People of the Revolution and the USSR

Hungary Communism 1886–1967 ○ Died

Hungarian communist who backed Soviet intervention with Kádár in 1956 and became prime minister after the revolution was crushed

Born into a German Catholic family in Seregélyes, he studied law and was taken prisoner on the Eastern Front in 1915 and sent to Tomsk. There he joined the Bolsheviks and commanded an international POW unit; back in Hungary in 1918 he helped found the Hungarian Communist Party and was war commissar of the Slovak Soviet Republic. He lived in the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1936 and, under the name Otto Flatter, commanded the XI International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. After the war he was Budapest’s chief of police and then a diplomat. In the 1956 revolution he was interior minister under Imre Nagy, but in November he went to Moscow with János Kádár and openly backed Soviet armed intervention. As minister of the armed forces and public security in Kádár’s government he helped organise the security regiments and the Workers’ Militia, and he was prime minister from 1958 to 1961.

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.

Workers' Party of Korea (WPK) Communism 1908–1953 ✕ Purged, died under suspicious circumstances

Principal organizer of the Workers' Party of Korea and leader of its early Soviet faction

At the Second Party Congress in March 1948, Ho Ka-i took the podium unannounced and rebuked officials who had apologized without admitting wrongdoing: "An apology that does not own the mistake is empty words" — setting a new standard of party discipline.

A Soviet Korean revolutionary dispatched to Pyongyang in 1945 by the Soviet occupation authorities, he became the principal organizer in the founding of the Workers' Party of Korea. As first secretary and second vice-chairman of the Central Committee, he pursued a Soviet-style elite cadre party and, during the Korean War, led a sweeping purge that expelled over 450,000 of the party's 600,000 members. His clash with Kim Il Sung over whether to build a mass party or a vanguard party led to his removal in 1951, making him the emblematic figure of the Soviet faction's rise and fall in the early DPRK.