Comintern architect of the Canton uprising who led the first party-apparatus challenge to Stalin's collectivization
At the 16th Party Congress in 1930, he took the podium and openly assailed Stalin's forced collectivization. When he finished, the hall fell silent — his was one of the few speeches not greeted by applause.
A Georgian Bolshevik who left a deep mark on the Chinese revolution as a Comintern operative. In 1927 he chaired the August 7 Emergency Conference, engineered the removal of Chen Duxiu, elevated Mao Zedong to the Politburo, and approved the Canton uprising. He also advanced the theory that China's 'Asiatic mode of production' made it possible to bypass the capitalist stage. In 1930 he and Syrtsov formed the first party-apparatus opposition to Stalin's forced collectivization; demoted and marginalized, he shot himself in 1935 under threat of arrest.
Career timeline
1917Worked in Petrograd military organization; secretary of Kutaisi party committee
1918–1920Led Tbilisi and Baku committees; Presidium member, CP of Azerbaijan
1921–1922Fought in the Kronstadt suppression; party organizer for Vyborg district, Petrograd
1922–1924First Secretary, Central Committee of the Communist Party of Georgia
1925–1929Secretary of KIM (Young Communist International); Comintern rep to China — led Aug. 7 Emergency Conference and approved Canton uprising
1930First Secretary of Transcaucasian Kraikom; formed Syrtsov-Lominadze bloc — expelled from CC
1933–1935Secretary of Magnitogorsk city party committee
Mao’s inquisitor who ran party security and intelligence from the Yan’an “rescue” campaign to the Cultural Revolution
He died of bladder cancer in December 1975 and was buried with state honours as a “proletarian revolutionary”, but in October 1980, on the eve of the Gang of Four trial, he was posthumously expelled from the party and exhumed from Babaoshan.
From a Shandong landlord family, he worked in the Shanghai underground and in 1933 went to Moscow as Wang Ming’s deputy, where he studied the Soviet purges. Back at Yan’an in 1937 he sided with Mao and, as head of the Social Affairs Department, ran the rectification movement’s “rescue” campaign that branded thousands as enemy agents. Sidelined for a time after 1949, he returned in the Sino-Soviet polemics of the 1960s and as adviser to the Cultural Revolution Group directed the investigation and persecution of Liu Shaoqi, He Long and other veterans. He died of cancer in 1975 and was posthumously expelled from the party in 1980.
Career timeline
1939–1946Head of the Social Affairs Department (intelligence and security)
1966–1969Adviser to the Central Cultural Revolution Group
“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 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.
Career timeline
1917–1920Civil War participant, political commissar
1925–1927Provost, Sun Yat-sen University
1927–1929Rector, Communist University of the Toilers of China
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.
Career timeline
1924Worked in the British Mandate Department of Posts and Telegraphs in Jerusalem, where Jewish workers introduced him to communism, and he joined the Palestine Communist Party.
1925–1928Sent by the Palestine Communist Party leadership to the Communist University of the Toilers of the East (KUTV) in Moscow, where he married a Ukrainian communist.
1930Elected a member of the Palestine Communist Party Central Committee at its Seventh Congress in Jerusalem and helped edit its clandestine newspaper, ilal-amam.
1931–1933Arrested by the British authorities and sentenced to two years, served in the Jerusalem, Jaffa and Acre prisons; kept under police surveillance for six months after his release.
1933–1936Sent by the Comintern to Paris to edit the Arabic monthly al-Sharq al-Arabi, which the French authorities shut down in early summer 1936.
1935–1936Studied the Soviet experience of the national question in Tashkent, then was sent by the Comintern to Spain in August 1936 to conduct propaganda among Moroccan troops fighting for Franco.
1937–1939Moved to Syria and Lebanon, active in communist circles in Damascus and Beirut and writing for the party press; expelled from the Syro-Lebanese Communist Party for criticising the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact of August 1939.
1939–1948Returned to Jerusalem to work for the British-run Near East Broadcasting Service and turned to literature, publishing Pushkin (1945) and Chekov (1947) in Cairo.
1948–1976Moved with the radio station to Limassol, Cyprus, after the 1948 Nakba, living there until 1950, then continued in Beirut as a journalist, translator and literary critic.
1976–1979Moved to Athens, where one of his daughters lived; he died there in 1979 and was buried in the city.
