People of the Revolution and the USSR

Communist Party of Germany (KPD) Soviet communism 1866–1925 ○ Illness

A Pole who passed through the German and Russian revolutions and tried to bring revolution home

As the Red Army prepared to march on Warsaw in 1920, he joined Radek in repeatedly urging Lenin to halt — warning him not to overestimate the revolutionary consciousness of the Polish worker.

Co-founder of Polish communism, he established the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland (SDKPiL) in 1893 together with Rosa Luxemburg and Leo Jogiches. Active in the German SPD's left wing, he helped build the Spartacus League and the German Communist Party, and after the Russian Revolution joined the Bolsheviks, becoming one of Lenin's close advisers on agrarian policy. During the Polish-Soviet War of 1920 he served as chairman of the Polish Provisional Revolutionary Committee, and later became the first chairman of International Red Aid (MOPR) and first rector of the Communist University of the National Minorities of the West.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1879–1937 ✕ Executed

The Polish revolutionary who ran Lenin's financial pipeline from Kraków to Stockholm

April 13, 1917, Stockholm station. Parvus waited for Lenin, who arrived on the sealed train. Lenin refused to meet him in person and used Ganetsky as intermediary. Parvus asked: "Peace is necessary. What does he intend to do?" Ganetsky relayed the question; Lenin answered: "I am not interested in diplomacy. My task is social-revolutionary agitation."

A Polish revolutionary from Warsaw who co-founded the SDKPiL and became Lenin's trusted financial operative. During World War I he partnered with Alexander Parvus to establish trading companies in Copenhagen and Stockholm, channelling profits from scarce wartime goods into revolutionary coffers, a route central to the 'German gold' controversy. After the October Revolution he helped build the Soviet financial system as deputy head of the State Bank and a collegium member of Narkomvneshtorg, later serving as plenipotentiary to Latvia and signing the Treaty of Kars before perishing in the Great Terror.

Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL) Soviet communism 1882–1968 ○ Natural causes

Polish Social Democrat who forged an independent revolutionary path from the SDKPiL underground to the Comintern

In June 1911 she gave birth to her son Jan in Warsaw's Pawiak prison and lived with him in her cell for eight months.

Born into a Polish-Jewish family in Warsaw and trained at the Warsaw Conservatory, Sofia Dzerzhinskaya joined the SDKPiL in 1904 and became a core cadre of the Polish revolutionary movement alongside Rosa Luxemburg and Leo Jogiches. Despite repeated arrests and Siberian exile, she continued underground newspaper publishing and exile organizing in Kraków, then served with the Soviet diplomatic mission in Bern (1918) before settling in Moscow. From 1939 to 1943 she handled Polish affairs on the Comintern Executive Committee, directed Radio Kościuszko broadcasting communist messages into occupied Poland during World War II, and received the Order of Lenin three times.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1890–1937 ✕ Executed

The Soviet trade representative who sent Republican Spain's gold to Moscow

Stashevsky proposed to finance minister Negrín the idea of opening 'a current account in gold' in Moscow, and persuaded him it could be used to buy arms and raw materials.

A Soviet intelligence officer and trade official from the SDKPiL. He ran the joint INO–GRU residency in Berlin as one of the key figures of early Soviet military intelligence, later headed Torgsin and served in the People's Commissariat for Foreign Trade before being posted to Republican Spain as trade representative in 1936. In Spain he negotiated arms sales and managed the financial side of Operation X; he has been identified as the man who persuaded Juan Negrín to deposit the Bank of Spain's gold reserves in Moscow. Recalled in June 1937 and shot two months later, he was rehabilitated in 1956.