People of the Revolution and the USSR

Workers' Party of South Korea Communism 1885–1951 ✕ Drowned

From civil-rights lawyer of the March 1st Movement to first Chairman of the DPRK Supreme People's Assembly: a progressive nationalist

When he submitted a motion of non-prosecution during the March 1st Movement trial, the Japanese courtroom erupted in protest — and the scene, reported nationwide, made Ho Hon the symbol of the anti-colonial lawyer.

One of colonial Korea's 'three great civil-rights lawyers,' he defended the 47 national representatives of the March 1st Movement and handled pro bono cases for workers and independence activists. Elected chairman of Singanhoe's Central Executive Committee in 1927, he led the united-front anti-Japanese struggle, and after liberation served as Prime Minister of the People's Republic of Korea and chairman of the South Korean Workers' Party before crossing north, becoming the bridge by which Korea's independence movement passed into socialism.

East Germany Communism 1892–1973 ○ Natural death

First East German justice minister, dismissed and imprisoned in 1953 after opposing the prosecution of striking workers

A toolmaker from Berlin, he joined the SPD in 1910 and sat in the Prussian Landtag from 1928 to 1933. Under the Nazis he took part in a resistance group and was twice imprisoned. After the war he supported the forced merger of the SPD and KPD, sat on the SED’s Central Committee, and in October 1949 became the GDR’s first Minister of Justice. In the trial of the Gladow gang he had adult criminal law applied unlawfully so that a death sentence was possible. In an interview with Neues Deutschland on 30 June 1953 he said that members of the 17 June strike leadership would not be punished on mere suspicion; denounced as an “enemy of the state and the party”, he was dismissed, expelled and arrested, and sentenced to eight years. Released and pardoned in 1956, readmitted to the party in 1958, he died in 1973.

East Germany Communism 1902–1989 ○ Natural death

East German jurist who succeeded Fechner as justice minister after the 1953 uprising and led its harsh political trials

Born into a liberal middle-class family in Bernburg, Anhalt, she was among the first women to study law in Germany. A Social Democrat, she married the physician Georg Benjamin, brother of Walter Benjamin, in 1926 and joined the KPD in 1927. Barred from practising law under the Nazis, she lost her husband in Mauthausen in 1942. After the war she worked in the justice administration of the Soviet zone, and as vice-president of the GDR Supreme Court presided over show trials of political undesirables and Jehovah’s Witnesses. On 15 July 1953 she succeeded Max Fechner, who had opposed prosecuting the striking workers, as minister of justice, and her heavy sentences against those arrested in June earned her the names “Red Hilde” and “the Red Freisler”. Ulbricht forced her to resign in 1967. She died in East Berlin in 1989.

Hungary Communism 1911–1990 ○ Natural causes

A communist judge who enforced political trials

Even in 1989, he maintained that Imre Nagy was guilty and expressed no regret for the judgment.

Ferenc Vida was a communist lawyer who had taken part in the illegal movement, endured imprisonment, and rose through Hungary’s postwar party and judicial bureaucracy. After the 1956 Revolution he became one of the judges who imposed the greatest number of death sentences in the state’s retaliatory trials. In the 1958 trial of Imre Nagy, he chaired the Supreme Court’s People’s Court Council, sharply restricting defendants’ statements and the defence’s requests for evidence, and sentenced Nagy, Miklós Gimes and Pál Maléter to death. He still refused in 1989 to acknowledge the trial’s illegality or express remorse.

Poland Communism 1915–1987 ○ Natural causes

A legal functionary who defined order against a workers’ revolt

On 17 July 1956, he said the investigation would distinguish striking workers from “trouble-makers, criminals and provocateurs.”

Marian Rybicki was a Polish lawyer and communist politician who helped institutionalize the postwar state through senior party, legal, and administrative work. After the Poznań workers’ revolt in 1956, as Prosecutor General, he publicly advanced a “two currents” line distinguishing striking workers from “trouble-makers, criminals and provocateurs.” The distinction separated workers’ economic grievances from alleged criminal responsibility, but it also framed the investigations and trials that followed. He later served as justice minister and worked as a legal scholar concerned with law and governance in a socialist state.