People of the Revolution and the USSR

Vietnam Communism 1890–1969 ○ Natural causes

He took on France, Japan and America in turn to win Vietnam's independence

“Nothing is more precious than independence and freedom.” — wartime radio address, 1966

Vietnamese revolutionary. After three decades of exile, including helping found the French Communist Party and the Communist Party of Vietnam, he led the Viet Minh to declare Vietnam's independence in 1945. He led North Vietnam through wars against France and the United States, becoming the symbol of Vietnamese independence.

French Communist Party (PCF) Communism 1896–1975 ○ Pulmonary congestion

The PCF's number two for 37 years: a Stalinist who moved between parliament and the underground

'There was opportunism, legalitarianism and parliamentary illusions... If we courageously carry out this self-criticism before the Party, we shall arouse among the masses a state of mind favourable for the fight,' founding Cominform conference, Szklarska Poręba, September 1947

Number two in the French Communist Party leadership for 37 years alongside Maurice Thorez, entering parliament by defeating Léon Blum in Paris's 20th arrondissement. He directed the clandestine PCF throughout the German occupation and served as vice-president of the National Assembly after the war. At the founding Cominform conference in 1947, he publicly admitted that the party's participation in government had been 'parliamentary illusions,' symbolising the PCF's turn to militant opposition against the Marshall Plan. In 1969, he won 21.3% of the vote as the Communist presidential candidate, the party's best-ever result.

Albania Communism 1908–1985 ○ Natural causes

Albania's leader who made isolation and self-reliance state policy

The 1961 rupture with the USSR showed how far a small socialist state could take an ideological break.

He led Albania's communists and anti-occupation resistance, founding the postwar people's republic. He broke diplomatic relations with the USSR in 1961 and later with China, pursuing an independent Stalinist line.

Polish United Workers' Party (PZPR) Communism 1913–2001 ○ Pneumoconiosis

First Secretary who led a decade of Western-credit modernisation: only for debt and Solidarity to bring the curtain down

To workers at a January 1971 rally — 'So, comrades, will you help?' (the hall answered with feeble applause)

A coal miner in France and Belgium, he became PZPR First Secretary after the 1970 workers' revolt and pursued a 'socialist consumer society' fuelled by Western credit. Living standards rose visibly — but the debt crisis and the 1980 strikes forced him out.

French Communist Party (PCF) Communism 1913–2008 ○ Natural causes

Co-founder of Négritude, pioneering critic of colonialism

"My turn to state an equation: colonization = 'thingification.'" In Discourse on Colonialism (1950) he argued that Europeans had already applied to colonized peoples the methods they later condemned as Nazism, and that Nazism was the natural conclusion of a civilization that justified colonization.

Born in Basse-Pointe, Martinique, the son of a tax inspector, he studied in Paris, where with Léopold Sédar Senghor and Léon Damas he launched the Négritude movement; the journal L'Étudiant noir (founded 1934–1935) first used the term in its present sense in May–June 1935. Frantz Fanon was his student. Elected with Communist Party support in 1945, he was mayor of Fort-de-France for 56 years and deputy for 47, and in 1946 secured the law making Martinique a French département. He broke with the PCF in his Lettre à Maurice Thorez (24 October 1956), citing the Khrushchev report and the repressive policy in the Maghreb; English-language accounts instead attribute the break to the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian Revolution. He founded the Parti Progressiste Martiniquais in 1958 and left politics in 2001.