People of the Revolution and the USSR

Ukrainian People's Republic state institutions Non-Bolshevik socialists 1880–1951 ○ Died

Ukrainian Social Democratic writer who led the Rada's General Secretariat and the Directory

Just as you created the dictatorship of workers and peasants in Russia, we must create a dictatorship of the Ukrainian language in Ukraine.

A Ukrainian Social Democratic writer, he led the Central Rada's General Secretariat in 1917 and retook Kyiv as first chairman of the Directory in 1918. Arguing for talks with the Soviets he broke with Petliura and resigned in 1919, dying in France in 1951.

Socialist Revolutionary Party (PSR/SR) Non-Bolshevik socialists 1880–1953 ○ Natural causes

A Socialist Revolutionary who defended democratic socialism through exile and testimony

Arriving at his place of exile, Russkoye Ustye, Zenzinov wrote in his diary: 'This is, of course, Russia, but Russia of the 17th, perhaps 16th century.'

Vladimir Zenzinov was a member of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party's Central Committee and a journalist who turned three Siberian exiles into pioneering ethnographic and ornithological study of the Arctic. In 1918 he backed the democratic alternative of the Samara Constituent Assembly committee and the Ufa Directory between Bolshevik power and Kolchak's military rule, before the Omsk coup banished him, and he spent his last decades recording the revolution and civil war in Paris and New York.

Non-Bolshevik socialists 1891–1920 ✕ Murdered by officers

Socialist writer and Népszava journalist murdered with Béla Somogyi in 1920 for writing against the White Terror

Born in Kassa (Košice), he began as a journalist on the local Kassai Napló and published the novel A Sefcsik ház in 1918. In 1919 he joined Népszava, writing about proletarians, the peasants’ hunger for land and migration, and against the White Terror associated with the names of Iván Héjjas, Pál Prónay and Gyula Ostenburg-Moravek. For this the Ostenburg detachment abducted him and his editor Béla Somogyi on 17 February 1920 and shot them, throwing the bodies into the Danube.

Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD) Non-Bolshevik socialists 1893–1939 ✕ Suicide

German Jewish Expressionist playwright who took part in the Bavarian revolution

After volunteering for the German army in World War I and being wounded at Verdun, Toller was discharged in 1917; his wartime experience turned him toward pacifism, and he joined the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany. In April 1919 he served six days as president of the Bavarian Soviet Republic and took part in its armed resistance; sentenced to five years for high treason, he wrote several major plays in prison. Exiled after the Nazis came to power, he continued warning against Nazism and died by suicide in New York in 1939.

Non-Bolshevik socialists 1903–1950 ○ Tuberculosis

The democratic socialist who came back wounded from the POUM militia and dissected the language of totalitarianism

Homage to Catalonia, on reaching Barcelona in December 1936: “It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle.”

Born Eric Arthur Blair. Five years in the Indian Imperial Police in Burma and his reportage on destitution in Paris and London made him a writer; in December 1936 he went to Spain, joined the POUM militia through the Independent Labour Party, spent four months on the Aragon front and was shot through the throat at Huesca. The street fighting he witnessed in Barcelona while convalescing in May 1937, and the outlawing of the POUM that followed, broke him with Soviet communism for good, and he crossed the border with his wife with a warrant out for him as a Trotskyist. Homage to Catalonia, his account of it, sold 683 copies in its first six months. Orwell called himself a democratic socialist to the end, and Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four anatomize the hardening of a revolution into a new rule, and the language that holds it up.