People of the Revolution and the USSR

Japanese Communist Party (JCP) Communism 1894–1953 ○ Died

First JCP chairman who endured 18 years in imperial prisons

At the 1956 20th Party Congress, Khrushchev asked delegates to rise in memory of Stalin, Gottwald, 'and the little-known Kyuichi Tokuda'—and the entire congress rose.

A founding member of the Japanese Communist Party (1922), he was arrested in 1928 under the Peace Preservation Law and spent 18 years in prison without recanting, emerging in 1945 to rebuild the party as its first secretary-general. When the Cominform condemned the JCP's peaceful-revolution line in 1950, Tokuda swung the party toward armed struggle aligned with Moscow and Beijing; purged from public office, he defected to China and directed the party from his Peking Organization until his death in 1953.

East Germany state institutions Communism 1894–1964 ○ Natural causes

The Social Democrat who led a divided state into being

In April 1946, he was elected co-chairman of the newly founded Socialist Unity Party alongside Wilhelm Pieck.

Otto Grotewohl was a Weimar-era Social Democratic politician who voted against Hitler’s Enabling Act and later led the postwar SPD in the Soviet occupation zone. Initially cautious, he helped drive the merger with the Communist Party under Soviet occupation authorities, becoming the SED’s co-chairman in 1946. The merger created the political foundation of East Germany, but it also followed the suppression of free choice within the SPD. As the GDR’s first head of government from 1949, Grotewohl helped build the new state while operating within the limits imposed by Soviet power.

Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) Communism 1894–1979 ○ Natural causes

A social democrat who moved from municipal politics into state power amid Germany's division

On 30 November 1948, he was elected Lord Mayor of the “provisional democratic magistrate” in Berlin's Soviet sector.

Friedrich Ebert Jr. was a German politician who moved from the Social Democratic Party to the leadership of the Socialist Unity Party, carrying both the symbolism of being the first president's son and the consequences of his own choices. The Nazis detained him in concentration camps for illegal political activity; after the war, he became a central figure in the Soviet zone as social democracy was forcibly fused with communism and the SED consolidated power. On 30 November 1948 he led the extraordinary assembly in the Soviet sector that deposed Berlin's elected magistrate and installed a rival East Berlin magistrate, then combined municipal reconstruction with senior work in East German state institutions.

Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) Communism 1895–1964 ○ Heart attack

SPD organiser in the Soviet zone who signed the merger with the KPD, then left the SED in 1948 and fled west

The son of a shipyard worker in Elbing, he joined the SPD in 1913 and became a white-collar union official in Brunswick, where he worked closely with Otto Grotewohl. Under the Nazis he belonged to a Social Democratic resistance circle and was imprisoned with Grotewohl in 1938. In May 1945 he and Grotewohl rebuilt the SPD in Berlin; he sat on its Central Committee and was the first SPD signatory of the agreement with the KPD and of the unity declaration. Elected to the SED Central Secretariat in 1946, he was isolated as the party was Stalinised and in September 1948 was relieved of all functions. In October he wrote a letter of resignation warning that the “party of a new type” would lead to a totalitarian dictatorship, and fled to the West. He died in 1964.

Czechoslovakia state institutions Communism 1895–1979 ○ Natural causes

A national hero of two world wars who became an unlikely last bastion of the Prague Spring

In Moscow in August 1968, when Brezhnev demanded he install a 'workers'-peasants' government,' Svoboda replied that he would put a bullet in his own head unless Dubček and the reformist leaders were released.

A World War I veteran who deserted the Austro-Hungarian army for the Czechoslovak Legion, Svoboda organized the 1st Czechoslovak Army Corps in the USSR during World War II and emerged a national hero, liberating his homeland from the east. As Minister of Defense, he declared in February 1948 that 'the army will not march against the people,' enabling the Communist takeover, only to be purged and spend the 1950s imprisoned and in obscurity. Elected president in March 1968 on Dubček's recommendation, he consented to the Prague Spring reforms; after the Warsaw Pact invasion that August, he flew to Moscow and threatened to shoot himself in Brezhnev's presence unless the kidnapped reform leaders were freed. During normalization he passively acquiesced to the muzzling of the press and Dubček's removal, remaining in office until a constitutional provision forced him out in 1975.

Czechoslovakia state institutions Communism 1896–1953 ○ Natural causes

The communist leader who turned Czechoslovakia into a people's democracy through the February 1948 coup

We are the party of the Czechoslovak proletariat and our supreme chief of staff is indeed Moscow. We go to Moscow to learn from the Russian Bolsheviks how to wring your necks. That grin will be wiped off your faces! Maiden speech in the Czechoslovak National Assembly, 21 December 1929

Born into a poor Moravian peasant household, he helped found the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ) in 1921 and became its general secretary in 1929, leading it until his death. A Comintern secretary from 1935 to 1943, he helped shape the Popular Front line, and in May 1945 he returned to Prague as deputy prime minister and National Front chairman. After the KSČ won 38 per cent in the 1946 elections he became prime minister, and following the February 1948 coup he was elected Czechoslovakia's first Communist president on 14 June 1948. As president he drove nationalisation and agricultural collectivisation and instigated the trials of Milada Horáková, executed in 1950, and of Rudolf Slánský and Vlado Clementis, executed in 1952; he died on 14 March 1953.

French Communist Party (PCF) Communism 1896–1975 ○ Pulmonary congestion

The PCF's number two for 37 years: a Stalinist who moved between parliament and the underground

'There was opportunism, legalitarianism and parliamentary illusions... If we courageously carry out this self-criticism before the Party, we shall arouse among the masses a state of mind favourable for the fight,' founding Cominform conference, Szklarska Poręba, September 1947

Number two in the French Communist Party leadership for 37 years alongside Maurice Thorez, entering parliament by defeating Léon Blum in Paris's 20th arrondissement. He directed the clandestine PCF throughout the German occupation and served as vice-president of the National Assembly after the war. At the founding Cominform conference in 1947, he publicly admitted that the party's participation in government had been 'parliamentary illusions,' symbolising the PCF's turn to militant opposition against the Marshall Plan. In 1969, he won 21.3% of the vote as the Communist presidential candidate, the party's best-ever result.

Bulgaria state institutions Communism 1897–1949 ✕ Executed

Bulgaria's number two, who ran the repression and fell to a Stalinist purge

At the trial he withdrew his pre-trial confession and in his final statement tried to say it had been extracted under torture.

A leader of the Bulgarian Communist Party and, from his underground years, the second man to Georgi Dimitrov, later a Politburo member and deputy prime minister. From the Fatherland Front government of September 1944 he ran the party's central committee secretariat and pressed for maximum use of the death penalty, yet as economic chief he clashed with Stalin over Soviet purchase prices for Bulgarian tobacco. Arrested in 1949 and tried for British espionage and collusion with Tito, he was the only defendant in an Eastern European show trial to retract his confession in court, was hanged on 16 December, and was rehabilitated in 1956.

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.

Romania state institutions Communism 1898–1963 ○ Died in prison

Finance minister of the "Muscovite faction", purged on the pretext of the 1952 currency reform and dead in Aiud prison, a Székely Hungarian communist

At the Central Committee plenum of 29 February to 1 March 1952 the "errors" of the currency reform were laid on Luca alone. Pauker and Georgescu, who had tried to defend him, followed the same road at the same table three months later.

Born László Luka to a Hungarian family in the Székely Land of Transylvania, he worked in a railway workshop, entered the Romanian labour movement after the Hungarian revolution of 1919 and joined the Communist Party in the early 1920s. Imprisoned repeatedly, he was in the Cernăuți prison in 1940 when the Soviet occupation of Northern Bukovina freed him; he became a Soviet citizen and was elected a deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR. During the war he led the exiled Romanian communists in Moscow alongside Ana Pauker, and on his return in 1944 he joined the Politburo and the Central Committee Secretariat. As finance minister from November 1947 he ran the currency stabilization and the financing of nationalization, but the botched execution of the January 1952 currency reform became the pretext for denouncing him as a "right deviationist" at the plenum of early March, and he was arrested in August. Sentenced to death in October 1954 and commuted to life imprisonment, he died in Aiud prison in 1963. A party plenum under Ceaușescu rehabilitated him posthumously in 1968.

East Germany state institutions Communism 1898–1967 ○ Natural death

Communist who ran an anti-fascist sabotage network before the war and headed the Stasi from 1953 to 1957

Born in Münden in the Province of Hanover, he took part in the sailors’ revolt of 1918, joined the KPD in 1919 and led party military wings; he sat in the Reichstag in 1932–1933. In exile he organised the “Wollweber League” in 1936–1940, which carried out 21 known acts of sabotage against ships of fascist nations, and supplied arms to the Spanish Republicans. Back in Germany in 1946 he ran shipping administration. In July 1953, when Zaisser was removed and the Ministry for State Security was downgraded to a State Secretariat, he became its head, and in November 1955 Minister of State Security again. He clashed with Ulbricht and Honecker and sided with Schirdewan, resigned in 1957, and in 1958 was removed from the Central Committee for “factional activity”. He died in East Berlin in 1967.

Hungary state institutions Communism 1898–1968 ○ Natural causes

Smallholder turned titular head of state

In June 1953, Soviet leaders included Dobi, who held little real power, in Hungary’s delegation. János Rainer suggests the invitation may have reflected a misunderstanding of his office or Smallholder past, or a wish to give the talks an official, interstate character.

Born to a poor peasant family in Szőny, he finished only six years of primary school and worked as a day labourer. He supported the 1919 Soviet Republic and was active in the agricultural workers' movement. A left-wing Smallholder leader who sided with the communists, he was prime minister in 1948–52 and, as chairman of the Presidential Council in 1952–67, titular head of state. He was invited to the Kremlin talks of June 1953, which Rainer attributes to a Soviet misreading of his real power or his standing among the peasantry. When Molotov raised the dissolution of forcibly organized cooperatives, Dobi objected.

Hungarian Working People's Party (MDP) Communism 1898–1980 ○ Natural causes

Hungary's last Stalinist First Secretary; his three months in power ignited the revolution

On the night of October 23, 1956, Gerő took to the radio and denounced the student demonstration: 'We condemn those who seek to instil in our youth the poison of chauvinism.'

A central figure of Hungarian communism, he joined the party at its founding in 1918 and served in the 1919 Soviet Republic. As a Comintern operative and NKVD agent, he worked across Europe in France, Belgium, and Scandinavia, and during the Spanish Civil War he directed the purge of Trotskyists, earning the epithet 'the Butcher of Barcelona.' After WWII he became Rákosi's right hand, driving the Stalinization of Hungary's economy through crash industrialization and collectivization. Appointed First Secretary in July 1956 after Rákosi's forced resignation, he refused reform; on the evening of October 23 his radio broadcast denouncing student demonstrators as 'fascists' and 'chauvinists' detonated the Hungarian Revolution, and within forty-eight hours he was replaced by János Kádár and fled to the Soviet Union.