Wartime prime minister who declared war on the Soviet Union over the Kassa bombing and approved the deportation of Jews
A lawyer and diplomat from Szombathely, he moved to the foreign ministry in 1922 and headed its press department. He became foreign minister in January 1941 and, after Teleki’s suicide in April, prime minister as well. Seeking to regain lands lost at Trianon, he followed a pro-German line, joined the invasion of Yugoslavia, declared a state of war with the Soviet Union without parliament’s consent after the Kassa bombing in June, and took Hungary into war with Britain and the United States. He pushed through the deportation of “alien” Jews and the Third Jewish Law, and Horthy forced him out in March 1942. Sentenced to death by a People’s Court after the war, he was shot in January 1946.
Career timeline
1913–1922Official, Ministry of Culture and Education
1922–1941Press chief and diplomat, foreign ministry
1941Foreign minister
1941–1942Prime minister and foreign minister; war on the USSR
1945–1946Sentenced by a People’s Court and executed
General who as prime minister in August–October 1944 halted the Jewish deportations and prepared an armistice until the Arrow Cross coup
Born in Budapest, he graduated from the Ludovika Academy in 1910 and in 1919 served at the Hungarian Red Army’s headquarters before joining Horthy’s National Army. Military attaché in Prague from 1928 to 1934, he commanded the Second Army from 1943 and the First Army from April 1944. Recommended by István Bethlen, he succeeded Sztójay as prime minister on 29 August 1944 with a secret mandate to prepare an armistice; his government stopped the deportation of Jews and replaced the state secretaries responsible. When Operation Panzerfaust and the Arrow Cross coup thwarted the armistice on 15 October, he negotiated through the night with Veesenmayer, then urged Horthy to surrender; forced to resign, he was imprisoned by the Germans. Never prosecuted, he lost his pension and lands, and in 1965 joined his daughter in Adelaide, where he died in 1967.
Soviet Union
Soviet communism
1890–1986
○ Natural causes
“Stone-arse”: the man who never changed his mind
His wife Polina Zhemchuzhina was arrested for treason in December 1948 and forced into divorce, and was released only after Stalin's death in 1953. Throughout, Molotov is said to have had dinner set for two every evening. 'She suffered because of me,' he said later.
An Old Bolshevik who joined the RSDLP in 1906 and was arrested and internally exiled twice before 1917. A full Politburo member from 1926, he became premier in 1930, overseeing collectivisation and the Great Purge; in 1939 he signed the Nazi–Soviet pact. As deputy chair of the State Defence Committee he attended the Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam conferences, and he initiated the 'Molotov Plan' against the Marshall Plan. In 1957 he failed to oust Khrushchev; sources date his expulsion to 1961 or 1962. Readmitted in 1984, he died in 1986.
An aristocratic diplomat who preserved Poland’s diplomatic continuity in exile
On 17 April 1943, Raczyński’s Foreign Ministry requested that the International Red Cross investigate Katyn.
Edward Raczyński was a diplomat of the Second Polish Republic and a leading figure in the Polish government-in-exile in London. During the war he informed the Allies about the mass murder of Jews in German-occupied Poland and took part in the Polish diplomatic action requesting an international investigation into the Katyn massacre in 1943. After 1945 he defended the continuity of the government-in-exile while supporting democratic opposition in communist-ruled Poland, and served as President of Poland-in-exile from 1979 to 1986.
Career timeline
1919–1925Served in Polish diplomatic missions in Bern, Copenhagen and London
1925–1932Head of the International Treaties Department, Polish Foreign Ministry
1932–1934Polish ambassador to the League of Nations
1934–1945Polish ambassador to the United Kingdom and diplomatic representative of the government-in-exile
1941–1943Foreign Minister of the Polish government-in-exile in London
1954–1972Member of the Council of Three of the government-in-exile
1979–1986President of the Republic of Poland-in-exile
1986–1993Senior figure in the Polish émigré community in London
From Volga flotilla commander to exile critic: the diplomat who wrote Stalin an open letter
December 1918, aboard the destroyer Spartak — disguised as an Estonian sailor and hidden among potato sacks, he was exposed when it turned out he didn't speak a word of Estonian.
Bolshevik naval commander of the Volga and Baltic fleets during the Civil War. As a Soviet diplomat he refused recall in 1938 and defected, publishing his 'Open Letter to Stalin' in 1939, a public denunciation of the Great Purge.
Career timeline
1910Joined Bolshevik faction while at St. Petersburg Polytechnic Institute
1912–1914Literary contributor to Zvezda and Pravda
1917Deputy chairman of Kronstadt Soviet; arrested after July Days, freed Oct 1917
1918Commissar of Naval General Staff, commander of Volga Flotilla — took Kazan, saved 432 prisoners from 'death barge'
1919–1920Captured by British, held in Brixton Prison; exchanged, commanded Volga-Caspian Flotilla, led Enzeli landing
1920–1921Commander of Baltic Fleet; twice awarded Order of the Red Banner
1921–1924Plenipotentiary to Afghanistan
1928–1930Chairman of Glavrepertkom (censorship); editor-in-chief, Krasnaya Nov
1930–1938Plenipotentiary to Estonia, Denmark, and Bulgaria
1938–1939Refused recall, defected in Paris; published 'Open Letter to Stalin' Aug 1939
US Under Secretary of State whose Welles Declaration of July 1940 refused to recognise the Soviet annexation of the Baltic states
Born in New York City to a wealthy political family, he graduated from Harvard in 1914 and joined the diplomatic service on the advice of the family friend Franklin Roosevelt. A Latin America specialist, he saw his career ended by President Coolidge, but under Roosevelt he became Assistant Secretary for Latin American Affairs and then Under Secretary of State from 1937 to 1943. As acting Secretary of State he issued the Welles Declaration on 23 July 1940, condemning the Soviet occupation of the Baltic states and refusing to recognise their annexation; the day before, he had authorised diplomatic visas for the family of Konstantin Päts. He went on to oppose any concession on the Baltic question. He helped write the Atlantic Charter, but was forced out by Cordell Hull in 1943 after word spread that he had propositioned two railroad porters. He died in New Jersey in 1961.
Career timeline
1914Graduated from Harvard; entered the diplomatic service
Nazi Germany’s foreign minister, he played a key role in negotiating the German-Soviet nonaggression pact.
Joachim von Ribbentrop served as Germany’s foreign minister from 1938 to 1945. He played a key role in negotiating the 1939 German-Soviet nonaggression pact, which made possible Germany’s invasion of Poland that September. He also directed diplomatic efforts to persuade Axis partners to deport Jews to German killing centers and to hand over their Jewish citizens in Germany to deportation. The International Military Tribunal convicted him on all four counts and sentenced him to death; he was hanged on October 16, 1946.
The Comintern's first envoy who midwifed the Chinese Communist Party
In 1920 Shanghai, discussing party-building with Chen Duxiu, he diagnosed: "The new-thought movement in China is surging but too complex — Anarchism, syndicalism, Social Democracy, guild socialism, a chaos without a mainstream. People write articles and speak empty words but take absolutely no practical action. This can never propel the Chinese revolution forward."
The Comintern's first envoy to China, who in 1920 worked with Li Dazhao and Chen Duxiu to lay the foundation for the Chinese Communist Party. After his recall, he became a founder of Soviet sinology in Moscow.
Career timeline
1913–1918Emigrated to US and Canada; joined Socialist Party of America
1918Joined RCP(b) in Vladivostok
1919–1920Captured by Whites, exiled to Sakhalin; escaped via prisoner uprising
1920–1927ECCI Far Eastern Dept head & China representative; assisted CCP founding
1926Chairman, Comintern Far Eastern Bureau in Shanghai
1927–1929Economic work in Irkutsk
1929–1934Oriental studies in Moscow; Profintern Pacific Secretariat secretary
1934–1953Professor, Moscow State University; Academy of Sciences researcher; sinology publications
Shortly after Sokolovsky walked out, Murphy reported that the Soviets had begun a three-step plan to force the Western powers out of Berlin.
Robert Daniel Murphy was an American diplomat who combined negotiation with intelligence judgment in the arenas of war and occupation. As the U.S. political adviser for Germany in 1948, he reported to Washington that the Soviet Union had begun a staged campaign to drive the Western powers from Berlin, helping shape American perceptions during the blockade and airlift crisis. His career ranged from preparing the North African landings and administering occupied Germany to ambassadorships in Belgium and Japan and senior State Department posts, illustrating how field reporting could move military and political decisions.
Career timeline
1916Began federal service at the U.S. Post Office
1917–1919Cipher clerk, American Legation in Bern, Switzerland
1921–1925Vice consul in Zurich and Munich
1930–1940Consul in Paris and chargé d’affaires at Vichy
1940–1944Presidential envoy to French North Africa and Allied political adviser
1944–1949U.S. political adviser for Germany
1949–1952U.S. ambassador to Belgium
1952–1959Ambassador to Japan and Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs
Finnish foreign minister who dismissed Stalin's demands as a bluff and overruled Mannerheim's counsel to compromise
"Forget that the Soviet Union is a great power": Erkko's instruction to Paasikivi before the 1939 Moscow negotiations.
A press baron who built Helsingin Sanomat into the Nordics' largest daily, Erkko became foreign minister in December 1938 and seized full control of the Soviet negotiations. An unyielding hardliner, he instructed Paasikivi departing for Moscow to "forget that the Soviet Union is a great power," dismissed Stalin's territorial demands as a bluff, and overruled Marshal Mannerheim's advice to compromise. With the Erkko-owned Helsingin Sanomat steering public opinion against concessions, the talks collapsed; after the Winter War began, Paasikivi called it "Erkko's war."
Career timeline
1918White Guard officer, Finnish Civil War
1919–1927Foreign Ministry postings in Paris, Tallinn, London
1927–1938Editor-in-Chief, Helsingin Sanomat; CEO, Sanoma Oy
1932Minister without portfolio, Deputy Interior Minister (Sunila II)
1933–1936MP, National Progressive Party
1938–1939Minister of Foreign Affairs (Cajander III)
The Nationalist diplomat whose presence at the Security Council table triggered the Soviet walkout
In January 1950, as Tsiang took the chair of the Security Council, Malik declared 'This is not a meeting, but a parody of a meeting' and walked out.
A historian of Qing diplomacy who became the Republic of China's most consequential Cold War diplomat. After a Columbia PhD and pioneering work in modern Chinese diplomatic history at Nankai and Tsinghua, he left academia in 1935 to serve the Nationalist government as ambassador to the Soviet Union and later as permanent representative to the United Nations. In January 1950, with Tsiang presiding over the Security Council, Soviet delegate Malik walked out rather than sit with a Nationalist Chinese representative, a boycott that left the Soviet veto unused when the Council voted in June to defend South Korea.
Career timeline
1923–1929Professor and Chair of History, Nankai University
1929–1935Chair of History and Dean of Arts, Tsinghua University
1935–1936Director of Political Affairs, Executive Yuan, Nationalist Government
1936–1938Ambassador of the ROC to the Soviet Union
1944–1946China Representative to UNRRA; Director, CNRRA
1947–1962Permanent Representative of the ROC to the UN and Security Council
1961–1965Ambassador of the ROC to the US (concurrent with UN post)
Swiss vice-consul in Budapest who saved tens of thousands of Jews with protective letters and safe houses
Born in Walzenhausen, Switzerland, he emigrated to the United States in 1913 and from 1920 worked in the Swiss consular service in the US and in Jaffa. Appointed Swiss vice-consul in Budapest in 1942, he cooperated with the Jewish Agency. In 1944 he negotiated with the Hungarian government and the Nazis for permission to issue 8,000 protective letters for emigration to Palestine, applied it to families rather than individuals, and issued tens of thousands more letters, all numbered between one and 8,000. He declared some 76 houses around Budapest annexes of the Swiss legation; about 3,000 people found refuge at the “Glass House”. Credited with saving over 62,000 Jews, he was criticised after the war for exceeding his authority and rehabilitated only in 1958; in 1965 Yad Vashem named him one of the Righteous Among the Nations.
Lithuanian officer and envoy in Berlin who founded the Lithuanian Activist Front behind the June Uprising of 1941
Mobilised into the Imperial Russian Army in the First World War, he was the first to enlist in the Lithuanian armed forces after independence in 1918, and on 1 January 1919 his men raised the Lithuanian flag over Gediminas’ Tower in Vilnius. He became Chief of the General Staff in 1925 but had to resign after opposing the 1926 coup. He was envoy to Germany in 1927–1930 and 1938–1941. After the Soviet occupation of 1940 he founded in Berlin the Lithuanian Activist Front, which sought to restore independence by working with the Nazis; named prime minister of the provisional government in 1941, he was held under house arrest by the Germans. In 1944 he was arrested for a memorandum demanding a Lithuanian government. After the war he settled in the United States, working at the Library of Congress. His antisemitic writings have made dedications in his honour controversial.
Career timeline
1919Raised the flag over Gediminas’ Tower
1925–1926Chief of the Lithuanian General Staff
1938–1941Envoy to Germany
1940–1941Founded the Activist Front; named provisional prime minister
A Fascist power broker who helped bring down Mussolini
At 2 a.m. on 25 July 1943, the Grandi motion passed 19–8 and shattered Mussolini’s grip on power.
Dino Grandi was a leading Italian Fascist and diplomat who exercised power at the centre of the regime. As foreign minister and ambassador in London, he pursued a cautious diplomatic line toward war, but he also bore responsibility for administering the Fascist state and its policies. After the Allied invasion of Sicily, he drafted and organized the vote on the July 1943 motion calling on the king to resume constitutional command of the armed forces, helping bring about Benito Mussolini’s removal. He went into exile and was later sentenced to death in absentia by the Italian Social Republic’s Fascist tribunal.
Career timeline
1915–1919Served in World War I, studied law and economics, and began legal practice
1920–1922Leader in the Bologna Fascist movement and the National Fascist Party leadership
1924–1929Undersecretary of the Interior and Foreign Affairs
1929–1932Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs
1932–1939Italian ambassador to the United Kingdom
1939–1943Minister of Justice and president of the Chamber of Fasces and Corporations
1943Drafted and organized the Grand Council motion that removed Mussolini
1944Sentenced to death in absentia by the Italian Social Republic tribunal
Comintern architect of the Canton uprising who led the first party-apparatus challenge to Stalin's collectivization
At the 16th Party Congress in 1930, he took the podium and openly assailed Stalin's forced collectivization. When he finished, the hall fell silent — his was one of the few speeches not greeted by applause.
A Georgian Bolshevik who left a deep mark on the Chinese revolution as a Comintern operative. In 1927 he chaired the August 7 Emergency Conference, engineered the removal of Chen Duxiu, elevated Mao Zedong to the Politburo, and approved the Canton uprising. He also advanced the theory that China's 'Asiatic mode of production' made it possible to bypass the capitalist stage. In 1930 he and Syrtsov formed the first party-apparatus opposition to Stalin's forced collectivization; demoted and marginalized, he shot himself in 1935 under threat of arrest.
Career timeline
1917Worked in Petrograd military organization; secretary of Kutaisi party committee
1918–1920Led Tbilisi and Baku committees; Presidium member, CP of Azerbaijan
1921–1922Fought in the Kronstadt suppression; party organizer for Vyborg district, Petrograd
1922–1924First Secretary, Central Committee of the Communist Party of Georgia
1925–1929Secretary of KIM (Young Communist International); Comintern rep to China — led Aug. 7 Emergency Conference and approved Canton uprising
1930First Secretary of Transcaucasian Kraikom; formed Syrtsov-Lominadze bloc — expelled from CC
1933–1935Secretary of Magnitogorsk city party committee
Soviet Union
Soviet communism
1897–1942
✕ Died in prison
The Soviet chargé d'affaires in Berlin who opened the secret channel to the Nazi-Soviet pact
At the 26 July dinner with Schnurre he noted in his diary that he 'felt the conversation was beginning to go too far', even then holding no instructions at all from Moscow.
A Soviet diplomat who began as a writer of noble birth. He joined the Bolsheviks in 1918, moved between press work and diplomacy, and in 1928 concluded the USSR's first treaty with an Arab state, Yemen. He is remembered above all for serving as chargé d'affaires in Berlin in the spring of 1939, when his meetings with Weizsäcker, Schnurre, and Ribbentrop carried the early signals of a German-Soviet rapprochement; after Molotov authorized him on 29 July to signal Soviet readiness, he was recalled to Moscow on the eve of the pact, then arrested in February 1940 and died in the camp.
Career timeline
1918Joined the Bolshevik Party
1918–1920Telegraph agency correspondent in Berlin, editor of Kommunist in Vladikavkaz
1922–1928Press posts in the Soviet missions in Turkey, Germany, and Japan
1928Mission to Yemen; concluded the USSR's first treaty with an Arab state
1930–1935Counsellor in the missions in Turkey and Britain
1936–1937Head of the NKID press department
1937–1939Counsellor, then chargé d'affaires, of the USSR in Germany
1940Arrested and sentenced to 15 years; died in camp in 1942
Second Soviet ambassador to Spain, recalled and shot barely three months after taking the post
Kollontai wrote in her diary in Mexico, 1927: 'I wonder how I can work when I only have two senior staff members: Gaikis and myself. We do our own ciphering. We are terribly isolated.'
Born in Warsaw in 1898 to a Jewish family, Gaikis was active in Polish socialist parties before joining the Bolsheviks in 1917. After serving as Chicherin's secretary, first secretary in Mexico, and consul-general in Istanbul, he was posted to Madrid in 1936 as counsellor to the Soviet embassy and succeeded Marcel Rosenberg as ambassador in February 1937. Barely three months later he was recalled to Moscow, arrested on arrival, and shot on 21 August 1937 on charges of 'betrayal of the Fatherland'; he was posthumously rehabilitated in 1955. His execution left the Soviet embassy in Spain effectively vacant for the remainder of the Civil War, with no ambassador appointed again until after Franco's death.
Career timeline
1917–1919Polish socialist parties, Red Army 11th Army
1920Official, Kazakh Military Revolutionary Committee (Kazrevkom)
1921–1924NKID official, secretary to People's Commissar Chicherin
1924–1928First secretary and chargé d'affaires, Soviet legation in Mexico
1929–1933Profintern (Red International of Labour Unions)
Latvian foreign minister who signed the Soviet–Latvian Mutual Assistance Treaty in 1939 and was deported to the Soviet Union in 1940
Born in Riga to an Estonian trader and a Baltic German mother, he served in the Estonian Army during the Latvian War of Independence. He joined the Latvian foreign ministry in 1920, became its general secretary in 1933, ran the ministry de facto after Kārlis Ulmanis’s coup of 1934 and was foreign minister from 1936 to 1940; he was also active on the Council of the League of Nations. In June 1939 he signed the German–Latvian Non-Aggression Pact and on 5 October 1939 the Soviet–Latvian Mutual Assistance Treaty. After the Soviet occupation he and his family were deported to Voronezh in July 1940 in the presence of the interior minister Vilis Lācis; he was arrested in June 1941 and in 1952 sentenced to 25 years. Released in 1954, he returned to Latvia in 1958, wrote against the Latvian diaspora organisations and died in Riga in 1967.
Career timeline
1920Joined the Latvian foreign ministry
1933General secretary of the foreign ministry
1936–1940Minister of foreign affairs
1939Signed the Soviet–Latvian Mutual Assistance Treaty
Mao’s inquisitor who ran party security and intelligence from the Yan’an “rescue” campaign to the Cultural Revolution
He died of bladder cancer in December 1975 and was buried with state honours as a “proletarian revolutionary”, but in October 1980, on the eve of the Gang of Four trial, he was posthumously expelled from the party and exhumed from Babaoshan.
From a Shandong landlord family, he worked in the Shanghai underground and in 1933 went to Moscow as Wang Ming’s deputy, where he studied the Soviet purges. Back at Yan’an in 1937 he sided with Mao and, as head of the Social Affairs Department, ran the rectification movement’s “rescue” campaign that branded thousands as enemy agents. Sidelined for a time after 1949, he returned in the Sino-Soviet polemics of the 1960s and as adviser to the Cultural Revolution Group directed the investigation and persecution of Liu Shaoqi, He Long and other veterans. He died of cancer in 1975 and was posthumously expelled from the party in 1980.
Career timeline
1939–1946Head of the Social Affairs Department (intelligence and security)
1966–1969Adviser to the Central Cultural Revolution Group
At the Constituent Assembly's session on 11 January 1946, he was elected chair of a 20-member mandate verification commission, closing its first session; at midday of that day, at the second session, the Assembly proclaimed Albania a People's Republic.
Albanian communist activist and diplomat. Born in Faiyum, Egypt, into a national-movement family, he studied in Beirut and at Harvard, served as Albanian consul in New York in 1923-24, and taught at the Comintern school in Moscow. Sent to Albania in 1938, he took part in the party's founding in 1941, served as secretary of the General National Liberation Council in 1943 and of the Constituent Assembly in 1945, was ambassador to Moscow in 1946-47, Deputy Foreign Minister and ambassador to Sofia in 1954-55, and chaired the Party Control and Revision Commission until 1960, when he was purged: eight years of internment, ten years in Burrel prison, released in 1980, dead in 1984.
Career timeline
1923–1924Albanian consul in New York
late 1920sTaught in the Comintern school's Anglo-American section, Moscow
1938Sent to Albania
1941Participant in the founding of the Communist Party of Albania
1943Secretary of the General National Liberation Council
1945Secretary of the Constituent Assembly
1946–1947Ambassador to Moscow
1954–1955Ambassador to Sofia
1955–1960Chair of the Party Control and Revision Commission
1960Purged: expelled from the party, interned and imprisoned
1969–1980Held in Burrel prison as its oldest prisoner
A corporate executive turned architect of the postwar international order
The Yalta Protocol preserves the signature of the American representative, “E. R. Stettinius Jr.”
Edward Stettinius was a statesman who moved from corporate management and national mobilization into the center of American diplomacy at the end of the Second World War. As administrator of Lend-Lease, he helped sustain the Allied war effort, and at Yalta he accompanied Franklin Roosevelt in negotiating the framework of postwar Europe and international organization. He signed the Yalta Protocol as the American representative and then led the United States delegation at the conference that founded the United Nations, but his effort to address growing tensions with the Soviet Union through the UN brought him into conflict with the Truman administration. His career shows how wartime coordination between corporations and the state fed into postwar multilateralism while being constrained on the threshold of the Cold War.
Career timeline
1926Joined General Motors as assistant to John Lee Pratt
1931General Motors vice president for public and industrial relations
1934–1938Executive at U.S. Steel, becoming board chairman in 1938
1939–1941Led wartime resource and production-priority bodies
1941–1943Administrator of Lend-Lease aid
1943–1944United States Under Secretary of State
1944–1945United States Secretary of State and American representative at Yalta
1945–1946First United States Ambassador to the United Nations
Soviet Union
Soviet communism
1900–1958
○ Natural causes
The Soviet diplomat who represented Moscow in all three major Western Allied capitals during the early Cold War
On 27 January 1958 in Washington, Zarubin put his signature alongside William Lacy's on a document that, for the first time in US–Soviet relations, institutionalized the exchange of films, music, science, and sports between the two powers.
A Soviet diplomat who served successively as ambassador to Canada (1944–1946), the United Kingdom (1946–1952), and the United States (1952–1958), acting as Moscow's key transatlantic interlocutor throughout the early Cold War. On 27 January 1958, he and William S.B. Lacy signed the landmark Lacy–Zarubin Agreement, the first intergovernmental US–Soviet cultural exchange framework, which was renewed biennially until the Soviet collapse and produced iconic Cold War cultural moments including tours by the Bolshoi Ballet and the Philadelphia Orchestra. He served as a candidate member of the CPSU Central Committee from 1952 to 1958 and was appointed Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs in January 1958, dying in Moscow ten months later.
Career timeline
1918–1924Served in the Red Army
1919Joined the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks)
1931–1935Director of the Industrial Academy
1935–1938Head, Main Administration of Educational Institutions, People's Commissariat of Light Industry
1938–1940Deputy General Commissioner and Arts Council Chair, Soviet section, New York World's Fair
1940–1941Head, Consular Department, People's Commissariat of Foreign Affairs
1941–1944Head, Latin American Department, People's Commissariat of Foreign Affairs
1944–1946Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to Canada
1946–1952Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to the United Kingdom
1952–1958Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to the United States
1952–1958Candidate member, CPSU Central Committee
1958Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of the USSR
Comintern China specialist who cultivated the 28 Bolsheviks
In January 1931, at the CCP's 4th Plenary Session in Shanghai, Mif appeared in person as the Comintern representative and directly secured Wang Ming and his group's landslide entry into the Politburo, orchestrating the ascent of the '28 Bolsheviks' on the spot.
He joined the Bolshevik party in his teens, fought in the Civil War, and studied at Sverdlov Communist University. Named rector of Moscow's Sun Yat-sen University at just 26, he personally cultivated the Chinese student cohort known as the '28 Bolsheviks', including Wang Ming, shaping a pro-Soviet orthodox faction that would prove decisive in the early Chinese Communist Party. As deputy head of the Comintern Eastern Secretariat from 1928 to 1935, he steered Comintern policy on the Chinese revolution, then served as Georgi Dimitrov's political assistant on China. He was a pioneer of Soviet Marxist sinology, authoring numerous works on the Chinese revolution and the colonial question.
Career timeline
1917–1920Civil War participant, political commissar
1925–1927Provost, Sun Yat-sen University
1927–1929Rector, Communist University of the Toilers of China
The poet-marshal who led the New Fourth Army and the Third Field Army and succeeded Zhou Enlai as foreign minister
Wounded and besieged on Meiling in the winter of 1936, Chen Yi wrote three poems as his dying words, hiding them in his clothes: "I go to the Springs to muster my old troops, a hundred thousand banners to behead the King of Hell."
From Sichuan, he joined the party after work-study in France and with Zhu De led the remnants of the Nanchang Uprising to Jinggangshan. He stayed behind on the Long March to fight three years of guerrilla war in the south and became acting commander of the New Fourth Army after the 1941 incident. In the civil war he commanded the East China (Third) Field Army at Huaihai and took Shanghai, becoming its first mayor. A marshal in 1955 and foreign minister from 1958, he ran China’s Bandung-era diplomacy in Asia and Africa. Attacked in the “February Countercurrent” of 1967, he died of cancer in 1972; Mao attended the funeral.
