People of the Revolution and the USSR

Comintern Communism 1883–1936 ✕ Executed

The party’s licensed voice of caution: his warnings outlived him

On 18 October 1917, Kamenev publicly called the coming armed rising ruinous for the revolution. Lenin demanded his expulsion; on 20 October the Central Committee instead accepted his resignation. On 25 October (7 November) he became head of state, but resigned on 4 November.

One of Lenin's oldest comrades, whom he met in Paris in 1902 and worked beside for over thirty years. He joined the RSDLP in 1901, endured arrest and Siberian exile, and by 1914 was directing Pravda. He opposed the October 1917 rising yet served the new state, chairing the Moscow Soviet from 1918 to 1926 and presiding over the Politburo during Lenin's illness. It was Kamenev who proposed Stalin as General Secretary in 1922, and with Stalin and Zinoviev he formed the triumvirate that blocked Trotsky. He broke with Stalin in 1925 and lost every post. Cut off from politics, he directed the Pushkin House and the Academia publishing house. In August 1936 he stood in the dock of the first Moscow trial and was shot on 25 August 1936, at fifty-three. He was rehabilitated in 1988, but never restored to the party.

Comintern Communism 1883–1959 ○ Natural causes

ECCI secretary who carried out the Stalinist purges (1928–1943)

In 1939 Stalin told Dimitrov: "Manuilsky is a toady! He was a Trotskyite! We criticised him for keeping quiet and not speaking out when the purges of Trotskyite bandits were going on, and now he has started toadying!" Almost every Old Bolshevik with a Trotsky link was killed or jailed except him.

A Bolshevik from Volhynia, born in the village of Sviatets to a priest's family (English sources say peasants) and a law graduate of the Sorbonne, he was a member of the Vpered group, joined the Mezhraiontsy in 1917, and held Ukrainian and Comintern posts. As ECCI secretary in the 1920s and 1930s he directed the Stalinist purges in the Comintern apparatus and foreign communist parties, and in 1945–46 he led the campaign against 'Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism'. In 1945 he headed Ukraine's delegation at San Francisco, chaired the committee that drafted the Preamble and Chapter 1 of the UN Charter, and from 1944 to 1952 was Ukrainian foreign minister.

Comintern Communism 1884–1951 ✕ Died in prison

Sun Yat-sen's political advisor, architect of the First United Front, and the Comintern's global emissary

When American KMT supporters warned Sun Yat-sen, asking 'Do you know that Borodin is a pseudonym? Do you know his real name — Gruzenberg?', Sun replied: 'I know. Lafayette.'

Sun Yat-sen's political advisor and the Comintern's global emissary who engineered the First United Front between the KMT and the Chinese Communist Party. Born into a Jewish family, he joined the Bund at sixteen and the Bolsheviks in 1903, then after the 1905 Revolution emigrated to Chicago, where he ran a school for exiled Russian revolutionaries. In 1919 he became the first Soviet consul in Mexico and helped found the Mexican Communist Party. From 1923 in Guangzhou, he reorganized the Kuomintang into a Leninist vanguard party and established the Whampoa Military Academy. The United Front he built gave the CCP a foothold in mass politics, but it collapsed when Chiang Kai-shek purged the communists in 1927.

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.

Comintern Communism 1888–1938 ✕ Executed

The “favourite of the whole party,” killed in its name

In the mid-1920s Stalin told his comrades he and Bukharin were “the Himalayas; all the rest are little spots.” Ten years later he had him shot.

The brilliant theorist Lenin's testament called “the favourite of the whole party.” At Brest he was the far-left voice for revolutionary war; a decade later, defending NEP and the peasants against Stalin's Great Break, he became the “Right Deviation.” Removed from the Politburo in 1929, he returned to the Central Committee in 1934, edited Izvestia and helped draft the 1936 constitution, was arrested on treason charges in 1937 and shot after the 1938 trial. His note to Stalin, “Koba, why do you need me to die?”, is attributed through the Medvedevs' writing.

Comintern Communism 1890–1938 ✕ Executed

Architect of Comintern propaganda and party history compiler

"We believe that Byelorussians are not a nation, and the ethnographic specifics that differentiate them from Russians must be erased" — in Zvyazda, the newspaper he edited, 6 October 1918.

A Latvian Bolshevik who built party organizations in Belarus and Latvia and twice served as First Secretary of the Communist Party of Byelorussia in the 1920s. As head of the Comintern Information-Propaganda Department he coordinated the ideological line of foreign communist parties, and as director of the Institute of Red Professorship (Party History) he authored the 1935 Short History of the CPSU, the direct precursor to the 1938 Short Course. Arrested in 1937, executed the following year, and rehabilitated in 1955.