People of the Revolution and the USSR

East Germany Communism 1876–1960 ○ Natural causes

From the Spartacus League to GDR head of state, the sole founding member who lived the full arc of German communism

On the night of 15 January 1919, Pieck was arrested alongside Luxemburg and Liebknecht and taken to the Eden Hotel. He became the sole survivor — the last to witness his comrades alive.

A coachman's son turned carpenter, he joined the SPD in 1895 and was radicalized under Rosa Luxemburg's influence. Court-martialed for anti-war agitation, he co-founded the Spartacus League and the KPD. Arrested with Luxemburg and Liebknecht in January 1919, he alone survived. He served on the ECCI (1921) and its Presidium (1931), then led the KPD in Moscow exile as Comintern secretary. Returning after the war, he drove the SPD-KPD merger that created the SED and became the first President of the GDR in 1949, holding that office until his death.

Czechoslovakia Communism 1884–1957 ○ Natural causes

Czechoslovak Communist who led the trade-union central council, became prime minister after February 1948 and president in 1953

He helped build the Communist Party and its unions, became premier after its 1948 takeover, and succeeded Gottwald as president in 1953, serving until his death in 1957.

A stonemason from Zákolany in Bohemia, he came from the Social Democrats to help found the Communist Party. Arrested under the German occupation, he was held in Pankrác prison and Dresden and from 1940 in Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Back home after liberation he became chairman of the Central Council of Trade Unions and a member of the Communist presidium, and briefly chaired the Constituent Assembly in 1946. He succeeded Gottwald as prime minister in June 1948 when Gottwald became president, and became president himself on Gottwald’s death in 1953. He favoured a more humane rule but was outflanked by Novotný.

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.

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.

Democratic People’s Republic of Korea Communism 1889–1958? ↓ Vanished after removal 1958

Independence activist, linguist, and Yan'an faction leader who served as the first head of state of the DPRK

On the day the People's Assembly adopted the new DPRK flag in July 1948, Kim Tu-bong personally lowered the Taegeukgi and raised its replacement. Barely a year earlier, he had been the man passionately explaining the old flag's philosophical meaning to a skeptical Soviet general.

A Hangul linguist trained under Chu Sigyŏng who led the Korean Independence League in Yan'an. Became the DPRK's first head of state in 1948, though real power lay with Kim Il Sung. Purged and vanished in the 1958 August Faction Incident.

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.

Czechoslovakia Communism 1891–1976 ○ Natural causes

Pro-Soviet Social Democrat and first post-liberation premier who sided with the Communists in 1948 and merged his party into theirs

During the Communist coup of February 1948, he led the Social Democratic push for union with the Communists; the merger later that year brought his party into the one-party system.

A diplomat from Olomouc, he served as envoy to the Netherlands, Romania, the United States, Switzerland and Austria and, as the exile government’s ambassador in Moscow during the war, grew close to the Soviet Union. Prime minister of the Košice government from April 1945, he led the National Front government until June 1946. As Social Democratic leader he advocated close co-operation with the Communists, and when the non-Communist ministers resigned in February 1948 he stayed and openly backed the Communists. After the coup he merged the Social Democrats into the Communist Party and held high office under the regime.

Polish United Workers' Party (PZPR) Communism 1892–1956 ○ Heart attack

Stalin's most trusted East European proxy, architect of Poland's Stalinist system and guardian of the Oder–Neisse border

On 5 February 1947, atheist communist Bierut took Poland's presidential oath and ended it with the traditional 'Tak mi dopomóż Bóg' — So help me God.

A Polish communist trained in Comintern schools, he joined the PPR leadership in 1943 with Soviet backing and served as Chairman of the State National Council (1944–47), President (1947–52), PZPR General Secretary (1948–56), and Prime Minister (1952–54). He secured the Oder–Neisse border at Potsdam and drove the Six-Year Plan's heavy industrialization, collectivization, and socialist realist cultural policy, presiding over Warsaw's reconstruction. His regime used the Ministry of Public Security to suppress armed opposition and confronted the Catholic Church. He died of a heart attack in Moscow in March 1956, days after Khrushchev's Secret Speech.

Party of Communists in Hungary (KMP) Communism 1892–1971 ○ Died

Architect of Hungary's Sovietization who built one-party rule through 'salami tactics'

Released on 30 October 1940 and reaching Moscow on 6 November, Rákosi stood beside Stalin atop Lenin's Mausoleum the next day as the October Revolution Day parade crossed Red Square.

General secretary of the Hungarian Communist Party (1945–1948) and then general secretary, later first secretary, of the Hungarian Working People's Party (1948–1956), he ruled Hungary as its de facto leader from 1948 to 1956. Arrested in 1925, he received an 8.5-year sentence in 1926 and a life term in 1935, serving over fifteen years in prison before reaching Moscow in November 1940. After returning in 1945 he dismantled the democratic parties through 'salami tactics' and forced the Social Democrats into a merger to build one-party rule, bearing responsibility for mass imprisonment, forced-labour camps and the Rajk show trial. He handed the premiership to Imre Nagy in 1953 yet obstructed reform as first secretary, was removed on 18 July 1956, expelled from the party in 1962, and died in Gorky on 5 February 1971 after deportation to Krasnodar, Tokmak and Arzamas.

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.

Yugoslavia Communism 1892–1980 ○ Natural causes

Yugoslavia's partisan leader who chose non-alignment

The 1948 Cominform split threw Tito's Yugoslavia out of the Soviet bloc and showed that a socialist state could take an independent line, while the dispute was as much a geopolitical struggle in the Balkans as an ideological one.

He was born in Kumrovec to a Croat father, Franjo Broz, and a Slovene mother, Marija, and identified as a Croat like his father and neighbours. Wounded and captured by Russian forces while serving as an Austro-Hungarian Army sergeant major in the First World War, he joined the Communist Party in Omsk in 1920 and led the Communist Party of Yugoslavia as General Secretary from 1939. Appointed commander-in-chief of the Partisans in 1941, he led the national liberation struggle through the Second World War and then headed the Yugoslav federation until his death on 4 May 1980 at Ljubljana Medical Centre. After the 1948 Cominform rift, tens of thousands accused of Stalinism were held in forced labour camps such as Goli Otok, where hundreds died.

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.

Romania Communism 1893–1960 ○ Cancer

The world's first woman foreign minister and head of the Romanian party's "Muscovite faction", brought down by Gheorghiu-Dej's 1952 purge

At the Central Committee plenum of 26 and 27 May 1952 Gheorghiu-Dej denounced Pauker, Luca and Georgescu as an "anti-party faction" and removed Pauker from the Politburo. Dej had returned from Moscow with Stalin's approval, and the Slánský trial was spreading the purge of Jewish communists across Eastern Europe.

Born Hannah Rabinsohn to an Orthodox Jewish family in Vaslui County, she taught Hebrew before joining the Social Democratic Party in 1915 and took part in founding the Romanian Communist Party in 1921. Arrested in 1935, she was sentenced to ten years at the Craiova trial the following year, then sent to Moscow in a 1941 prisoner exchange with the Soviet Union, where she led the exiled Romanian communists under the Comintern. Back in Romania in 1944 she joined the Politburo and the Central Committee Secretariat, and in November 1947 became foreign minister, the first woman in the world to hold such a post. With Vasile Luca and Teohari Georgescu she formed the so-called "Muscovite faction" that contested party control with Gheorghiu-Dej's prison faction, but in May 1952 Dej, with Stalin's approval, had her expelled from the Politburo on the charge of committing both "right" and "left" deviations, and in July she lost the foreign ministry as well. Arrested in February 1953, she was released after Stalin's death, expelled from the party without trial, and spent her last years as a translator at the political publishing house. Time magazine put her on its cover in 1948 as "the most powerful woman alive", yet Robert Levy's research shows that she braked forced collectivization and allowed Jewish emigration to Israel, a more moderate course than Dej's.

Communist Party of Italy / Italian Communist Party (PCdI/PCI) Communism 1893–1964 ○ Natural causes

'Il Migliore': the strategist who led Western Europe's largest communist party for forty years

In the 'Yalta memorandum' written on his deathbed, he argued for polycentrism — autonomy from Moscow (1964)

Founder and secretary of the Italian Communist Party. He steered the Comintern Popular Front and, with the 1944 Salerno turn, brought the PCI into the anti-fascist coalition government. On his deathbed, his Yalta memorandum argued for polycentrism, anticipating Eurocommunism.