People of the Revolution and the USSR

Counter-revolutionary forces 1871–1942 ○ Died

Pastor and writer who headed Latvia's pro-German government of 1919

"Not clever speeches or treaties but force decides a nation's fate," he declared at his 1924 treason trial.

A leading Latvian novelist and Lutheran pastor, he headed the pro-German government backed by von der Goltz after the Liepāja coup of 1919. His regime fell after Cēsis, he fled to Germany and, returning in 1924, was tried for treason and expelled.

Hungary Counter-revolutionary forces 1871–1947 ○ Died

Conservative aristocrat who set up the counter-revolutionary government in Szeged in 1919 and was prime minister of Hungary in 1931–1932

Born into an old aristocratic family in Nyírbakta, he was a first cousin of Mihály Károlyi. He entered the House of Magnates and was ispán of Arad County from 1906 to 1910. In May 1919 he formed a counter-revolutionary government against the Soviet Republic in Arad but was interned by the Romanians; after his release he reorganised it on 30 May in French-occupied Szeged, asking Miklós Horthy to set up the National Army as war minister, and the two became lifelong friends. After serving as foreign minister in Bethlen’s government in 1930–1931 he became prime minister in August 1931, and after the Biatorbágy viaduct bombing he imposed martial law and imprisoned Communists. He resigned in September 1932, and in 1939 he gave up all his posts in protest against the second Jewish law. He died in Budapest in 1947.

Italy state institutions Counter-revolutionary forces 1871–1956 ○ Natural causes

A marshal who served Fascism before steering Italy's turn

When the armistice was announced on 8 September 1943, Badoglio's government left Rome and headed south for Allied protection.

Pietro Badoglio was an Italian royal army officer and colonial commander who enforced imperial violence in Libya and Ethiopia. A central military official under Mussolini, he resigned after the failure of the 1940 Greek campaign and later helped the monarchy remove the dictator. As prime minister after Mussolini's fall in 1943, he arranged Italy's armistice with the Allies, but the confused announcement and flight of the royal government left Italian forces unprepared for German disarmament and the collapse of state authority.

Austria state institutions Counter-revolutionary forces 1872–1962 ○ Died

Habsburg archduke and last field marshal of the Austro-Hungarian army who briefly declared himself regent of Hungary in August 1919

Born at Alcsút in Hungary into the Hungarian or Palatinal branch of the House of Habsburg-Lorraine, he entered the army in 1890, commanded a corps, an army and army groups in the First World War and on 24 October 1918 became the last field marshal of the Austro-Hungarian army. On 27 October Emperor Charles made him homo regius of Hungary, but the Aster Revolution put an end to his plans. After the fall of the Soviet Republic he became head of state in August 1919 as regent for Charles and appointed István Friedrich prime minister, but when it became clear that the Allies would not recognise a Habsburg as head of state he was forced to resign on 23 August. In the Horthy era he was president of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences from 1936 to 1944. He left Hungary in 1944 and died in Rain, West Germany, in 1962.

Ukrainian State (Hetmanate) Counter-revolutionary forces 1873–1945 ○ Died

The last hetman of Ukraine, installed under German occupation in 1918

On 29 April 1918 in Kyiv, the All-Ukrainian Congress of Landowners rose and unanimously acclaimed Pavlo Skoropadskyi as Hetman of Ukraine with shouts of 'Long live the Hetman!'

A Ukrainian aristocrat and tsarist lieutenant general who commanded a corps in the First World War. In April 1918, backed by the German army that occupied Ukraine after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, he overthrew the socialist Central Rada in a coup and was proclaimed Hetman of the Ukrainian State. During his eight-month rule he founded the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, established universities, and built diplomatic ties, but his pro-landlord agrarian policy and the German occupiers' forced grain requisitions provoked widespread peasant resistance. When Germany collapsed in November 1918, Symon Petliura's Anti-Hetman Uprising drove him from power; he abdicated in December and spent the rest of his life in German exile, refusing to collaborate with the Nazis.

Counter-revolutionary forces 1874–1934 ○ Illness

The perfume magnate who bought both the far-right leagues and a mass newspaper

In 1928 he launched a daily at ten centimes a copy and drove its circulation toward a million. The paper lost money, which was not the point: it was cheap enough to be read everywhere, and the language grown on its pages became the language of the columns that filled the square in February 1934

A Corsican who built the largest fortune in the European perfume industry of his day. He bought Le Figaro in 1922 and founded the cheap mass daily L'Ami du peuple in 1928, using both as instruments of anticommunist, antisemitic and antiparliamentary agitation. He financed Georges Valois's Faisceau and the early Croix-de-Feu, and in 1933 created and funded Solidarité Française outright. His career is a large part of the answer to the question that hangs over the French leagues of the 1930s: who paid for them. The organisation he had founded was on the Place de la Concorde as a column on 6 February 1934, and he died that July, ruined by a divorce settlement and his debts.

Hungary Counter-revolutionary forces 1874–1946 ○ Died in prison

Transylvanian aristocrat who, as prime minister in 1921–1931, consolidated the Horthy regime with a restricted franchise and a League loan

Scion of an old Transylvanian noble family, he entered parliament as a liberal in 1901. He joined the counter-revolution in Szeged in 1919 and became prime minister in April 1921, after King Charles’s first return attempt. He founded the Unity Party, secured its victories by restoring the open ballot in the countryside with the Franchise Act of 1922, concluded a pact with the Social Democrats, and stabilised the economy through League of Nations membership and a loan. He resigned in the Depression in 1931 and in 1941 opposed war with the Soviet Union. Arrested by the Soviets in 1945, he died in a Moscow prison in 1946.