People of the Revolution and the USSR

Comintern Communism 1859–1933 ○ Natural causes

Japanese communist founder who shook Plekhanov's hand and shaped Comintern East Asia strategy

Amsterdam, 1904. When the chair announced that the vice-chairs were the delegates of the two warring powers — Plekhanov and Katayama — the two rose and clasped hands in silence. The hall answered with a standing ovation.

Father of Japanese communism. Born in Okayama, he studied in the United States and founded Japan's first trade union and Social Democratic Party. As a Comintern Executive Committee member he shaped anti-imperialist strategy for East Asia, and was buried in the Kremlin Wall.

Comintern Communism 1870–1932

French socialist and teachers’ union activist who led the Committee for the Third International

He organised internationalist socialists against the war and served as secretary of the Committee for the Third International during the founding of the French Communist Party.

A teacher, Loriot joined the Socialist Party in 1901 and became active in the teachers’ union. During the First World War he opposed support for the war and backed the Zimmerwald position, serving as secretary of the Committee for the Resumption of International Relations and later the Committee for the Third International. At the Tours Congress in 1920 he joined the leadership of the newly formed French Communist Party.

Comintern Communism 1877–1950 ○ Natural causes

Co-founder of Bulgarian communism, from the Comintern to head of state

On 22 September 1923, Kolarov and Dimitrov launched the anti-fascist armed uprising. Crushed, they led the survivors across the Yugoslav border — sentenced to death in absentia, beginning 22 years of exile.

Co-founder of the Bulgarian Communist Party and Comintern General Secretary (1922–24). He personally directed the failed September 1923 uprising, spent 22 years in Soviet exile as the Krestintern's agrarian theorist, then returned to lead Bulgaria's Stalinization as head of state and prime minister.

Comintern Communism 1878–1965 ○ Natural causes

The Comintern's first secretary, who taught Mussolini and branded him traitor

"I had never seen a more wretched human being" — on first meeting Mussolini in Lausanne

Russian-born Italian socialist. First secretary of the Comintern, she taught Mussolini Marxism and publicly denounced him as a traitor when he embraced fascism. She broke with Bolshevism in 1922 and led Italy's maximalist socialist faction.

Comintern Communism 1882–1949 ○ Natural causes; some details unconfirmed

From Leipzig defendant to Comintern General Secretary

"I am defending myself, an accused Communist. I am defending my political honor, my honor as a revolutionary. I am defending my Communist ideology, my ideals." Spoken in the Leipzig courtroom in 1933, the words were meant to defend the content and significance of his whole life.

A printer and trade unionist who led the failed 1923 uprising, he became an international symbol by defying the Nazis at the Leipzig Reichstag fire trial. Elected Comintern General Secretary in 1935, after the 7th World Congress, he headed the CPSU Central Committee's International Information Department after the Comintern was dissolved in 1943. During the Great Purge he took part in the destruction of the Polish Communist Party's leadership and in reprisals against old Bulgarian comrades, while also intervening to save some. He returned to Bulgaria in 1945 and became Prime Minister the next year; his Bulgarian-Yugoslav federation plans were undone by the Stalin-Tito split. He died near Moscow in 1949.

Independent activity Communism 1883–1942 ✕ Shot

Swiss communist who organised Lenin’s sealed-train journey in 1917 and sat on the Comintern’s founding presidium

He organised Lenin’s party’s passage through Germany in 1917 and represented the Swiss communists at the Comintern’s founding congress in 1919.

From St. Gallen, he worked on the left of the Swiss Social Democrats and joined the Zimmerwald movement. After the February Revolution of 1917 he was the chief organiser of the sealed-train journey that took Lenin’s party from Switzerland across Germany back to Russia. At the Comintern’s founding congress in 1919 he represented the Swiss communists and sat on the presidium, and he helped found the Communist Party of Switzerland. A member of the National Council from 1917 to 1922, he later moved to the Soviet Union, was arrested in the purges in 1938 and was shot in a camp in 1942; he was rehabilitated in 1956.

Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) Communism 1883–1942 ✕ Executed

The Dutch revolutionary who planted communist seeds in Indonesia and China, then fought both Stalinism and Nazism

On the night of 12 April 1942 at Amersfoort camp, bound and facing the firing squad, Sneevliet refused a blindfold and together with seven comrades sang 'The Internationale.' He asked the executioners to untie his hands; they refused.

Dutch revolutionary. In the East Indies he co-founded the ISDV, forerunner of the Indonesian Communist Party; as Comintern envoy he brokered the founding of the Chinese Communist Party and the First United Front. He fought both Stalinism and Nazism before his execution in 1942.

Comintern Communism 1884–1951 ✕ Died in prison

Sun Yat-sen's political advisor, architect of the First United Front, and the Comintern's global emissary

When American KMT supporters warned Sun Yat-sen, asking 'Do you know that Borodin is a pseudonym? Do you know his real name — Gruzenberg?', Sun replied: 'I know. Lafayette.'

Sun Yat-sen's political advisor and the Comintern's global emissary who engineered the First United Front between the KMT and the Chinese Communist Party. Born into a Jewish family, he joined the Bund at sixteen and the Bolsheviks in 1903, then after the 1905 Revolution emigrated to Chicago, where he ran a school for exiled Russian revolutionaries. In 1919 he became the first Soviet consul in Mexico and helped found the Mexican Communist Party. From 1923 in Guangzhou, he reorganized the Kuomintang into a Leninist vanguard party and established the Whampoa Military Academy. The United Front he built gave the CCP a foothold in mass politics, but it collapsed when Chiang Kai-shek purged the communists in 1927.

Comintern Communism 1887–1954 ○ Heart attack

The Indian Marxist who debated Lenin on colonial revolution

"You are so young! I expected a grey-bearded wise man from the East." — Lenin's first words to the 27-year-old Indian revolutionary upon meeting him at the Kremlin, 1920.

Bengali Marxist. He debated Lenin on the colonial question at the 1920 Comintern Congress and founded the Mexican Communist Party (the first outside Russia) as well as the CPI. Expelled from the Comintern, he served six years in British prisons before turning to Radical Humanism.

Comintern Communism 1889–1940 ✕ Mysterious death

The 'Red Millionaire' who exposed Nazi terror through publishing, the Comintern's greatest propagandist, who broke with Stalin

"Stalin, you are a traitor!" — Münzenberg's response to the 1939 Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact

The Comintern's most brilliant mass-propagandist. He founded Workers International Relief, co-founded the League Against Imperialism, and his Brown Book (1933) exposed the Reichstag fire as a Nazi frame-up. He broke with Stalin and died under mysterious circumstances.

Comintern Communism 1893–1953 ○ Natural causes

The Comintern's first envoy who midwifed the Chinese Communist Party

In 1920 Shanghai, discussing party-building with Chen Duxiu, he diagnosed: "The new-thought movement in China is surging but too complex — Anarchism, syndicalism, Social Democracy, guild socialism, a chaos without a mainstream. People write articles and speak empty words but take absolutely no practical action. This can never propel the Chinese revolution forward."

The Comintern's first envoy to China, who in 1920 worked with Li Dazhao and Chen Duxiu to lay the foundation for the Chinese Communist Party. After his recall, he became a founder of Soviet sinology in Moscow.

Comintern Communism 1900–1974 ○ Natural causes

“Li De”, the only Westerner on the Long March and the Comintern military adviser blamed at Zunyi

Sent to China as a Comintern agent under the name Li De, he was nearly the only foreigner on the Long March, and the Zunyi Conference of 1935 removed him and Bo Gu from command. East Germany revealed only in 1964 that Li De was Otto Braun.

A German Communist from Munich who escaped prison in 1928 and studied at the Frunze Military Academy in the Soviet Union. Sent to Shanghai as Comintern military adviser in 1932, he entered the Jiangxi Soviet in 1933 and with Bo Gu directed a positional defence that lost the fifth encirclement campaign. On the Long March the Zunyi Conference of 1935 condemned his and Bo Gu’s military leadership and elevated Mao. He returned to Moscow in 1939 and after the war lived in East Germany as a translator and lecturer, publishing his memoir A Comintern Agent in China in 1973.

Comintern Communism 1905–1979

Palestinian activist linking anti-colonialism and anti-fascism

In Spain in 1936 he addressed Moroccan soldiers serving Franco, confronting the tension between anti-fascist solidarity and colonial rule in North Africa.

Palestinian communist activist, writer, and translator. Raised in Jerusalem and educated in Moscow, he went to Spain in 1936 to support the Republic. His propaganda work among Moroccan soldiers serving Franco linked anti-fascism in Spain with Arab liberation. He later worked in journalism and literary translation. His memoirs provide an Arab participant’s perspective on the Spanish Civil War.