People of the Revolution and the USSR

Hungarian Working People's Party (MDP) Communism 1898–1959 ○ Heart disease

Overseer of culture in the Rákosi era

In June 1953, Soviet leaders criticized Rákosi’s concentration of power and discussed a reorganization of Hungary’s leadership. Révai was not invited to the Moscow talks and was dropped from the party Political Committee that month.

Born into a Jewish middle-class family, he was a founder of the Hungarian Communist Party in 1918, lived in the Soviet Union in 1934–44 and edited the party daily Szabad Nép in 1945–50. From 1948 to 1953 he controlled all aspects of Hungarian cultural life, and from 1949 he was also minister of culture. Pushed into the background by Rákosi from 1952, he was not invited to the Kremlin talks of June 1953, where Molotov mocked him as "everything rolled into one" in ideology. He left the Political Committee in 1953 and briefly returned in 1956.

Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) Communism 1903–1966 ○ Natural death

Editor of Neues Deutschland who helped draft the 1953 New Course, moved against Ulbricht and was purged as a “faction”

Born into a wealthy Jewish family in Gleiwitz, he became a correspondent for the Berliner Tageblatt and an agent of Soviet military intelligence (GRU). Exiled in the Soviet Union from 1939, he edited the newspaper of the National Committee for a Free Germany. Back in Berlin in 1945 he ran the Berliner Zeitung and helped found Neues Deutschland, whose editor always followed Moscow’s line. In June 1953 he and Zaisser set themselves against Ulbricht, and he helped formulate the New Course approved by the Central Committee. After the uprising he proposed a collective leadership, but in July he was removed from the Central Committee for “anti-party factionalism” and in January 1954 expelled from the SED. He worked at the Central Archives in Merseburg, died in 1966 and was rehabilitated only in 1989.

Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) Communism 1903–1977 ○ Natural death

Economist and the SED’s chief ideologue until 1958, when he was expelled from the Politburo in the Schirdewan affair

Born in Leipzig, he joined the USPD in 1919 and the KPD in 1920 and worked as an editor on party papers. From 1926 he studied in Moscow at the International Lenin School and the Institute of Red Professors. In exile from 1933 he was Ulbricht’s secretary in Paris; in Moscow he lost his teaching posts in 1936 for alleged deviations, and in the war became chief editor of Moscow Radio’s German service. Returning with the Ackermann Group in 1945, he ran the party’s propaganda and education work, joined the Politburo in 1950 and was Central Committee secretary for propaganda from 1950 to 1955, effectively the party’s chief ideologue. In June 1953 he set up the command in Halle that put down the uprising. After 1956 he opposed the complete collectivisation of agriculture, and in 1958 he was expelled from the Politburo. He then directed the Institute of Economics of the Academy of Sciences.

Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) Communism 1905–1973 ✕ Suicide while ill with cancer

German communist who drafted the KPD’s 1945 appeal and argued for a “special German road to socialism”

The son of a hosier from Thalheim in Saxony, he joined the KPD in 1926 and attended the International Lenin School in Moscow. After underground work and exile under the Nazis he directed a political school of the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, and in Moscow ran the “Free Germany” radio station. In 1945 he led the KPD group sent to Saxony and drafted the party’s appeal of 11 June 1945. In 1946 he argued that socialism could be built in Germany without a preceding dictatorship of the proletariat, a “special German road to socialism” he had to recant after Tito’s break with Stalin in 1948. He served as deputy foreign minister and first head of the GDR’s foreign intelligence service, and in 1953 was stripped of all posts for supporting Zaisser. Gravely ill with cancer, he took his own life in 1973.

Hungary Communism 1917–1957 ○ Died in prison

A reform communist journalist

On 4 November 1956, as Soviet forces attacked, he took refuge with his family in the Yugoslav Embassy.

Géza Losonczy was a Hungarian journalist and politician who emerged from the communist movement while challenging its repression and dogmatism. Alongside Imre Nagy’s reform circle, he became involved in the upheaval over popular mobilization and the limits of one-party rule, serving as a minister of state in the revolutionary government of 1956. Arrested after the Soviet intervention, he died in prison while on hunger strike awaiting trial, his death forming part of the state repression directed at the Imre Nagy group.

Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) Communism 1921–2014 ○ Natural death

Youngest member of the Ulbricht Group who fled to Yugoslavia in 1949 and became a leading Western scholar of Soviet communism

Born Vladimir Leonhard in Vienna, he went into Soviet exile with his Communist mother in 1935; she was arrested in 1936 and spent twelve years in the Vorkuta camps. After the Comintern school he became an announcer for Radio Free Germany, and on 30 April 1945 he returned to Berlin as a member of the Ulbricht Group. He worked in the agitation and propaganda department of the KPD and then SED Central Committee and from 1947 lectured at the party college. Convinced that Germany would replicate the Soviet system, he fled via Czechoslovakia to Yugoslavia in March 1949 and moved to West Germany in 1950. His 1955 memoir Die Revolution entlässt ihre Kinder became an international bestseller, and from 1966 to 1987 he taught Soviet history at Yale.

Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) Communism 1929–2015 ○ Convicted for border deaths; pardoned

The East German Politburo spokesman whose mistake brought down the Berlin Wall

Asked 'When does it take effect?' at the press conference, he shuffled through his papers and replied: 'As far as I know… immediately, without delay.'

The GDR's leading propagandist, he rose from editor-in-chief of Neues Deutschland to SED Politburo member and First Secretary of East Berlin. On 9 November 1989, asked at a press conference when new travel regulations would take effect, he answered 'immediately, without delay,' triggering the rush that breached the Berlin Wall that night. He later called his mistake 'the final nail in the coffin' of the regime; after reunification he was convicted for the border deaths, but his public acceptance of moral guilt earned him a reduced sentence.

Hungary Communism 1933–2016 ○ Died

The reformist Politburo member who called 1956 a 'popular uprising' and dismantled his own party's orthodoxy

In West Berlin he said the East German 'anti-fascist protective rampart' was a 'disgrace' that had to come down.

A reformist member of the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party (MSZMP) Politburo and the ideological patron of the reformers. On 28 January 1989 he told radio listeners that the 1956 Hungarian Revolution was a 'popular uprising,' demolishing the party's foundational lie; in May that year, in West Berlin, he called the Berlin Wall a 'disgrace.' Together with Otto von Habsburg he sponsored the Pan-European Picnic in August 1989, opening the first crack in the Iron Curtain, and later stood as the Socialist Party's presidential candidate but was defeated.