agricultural Artel. Arrested in 1937, he was tried with the Twenty-One, sentenced to death, and executed in 1938. Rehabilitated in 1988.

Literature and arts 1891–1938 ✕ Died in prison

The poet preserved by memory

"Only in Russia is poetry respected — it gets people killed. Is there anywhere else where poetry is so common a motive for murder?" Recorded by his wife Nadezhda in her memoir Hope Against Hope, a remark that distills a poet's fate under Stalin.

A central Acmeist poet and essayist, he inscribed the language and terror of Stalinism into verse. Arrested and exiled, then arrested again and sent toward a Far Eastern camp, he died in transit before the poems his wife and friends preserved by memory.

Social movements and organizing Affiliation unconfirmed 1891–1938 ✕ Executed

The Kosior brother who died in Vorkuta as an oppositionist while his brother ruled Ukraine for Stalin

After signing the Declaration of 46 in 1923 he spent fifteen years as an oppositionist, through expulsion, exile, a political isolator, and a camp, until he was shot.

Born in Węgrów in Poland, he joined the RSDLP in 1906. He was the brother of Stanislav Kosior, and while his brother rose to the Politburo and the leadership of the Ukrainian party, he took the road of the oppositions. He was an instructor for the Moscow metalworkers union in 1919, a member of the Revolutionary Military Council of the 12th Army and deputy head of the political department of the 14th Army in 1920, chairman of the All-Ukrainian Council of Trade Unions from 1920 to 1922, and chief editor of the trade-union paper Trud from 1922 to 1924. He belonged to the Democratic Centralist group in 1921, signed the Declaration of 46 in 1923, and worked with the Left Opposition thereafter. Expelled in May 1928, he was exiled to Pokrovsk in the Volga German ASSR, and because he kept up the work in exile he was given three years in a political isolator and then five years of exile in Minusinsk. In July 1936 he was sentenced to five years in the camps and held at Ukhta-Pechlag, was arrested again in December 1937, and was shot at Vorkuta on 30 March 1938.

Military command Ukraine state institutions 1891–1938 ✕ Assassinated

Ukrainian nationalist leader who commanded the Sich Riflemen and built the UVO and OUN

Rotterdam, 23 May 1938: a Ukrainian-style box of chocolates handed over by his trusted contact Pavel Sudoplatov concealed a time bomb made in Moscow.

A Ukrainian military and political leader from Zashkiv in Austrian Galicia. After captivity in Russia during the First World War, he organized the Sich Riflemen in Kyiv in 1917 and became a leading commander of the Army of the Ukrainian People’s Republic. Following defeat in the independence war, he led the Ukrainian Military Organization (UVO) in exile and united several nationalist groups into the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) in Vienna in 1929, becoming its first leader. He connected émigré organizations across Europe and North America and sought international support for Ukrainian independence, but was assassinated in Rotterdam in 1938 by a bomb delivered by NKVD operative Pavel Sudoplatov, who had infiltrated the OUN. In 1929 he obtained Lithuanian citizenship and a passport, giving his émigré activity a legal basis, while his national and political identity and the aim of his movement remained consistently Ukrainian independence.

Government and administration Soviet Union state institutions 1891–1939 ✕ Shot in

The economic administrator who led Ukraine's government for 11 years, caught between Stalin's demands and the famine

In June 1932 Chubar reported to Stalin and Molotov that "tens of thousands of malnourished, starving and swollen people" were dying of famine "in every village", and asked for grain relief. Stalin replied that "Chubar is mistaken ... Ukraine has been given more than it should get".

An economic administrator born to a poor Ukrainian peasant family in Fedorivka, he joined the RSDLP in 1907. From 1923 he chaired the Ukrainian SSR's Council of People's Commissars for eleven years, driving industrialisation and collectivisation, and in June 1932 he reported the famine to Stalin and Molotov and requested emergency grain. He also bore responsibility for enforcing collectivisation and the 1932–33 famine, and in 2010 the Kyiv Court of Appeal ruled him one of the organisers of the Holodomor. A full Politburo member from 1935, he was arrested in 1938 and shot the next year, then rehabilitated in 1955.

Literature and arts 1891–1940 ○ Illness

The unpublished writer of the devil

In 1930, with all paths to publication blocked, Bulgakov hurled the first draft of *The Master and Margarita* into the fireplace. Years later in the novel, the devil Woland pulls the burned manuscript from the ashes and says: 'Manuscripts don't burn.' Bulgakov rewrote it until his death — and the line proved true.

A physician turned novelist and playwright, he bent Soviet bureaucracy and fear through fantasy and satire. With his plays banned and publication blocked, he revised *The Master and Margarita* until his death; the novel first appeared posthumously in censored form.

Security, intelligence and policing Soviet Union state institutions 1891–1940 ✕ Executed

Architect of the Shakhty case and boss of the North Caucasus

Stalin in 1938: "Yevdokimov came twice demanding Sholokhov's arrest for talking with ex-White Guards. I told him: you understand nothing of politics or life."

A Chekist of the civil-war generation, Yevdokimov made his name through field violence, commanding mass executions of surrendered Wrangel troops. Posted to the North Caucasus as OGPU plenipotentiary in 1923, he built a regional power base and designed the 1928 Shakhty case (the first major show trial of technical specialists), personally directing the extraction of confessions. As chief of the OGPU Secret-Operational Directorate from 1929, he was hostile to Yagoda and remained outside the security organs during Yagoda's tenure, having moved to party work in 1934. Under Yezhov he supplied the central NKVD with North Caucasus cadres and regained influence, but fell with Yezhov, was shot in 1940, and rehabilitated in 1956.

Political and party leadership Communist Party of Germany (KPD) 1891–1941 ✕ Suspicious death (likely NKVD)

The pianist-turned-revolutionary who drove the KPD's ultra-left turn, and became the anti-Stalinist left's perpetual dissident

“Comrade Maslow, who is playing at Leftism and wishes to exercise himself 'hunting Centrists,' has more zeal than sense.” — Lenin, singling him out by name in his 'Letter to the German Communists' (14 August 1921).

Born into a Ukrainian Jewish merchant family, he abandoned a concert-pianist career to study physics under Einstein and Planck, then the First World War radicalized him into the KPD's founding. As Ruth Fischer's lifelong partner he took the party chairmanship in 1924 and drove 'Bolshevisation', a break with the united front and a one-sided crusade against Social Democracy, until Stalin and Thälmann displaced and expelled him in 1926, leaving him a lifelong anti-Stalinist dissident.

Industry and production Soviet Union state institutions 1891–1942 ✕ Air crash

The prisoner who gave the Red Air Force its finest tactical bomber: Pe-2, born in a sharashka

In the spring of 1940, Petlyakov watched the test flight of his Pe-2 from the roof of his prison workshop. He was still an inmate.

The right hand of Andrei Tupolev who designed the wings of the TB-1, TB-3 heavy bombers and the ANT-20 Maxim Gorky. Arrested with Tupolev in 1937 on fabricated sabotage charges, he continued designing inside an NKVD sharashka. When Lavrentiy Beria ordered his high-altitude VI-100 fighter converted into a dive bomber, Petlyakov delivered the Pe-2 in 45 days: a machine that became the Red Air Force's most important tactical bomber throughout the Great Patriotic War. Released in 1940, awarded the Stalin Prize (1st class) in 1941, he died the following year when the Pe-2 carrying him to Moscow for production talks crashed near Arzamas.

Government and administration Japan state institutions 1891–1945 ✕ Suicide

An aristocratic statesman whose diplomacy widened Japan’s imperial war

In October 1941, he said he could not be confident of war and that power should go to someone who could choose diplomacy.

Fumimaro Konoe was an aristocratic Japanese politician and prime minister who directed wartime mobilization for the empire. Although he engaged with socialism and racial equality arguments against Western imperialism, he pursued Japan’s war in China and its project of dominance in East Asia in the name of overcoming that order. He led the Tripartite Pact and the Imperial Rule Assistance Association in 1940, then sought negotiations with the United States without stopping military expansion and resigned in 1941, handing power to Hideki Tojo. Suspected of war crimes after Japan’s defeat, he died by cyanide suicide in 1945.

Military command Japan state institutions 1891–1945 ✕ Killed in action

The Iwo Jima commander who understood American power

He told his family that America was a great power and Japan should avoid fighting it if possible.

Tadamichi Kuribayashi was an Imperial Japanese Army officer and diplomat, unusually familiar among senior Japanese commanders with American society, industry, and military power. On Iwo Jima, he rejected a decisive stand at the beaches and organized a defense in depth from tunnels, caves, and concealed positions, turning an impossible strategic situation into a costly battle of attrition. The defense could not prevent Japan's defeat, but it imposed severe costs on the American landing and occupation while reflecting his effort to avoid wasteful banzai charges and indiscriminate self-destruction by his troops.

Military command Germany state institutions 1891–1945 ✕ Suicide

Hitler's "fireman" who rushed from crisis to crisis on the Eastern Front, the Wehrmacht's most tenacious defensive commander

Driving through a blizzard to confront Hitler in East Prussia, Model glared through his monocle and demanded: "Mein Führer, who commands Ninth Army, you or I?"

Walter Model distinguished himself as a staff officer in the First World War and rose to become the Wehrmacht's finest defensive commander in the Second. As commander of the 9th Army in the Rzhev salient, he repelled repeated major Soviet offensives, earning the nickname "the Lion of Defence" and Hitler's trust as the "fireman" who could be rushed to any crisis. On 27 April 1943, Model was the first senior commander to warn Hitler against Operation Citadel, presenting aerial reconnaissance photographs of the Red Army's deeply prepared defences in the Kursk salient, yet the offensive went ahead and his 9th Army failed to advance even 12 kilometres on the northern face. In the war's final weeks, trapped in the Ruhr Pocket, he dissolved his army group rather than order a mass surrender and shot himself in a forest.