People of the Revolution and the USSR

Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) Non-Bolshevik socialists 1826–1900 ○ Natural causes

Co-founder of the Eisenach party and drafter of the Gotha Programme

"Nobody has combatted State Socialism more than we German Socialists, nobody has shown more distinctively than I, that State Socialism is really State capitalism!" — 'Our Recent Congress' (1896)

Born in Giessen, he joined the risings of 1848 and fled by way of Switzerland to London, where he spent twelve years as a close associate of Marx and Engels. In 1869 he founded the Social Democratic Workers' Party with August Bebel at Eisenach; arrested for opposing war credits, he was convicted at the Leipzig treason trial of 1872. He was the man who brought off the Gotha unity congress of 1875 and drafted its programme, the document Marx took apart line by line. From 1890 until his death he edited the party paper Vorwärts. He was the father of Karl Liebknecht.

Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) Non-Bolshevik socialists 1840–1913 ○ Natural causes

Co-founder of the SPD who led the German workers' movement for over 40 years, the 'shadow emperor' of the working class

"The struggle in Paris is only a small outpost skirmish; the main affair in Europe is still ahead of us. Before a few decades have passed, 'War on the palaces, peace to the cottages' will become the battle cry of the entire European proletariat." — Reichstag, 25 May 1871

A woodturner's apprentice who co-founded the Social Democratic Workers' Party with Wilhelm Liebknecht in 1869 and, through the Gotha unity congress of 1875, built the SPD into the world's largest socialist party. Under the Anti-Socialist Laws (1878–1890) he ran the illegal party paper from Zurich exile and held the underground organisation together; he steered the adoption of the Erfurt Programme (1891), which became the Marxist benchmark for European social democracy, and led the orthodox defence against Eduard Bernstein's revisionism. His Woman and Socialism (1879) ran through over fifty editions as the founding text of socialist feminism, and his funeral in 1913 drew the leaders of the Second International.

French Workers' Party (POF) Non-Bolshevik socialists 1842–1911 ✕ Suicide

Marx's son-in-law, author of The Right to Be Lazy, first socialist deputy in the French parliament

"Healthy in body and mind, I end my life before pitiless old age which has taken from me my pleasures and joys one by one." — Suicide letter, 25 November 1911

French Marxist theorist born in Cuba. Co-founded the French Workers' Party (POF) with Jules Guesde and systematized economic determinism as a historical method. In his later years, defended revolutionary Marxism against Jean Jaurès's reformism.

France state institutions Non-Bolshevik socialists 1845–1922 ○ Natural causes

Veteran founder of French Marxist socialism who entered the Union sacrée government in 1914

After war began in 1914, Guesde left the socialist antiwar camp and entered the French government as minister without portfolio. At Stuttgart in 1907 he had rejected special antiwar measures apart from the socialist struggle; wartime office brought that position into government practice.

A journalist exiled for supporting the Paris Commune, he drafted the programme of the French Workers’ Party with Marx in 1880 and became the standard-bearer of French Marxism. He long opposed the reformist Jaurès and took part in founding the unified Socialist Party (SFIO) in 1905. At Stuttgart in 1907 he argued that class struggle would abolish war and that no special anti-war action was needed. In August 1914, seeing France itself in danger, he joined the Union sacrée government as a minister without portfolio and stayed until 1916.

Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) Non-Bolshevik socialists 1850–1928 ○ Natural causes

Theorist of the mass workers' party: the argument that lost to Lenin's vanguard

Trotsky recalled: 'An atmosphere of simplicity and sincere comradely participation reigned in the Akselrod household.'

A former narodnik, he co-founded the Emancipation of Labour group (1883) with Plekhanov and Zasulich, the first Russian Marxist organisation. As an Iskra editor (1900) and, after the 1903 RSDLP split, the central theoretician of Menshevism, he argued for a mass, democratic workers' party against Lenin's vanguard model. He served on the Petrograd Soviet executive in 1917 but opposed the October Revolution and spent his final decade in exile, active in the Second International.

Non-Bolshevik socialists 1852–1918 ○ Natural causes

Founder and leader of Austrian Social Democracy who could not stop the war in 1914 and backed it

In January 1918 he urged strikers in Lower Austria and Vienna to return to work. Elected foreign minister by German Austria’s provisional assembly on 30 October, he oversaw the end of hostilities with the Entente and died on 11 November.

Born to a Jewish family in Prague, a physician turned socialist by the misery of Vienna’s workers, he united the Austrian Social Democratic Workers’ Party at the Hainfeld congress of 1889 and led it as a “little International” inside a multinational empire. At the Brussels Bureau meeting of July 1914 he confessed that “the war is already with us” and that his party was powerless, and despite private misgivings backed the government’s war. He became foreign minister of the provisional government in October 1918 but died on 11 November, a day before the republic was proclaimed.

Labour Party (United Kingdom) Non-Bolshevik socialists 1856–1915 ○ Pneumonia

Former miner who founded the British Labour Party and opposed the First World War to the end, urging an anti-war general strike

Elected to Parliament in 1892 after organising miners, Hardie helped lead the Independent Labour Party and the new Labour movement. At the outbreak of the First World War, he campaigned against the conflict.

Born into poverty in Scotland and working in the pits from about the age of ten, he rose as a miners’ organiser to become in 1892 the first working-class member of parliament. He founded the Independent Labour Party in 1893 and became Labour’s first parliamentary leader in 1906, supporting women’s suffrage and Indian self-rule. At Copenhagen in 1910 he proposed a general strike in the arms industries to prevent war. He attended the Brussels Bureau meeting of July 1914 and opposed the war until his death in 1915.

French Section of the Workers' International (SFIO) Non-Bolshevik socialists 1859–1914 ✕ Assassinated

French socialist leader who united the left, founded L'Humanité, and was assassinated fighting to prevent the Great War

"In the vat of the Republic, prepare the wine of the Social Revolution!" — to winegrowers at the Maraussan cooperative, 1 May 1905

Jean Jaurès was the central figure in the unification of French socialism, leading the French Socialist Party from 1902 and merging it with Jules Guesde's revolutionary Socialist Party of France in 1905 to create the French Section of the Workers' International (SFIO). Through L'Humanité, the daily he founded in 1904, he championed reformist social democracy, while during the Dreyfus Affair he stood as the republican conscience against anti-Semitism and militarism. His Marxist class analysis in the multi-volume Socialist History of the French Revolution (1900–1903) left a lasting mark on French revolutionary historiography. In July 1914, he fought to prevent world war through an international general strike with the German Social Democrats, but was assassinated by nationalist Raoul Villain three days before France entered the conflict.

French Section of the Workers' International (SFIO) Non-Bolshevik socialists 1862–1922 ○ Natural death

French Socialist deputy who joined the Union sacrée government as Minister of Public Works in 1914

Born in Bonnières-sur-Seine in Seine-et-Oise, he took a doctorate in law and practised as a lawyer, and as a journalist edited La Petite République. He joined the Blanquist-leaning Central Revolutionary Committee and followed its successor parties into the SFIO in 1905. From 1893 until his death he was re-elected as a Socialist deputy for a working-class district in the 18th arrondissement of Paris. Author of the 1911 pacifist pamphlet Faites un roi, sinon faites la paix, he nevertheless entered Viviani’s Union sacrée government in August 1914 as Minister of Public Works, and kept the post under Briand until December 1916. At the Congress of Tours in 1920 he voted against joining the Third International. He died of a cerebral haemorrhage in Chamonix in 1922.

Belgium state institutions Non-Bolshevik socialists 1866–1938 ○ Natural causes

Chairman of the International Socialist Bureau who led the Second International and joined Belgium’s wartime government in 1914

At the 1919–20 Paris Peace Conference, he secured treaty clauses favouring labour, including an eight-hour day. As Belgium’s foreign minister, he helped negotiate the 1925 Pact of Locarno.

A leader of the Belgian Labour Party and a jurist, he chaired the International Socialist Bureau from 1900 and became the face of the Second International. When Germany invaded neutral Belgium in August 1914 he entered the government as minister of state and backed national defence, trying to hold the Bureau together against the Zimmerwald movement. After the war he served as justice and foreign minister, signing the Locarno treaties in 1925, and chaired the Labour and Socialist International from 1923.

Mensheviks (RSDLP) Non-Bolshevik socialists 1869–1934 → Died

One of the six who built Iskra: the Menshevik theorist who parted with Lenin

Witnessing the October Revolution, Potresov called it "the murder of democracy" and the Bolshevik regime that followed "the socialism of fools."

One of the six original editors of Iskra (1900) and a founding figure of the RSDLP. At the 1903 party congress he sided with Martov and became a leading Menshevik theorist, arguing for a mass party against Lenin's vanguard model. During WWI he led the defensist wing of Menshevism; he rejected the October Revolution and was briefly imprisoned by the Cheka in 1919. He left the USSR in 1925 and continued writing against the Soviet regime from Berlin and Paris until his death.

Mensheviks (RSDLP) Non-Bolshevik socialists 1871–1947 ○ Lung cancer

Menshevism's theoretical pillar who stood for democratic socialism against Lenin

In 1943, the lifelong anti-Bolshevik Menshevik leader Dan wrote in The Origins of Bolshevism that Bolshevism had been chosen by history to be 'the carrier of socialism, the key idea of our epoch.'

Fyodor Dan was a revolutionary, physician, and a founding leader and chief theorist of the Menshevik faction of the RSDLP. At the 1903 Second Congress he sided with Martov against Lenin; after the February Revolution he became the leading ideologist of 'revolutionary defencism' and served on the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet and the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee. Exiled in 1922, he headed the Menshevik Foreign Delegation from Martov's death in 1923 until 1940, upholding democratic socialism against both Bolshevik authoritarianism and Western social-democratic accommodation. In The Origins of Bolshevism (1943) he recognized Bolshevism as the historical carrier of socialism while arguing for political liberalization in the Soviet Union.

Mensheviks (RSDLP) Non-Bolshevik socialists 1873–1923 → Died

Lenin’s oldest friend and most principled adversary

In 1918 Martov published an exposé revealing that Stalin had been expelled from the party in 1907. Stalin sued him for libel, and the revolutionary tribunal sentenced Martov to 'public censure.'

He built Iskra alongside Lenin, then split with him in 1903 over a single clause on party membership and led the Mensheviks. After October he stayed, fighting to keep a legal opposition alive, and in 1920 was permitted to leave. He died of tuberculosis in Berlin. It is told that the dying Lenin asked after him.