People of the Revolution and the USSR

Comintern Communism 1878–1952 ✕ Executed

The Bolshevik who led the Profintern and was shot with the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee

I have said everything and ask for no leniency. I need full rehabilitation or death. But if it ever turns out that I was innocent, restore me posthumously to the party and publish my rehabilitation in the newspapers.

Born into a Jewish melamed family in Ekaterinoslav Governorate, he joined the RSDLP in 1901. After the 1905 revolution, arrest, and exile, he fled to Paris and worked in the French trade-union movement. As General Secretary of the Red International of Labour Unions (Profintern) from 1921 to 1937, he organized the left wing of the international labor movement. Appointed Deputy Commissar of Foreign Affairs in 1939, he led the Sovinformburo during the war and supervised the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. Arrested in 1949, he retracted his confession at the 1952 JAC trial and dismantled the prosecution's case point by point, but was sentenced to death and shot. Posthumously rehabilitated in 1955.

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 1880–1966 ○ Natural causes

First woman to lead the Ukrainian Bolshevik party; delegate to all seven Comintern congresses

February 1917, Ekaterinoslav. The revolution, Gopner recalled, arrived in the city 'by telegraph.' Barely a year back from exile, she rushed straight to the Bolshevik committee and the editorial office of Zvezda.

The first woman to lead the Ukrainian Bolshevik party. From 1903 onward she moved across underground work, civil war, and the Comintern stage, serving as a delegate to all seven congresses. She survived the Great Terror and spent her later years as a historian.

Comintern Communism 1883–1936 ✕ Executed

The party’s licensed voice of caution: his warnings outlived him

On 18 October 1917, Kamenev publicly called the coming armed rising ruinous for the revolution. Lenin demanded his expulsion; on 20 October the Central Committee instead accepted his resignation. On 25 October (7 November) he became head of state, but resigned on 4 November.

One of Lenin's oldest comrades, whom he met in Paris in 1902 and worked beside for over thirty years. He joined the RSDLP in 1901, endured arrest and Siberian exile, and by 1914 was directing Pravda. He opposed the October 1917 rising yet served the new state, chairing the Moscow Soviet from 1918 to 1926 and presiding over the Politburo during Lenin's illness. It was Kamenev who proposed Stalin as General Secretary in 1922, and with Stalin and Zinoviev he formed the triumvirate that blocked Trotsky. He broke with Stalin in 1925 and lost every post. Cut off from politics, he directed the Pushkin House and the Academia publishing house. In August 1936 he stood in the dock of the first Moscow trial and was shot on 25 August 1936, at fifty-three. He was rehabilitated in 1988, but never restored to the party.

Comintern Communism 1888–1938 ✕ Executed

The “favourite of the whole party,” killed in its name

In the mid-1920s Stalin told his comrades he and Bukharin were “the Himalayas; all the rest are little spots.” Ten years later he had him shot.

The brilliant theorist Lenin's testament called “the favourite of the whole party.” At Brest he was the far-left voice for revolutionary war; a decade later, defending NEP and the peasants against Stalin's Great Break, he became the “Right Deviation.” Removed from the Politburo in 1929, he returned to the Central Committee in 1934, edited Izvestia and helped draft the 1936 constitution, was arrested on treason charges in 1937 and shot after the 1938 trial. His note to Stalin, “Koba, why do you need me to die?”, is attributed through the Medvedevs' writing.

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.

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 1901–1938 ✕ Executed

Comintern China specialist who cultivated the 28 Bolsheviks

In January 1931, at the CCP's 4th Plenary Session in Shanghai, Mif appeared in person as the Comintern representative and directly secured Wang Ming and his group's landslide entry into the Politburo, orchestrating the ascent of the '28 Bolsheviks' on the spot.

He joined the Bolshevik party in his teens, fought in the Civil War, and studied at Sverdlov Communist University. Named rector of Moscow's Sun Yat-sen University at just 26, he personally cultivated the Chinese student cohort known as the '28 Bolsheviks', including Wang Ming, shaping a pro-Soviet orthodox faction that would prove decisive in the early Chinese Communist Party. As deputy head of the Comintern Eastern Secretariat from 1928 to 1935, he steered Comintern policy on the Chinese revolution, then served as Georgi Dimitrov's political assistant on China. He was a pioneer of Soviet Marxist sinology, authoring numerous works on the Chinese revolution and the colonial question.