People of the Revolution and the USSR

Comintern Communism 1892–1924 ✕ Killed in action

Comintern agent known as Nenin who built revolutionary committees in southern Bessarabia and led the Tatarbunary Uprising

Born Vasily Surov and known as Nenin or Ninin, he was born in 1892 in a village of Ryazan Governorate, worked at the Putilov plant in Petrograd and, qualified as a military medical assistant, served on the Romanian Front in the First World War. After the war he joined the Bolsheviks, and from May 1922, as a Comintern agent, he led the Soviet-controlled party committee in southern Bessarabia, organising revolutionary committees in Cahul, Ismail and Cetatea Albă counties. He urged the participants to count on the Red Army once the rising began, and on the night of 15–16 September 1924 at Tatarbunary he proclaimed a Moldavian Soviet Republic as part of the Ukrainian SSR. In the suppression he was mortally wounded by a gendarme while fleeing, according to English Wikipedia, or fell in the last battle, according to Russian Wikipedia. His identity was established only in 1967.

East Germany Communism 1893–1958 ○ Natural death

First East German Minister for State Security, purged in 1953 after trying to replace Ulbricht

Born in Gelsenkirchen to a gendarmerie sergeant’s family, he trained as a teacher and was a military leader of the Red Ruhr Army during the Kapp Putsch of 1920. As a GRU agent and Comintern military adviser he co-organised the Guangzhou Uprising in China, and in the Spanish Civil War, as “Gomez”, he led the International Brigades. He returned to Germany in 1947, joined the SED, and in 1950 became the first Minister for State Security and a Politburo member, building up the Stasi. After the uprising of June 1953 he moved to replace Ulbricht with Herrnstadt, but once Ulbricht had Khrushchev’s backing he lost his ministry and all his posts in July and was expelled from the party. He worked as a translator, died in East Berlin in 1958 and was rehabilitated after 1990.

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.