Wolfgang Leonhard

Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) Communism 1921–2014 ○ Natural death

Youngest member of the Ulbricht Group who fled to Yugoslavia in 1949 and became a leading Western scholar of Soviet communism

Born Vladimir Leonhard in Vienna, he went into Soviet exile with his Communist mother in 1935; she was arrested in 1936 and spent twelve years in the Vorkuta camps. After the Comintern school he became an announcer for Radio Free Germany, and on 30 April 1945 he returned to Berlin as a member of the Ulbricht Group. He worked in the agitation and propaganda department of the KPD and then SED Central Committee and from 1947 lectured at the party college. Convinced that Germany would replicate the Soviet system, he fled via Czechoslovakia to Yugoslavia in March 1949 and moved to West Germany in 1950. His 1955 memoir Die Revolution entlässt ihre Kinder became an international bestseller, and from 1966 to 1987 he taught Soviet history at Yale.