Austria

Non-Soviet revolutionary 1854–1938 ○ Natural causes

Chief theoretician of orthodox Marxism in the Second International, founding editor of Die Neue Zeit, editor of Marx's Capital Vol. IV

"Socialism as a means to the emancipation of the proletariat, without democracy, is unthinkable." — The Dictatorship of the Proletariat (1918)

Leading Marxist theoretician of the Second International. He authored the Erfurt Programme, refuted Bernstein's revisionism, and after the Russian Revolution critiqued Bolshevik rule, creating the defining point of divergence between social democracy and Leninism.

Counter-revolutionary forces 1908–1975 ○ Natural causes

A Nazi commando leader magnified by propaganda

Standing before Mussolini at Gran Sasso, Skorzeny became the face of a victory whose command credit belonged elsewhere.

Born in Vienna, Skorzeny became a Waffen-SS officer who directed sabotage and commando operations for Nazi Germany. In the 1943 Gran Sasso raid, he helped locate Benito Mussolini and led an SS detachment at the landing site, but the operation as a whole was planned and commanded by the airborne officers Harald Mors and Kurt Student. Nazi propaganda presented him as Mussolini's liberator, while he also took part in the overthrow of Hungary's government and the Ardennes deception operation. Acquitted at a postwar war-crimes trial, he later lived in Spain amid far-right networks.

Foreign statesman 1934–2017 ○ Natural causes

An Austrian Europeanist who helped open the Iron Curtain

On 27 June 1989, Mock and Gyula Horn cut the fence near Sopron, making the border opening visible to the world.

Alois Mock was an Austrian People's Party politician who made European integration a central aim of Austrian foreign policy. As foreign minister, he pursued Hungary's border opening and Austria's entry into the European Communities, helping shape Central Europe's reordering at the end of the Cold War. On 27 June 1989, he and Gyula Horn symbolically cut the border fence, creating an international image of the openings that enabled East German escapes and preceded the collapse of the Eastern bloc.

Scholar 1971–

The Swiss historian whose archival research overturned the received Yugoslav narrative of the Tito-Stalin split

Perović showed from newly opened East-bloc archives that Tito's Balkan territorial ambitions, particularly over Albania, triggered the 1948 split, and that the 'Yugoslav path to socialism' was a post hoc myth.

A Swiss historian and political scientist, he is Professor of Eastern European History at the University of Zurich and director of the Center for Eastern European Studies (CEES). His 2007 Journal of Cold War Studies article, 'The Tito-Stalin Split: A Reassessment in Light of New Evidence,' overturned the official Yugoslav narrative by using newly opened East-bloc archives to argue that Tito's Balkan territorial ambitions, particularly the push to absorb Albania, rather than a distinct Yugoslav path to socialism, drove the 1948 split with Moscow. He has also produced significant work on the North Caucasus under Russian rule and on Soviet energy diplomacy, and founded and edits several online scholarly digests including the Caucasus Analytical Digest, extending East European studies to a broader public.

Non-Soviet revolutionary 1895–1961 ○ Natural causes

First woman to lead a major European communist party, and its sharpest anti-Stalinist apostate

“We are condemned to death, since terror reigns in Leningrad.” — her letter to Maslow, intercepted by Soviet censorship and read aloud at a Comintern special session, sealed her break with Stalin (February 1926).

Co-chair of the KPD (1924–1925), the first woman to lead a major European communist party. Born to a Vienna philosophy professor, she co-founded the Austrian Communist Party in 1918 and then, with Arkadi Maslow, led the KPD's ultra-left in Berlin, providing the theoretical groundwork for the 1923 uprising. A fierce factional warrior who publicly denounced Trotsky at the Fifth Comintern Congress, she was expelled in 1926 after refusing to submit to Stalin and spent the rest of her life as an anti-Stalinist left intellectual. Her dramatic trajectory took her from Comintern leadership to US intelligence cooperation in exile, and finally back toward communism in her final years.

Counter-revolutionary forces 1908–1975 ○ Natural causes

A Nazi commando leader magnified by propaganda

Standing before Mussolini at Gran Sasso, Skorzeny became the face of a victory whose command credit belonged elsewhere.

Born in Vienna, Skorzeny became a Waffen-SS officer who directed sabotage and commando operations for Nazi Germany. In the 1943 Gran Sasso raid, he helped locate Benito Mussolini and led an SS detachment at the landing site, but the operation as a whole was planned and commanded by the airborne officers Harald Mors and Kurt Student. Nazi propaganda presented him as Mussolini's liberator, while he also took part in the overthrow of Hungary's government and the Ardennes deception operation. Acquitted at a postwar war-crimes trial, he later lived in Spain amid far-right networks.

Foreign statesman 1934–2017 ○ Natural causes

An Austrian Europeanist who helped open the Iron Curtain

On 27 June 1989, Mock and Gyula Horn cut the fence near Sopron, making the border opening visible to the world.

Alois Mock was an Austrian People's Party politician who made European integration a central aim of Austrian foreign policy. As foreign minister, he pursued Hungary's border opening and Austria's entry into the European Communities, helping shape Central Europe's reordering at the end of the Cold War. On 27 June 1989, he and Gyula Horn symbolically cut the border fence, creating an international image of the openings that enabled East German escapes and preceded the collapse of the Eastern bloc.