Architect of Pan-African Marxism who led sub-Saharan Africa's first independence
“We must unite now or perish.” — address to the Conference of African Heads of State, Addis Ababa, 1963
Ghana's independence leader, first prime minister and president. He secured sub-Saharan Africa's first independence in 1957. Through Nkrumaism, synthesizing scientific socialism with African tradition, he forged the intellectual foundation of the pan-African liberation movement.
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1935–1945Studies in America — degrees in economics, theology, philosophy and education from Lincoln and Penn
1945Co-organizes the Fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester
1947Returns to the Gold Coast as General Secretary of the UGCC
1949Founds the Convention People's Party; launches Positive Action campaign
1952–1957Prime Minister of the Gold Coast — negotiates independence
1957Ghana wins independence — sub-Saharan Africa's first; becomes first Prime Minister
1960–1966First President of Ghana — socialist construction and Pan-African diplomacy
1963Co-founds the Organization of African Unity
1962Awarded the Lenin Peace Prize
1965Publishes Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism
1966.02Deposed by military coup while visiting Beijing
1966–1972Exile in Guinea — honorary co-president; continues theoretical writing
Afghan prince who overthrew his cousin to found a republic, then was killed five years later in the same palace by a communist coup
At the 1977 Moscow summit he told Brezhnev bluntly: 'We will never allow you to dictate to us how to run our country… Afghanistan shall remain poor, if necessary, but free in its acts and decisions.'
A Barakzai prince appointed prime minister by his cousin King Zahir Shah in 1953, Daoud Khan pursued a decade of Soviet-leaning modernization, earning the moniker 'Red Prince,' and pressed the Pashtunistan dispute to the brink of war with Pakistan. In 1973 he overthrew the monarchy in a bloodless coup backed by leftist army officers and declared himself the first president of the Republic of Afghanistan, but then purged the communists from his government, imposed a one-party constitution, and pivoted his foreign policy toward Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the West. He and 18 members of his family were shot dead by Khalqist army officers inside the Arg palace during the Saur Revolution of April 1978, a flashpoint that installed the PDPA regime and set the stage for the Soviet-Afghan War.
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1934–1939Governor of Eastern and Kandahar provinces; Commander of Central Forces
1946–1951Minister of Defence, Interior Minister, Ambassador to France
1953–1963Prime Minister: Soviet-leaning modernization, Helmand Valley project, Pashtunistan dispute
After workers rose against the 1976 price plan, it was withdrawn within a day.
Piotr Jaroszewicz was a communist politician and former military officer who connected Poland’s postwar state administration with economic management. He implemented Edward Gierek’s growth strategy, financed partly by Western credit, while rising consumption and debt deepened pressures on food supply and prices. His announcement of sharp food-price increases in 1976 helped provoke worker protests in Radom and Ursus; the government withdrew the plan, while the repression helped bring workers and intellectual opponents together in KOR. Removed as premier in 1980, he was murdered at home with his wife in 1992.
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1929–1939Primary-school teacher and headmaster
1943–1945Political-education officer in the Polish forces in the USSR
1945–1952Senior command and political-education posts in the Polish Army
1952–1970Deputy Prime Minister of Poland
1954–1956Minister of Mining and Coal Mining
1956–1970Polish representative to Comecon and deputy chair of the Economic Committee
1970–1980Prime Minister of the Polish People’s Republic
1981–1992Retired from politics; interned after martial law in 1981
The prince who in 1949 told a U.S. diplomat that Laos was a 'classless, Buddhist country in which communist theories had no basis' later became the 'Red Prince' and first president of communist Laos.
A Lao royal and revolutionary leader associated with the Pathet Lao. He participated in coalition and national reconciliation institutions and became the Lao PDR’s first president in 1975. His role differed from Kaysone Phomvihane’s leadership of party and government.
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1945Foreign minister of the Lao Issara government and commander-in-chief of the Lao liberation army
1950Founded and chaired the Lao Freedom Front (Pathet Lao)
1956Chairman of the Lao Patriotic Front (Neo Lao Hak Sat)
1957–1958Minister for Planning, Reconstruction and Urban Development
1962–1963Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Economy and Planning
1974Presided over the National Political Consultative Council
1975–1991First president of the Lao PDR (Phoumi Vongvichit acting from 1986)
The non-Politburo power who was the institutional memory of the Soviet government for 25 years
In 1979 Brezhnev stalled his Hero of Socialist Labour — Smirtyukov was, he said, a key figure in the government's feud with the CC. Kosygin took it to the Politburo himself; Tikhonov and Shcherbitsky backed it, and the award passed.
He joined the Council of People's Commissars apparatus at 21 in 1930 and served in the Kremlin for 60 years until 1990, the living embodiment of the Soviet government machinery. As Mikoyan's assistant, he handled wartime Red Army supply for the State Defence Committee; from 1964 he served for 25 years as Administrator of Affairs of the Council of Ministers under Kosygin, Tikhonov, and Ryzhkov. Alone among non-Politburo officials, he received the most secret Politburo decisions, and Central Committee department heads were instructed to coordinate major plans with him. His institutional memory was the axis that kept the state running through every change of leadership.
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1924–1927Village soviet secretary, cooperative secretary, club manager
1927–1931Moscow State University, faculty of Soviet law
1930–1941Sovnarkom apparatus: senior referent, consultant, sector head
1941–1946Deputy head of Sovnarkom Secretariat, assistant to Mikoyan on GKO supply
1946–1953Deputy head, Council of Ministers Secretariat
1953–1964Deputy Administrator of Affairs, Council of Ministers
1964–1989Administrator of Affairs, Council of Ministers
East German planner who ran planning in the German Economic Commission and then chaired the State Planning Commission
A shoemaker’s son from Rixdorf, Berlin, he worked as a clerk, studied economics at night and joined the KPD in 1931. Under the Nazis he worked for the illegal paper “Der Rote Wedding” and the party’s military intelligence apparatus until his arrest in 1936; sentenced to six years in prison, he was then held in Sachsenhausen and Mauthausen until 1945. After the war he built up and headed the KPD’s economic department, and from 1947 played a major part in creating the German Economic Commission, where he took charge of planning and drew up the half-year plan of 1948 and the two-year plan of 1949/50. He succeeded Heinrich Rau as chairman of the State Planning Commission (1952–1961), joined the Politburo in 1958 and was deputy premier from 1955 to 1965. Removed as planning chief in 1961, he became the GDR’s permanent representative to Comecon. He died in East Berlin in 1965.
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1931Joined the KPD
1936–1945Imprisoned; held in Sachsenhausen and Mauthausen
1947–1949In charge of planning at the German Economic Commission
1952–1961Chairman of the State Planning Commission
A resistance survivor who became a guardian of the system
On Poznań radio on 29 June 1956, he warned that the people's government would chop off the hand of anyone raised against it.
Józef Cyrankiewicz was a prewar socialist activist and a leader of the resistance inside Auschwitz, yet after the war he became a central politician of the Soviet-aligned Polish People's Republic. As one of Poland's longest-serving prime ministers, he helped coordinate reconstruction and consolidate communist rule, including the absorption of the independent socialist tradition into the ruling party. His support for force against the Poznań workers in 1956 and against coastal workers in 1970 reveals the tension between his resistance past and his responsibility within the state he defended. Removed from power in 1970, he remained active in official peace organizations.
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1931Joined the Polish Socialist Party and socialist youth movement
1935–1939Secretary of the Kraków District Workers' Committee of the Polish Socialist Party
1942–1945Imprisoned at Auschwitz and Mauthausen; active in camp resistance
1945–1948General Secretary of the Central Executive Committee of the Polish Socialist Party
1947–1952Chairman of the Council of Ministers of Poland
1954–1970Chairman of the Council of Ministers of Poland
1970–1972Chairman of the Council of State
1973–1986Chairman of the Polish Peace Committee and member of the World Peace Council
A politician who linked revolution and reform while carrying the wounds of dictatorship
On 4 November 1956, he helped Imre Nagy draft a condemnation of the Soviet attack before taking refuge in the Yugoslav Embassy.
Ferenc Donáth was a Hungarian communist politician and agricultural economist who helped shape postwar agrarian policy. His role in land reform and collectivization was followed by imprisonment in a 1951 purge trial, rehabilitation, and a lasting confrontation with the tension between party policy and state violence. In 1956 he sided with Imre Nagy, helped frame the uprising as a revolution, and condemned the Soviet intervention; sentenced to 12 years in the Imre Nagy trial, he was released in 1960. He then devoted himself to agricultural research and helped bring Hungary’s opposition groups into dialogue in the 1980s, before being legally rehabilitated in 1989.
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1934Joined the Hungarian Communist Party and worked underground
1937–1939Helped organize the March Front and took part in founding the National Peasant Party
1945–1948Vice-president of the National Landholding Settlement Council and political state secretary at the Ministry of Agriculture
1948–1951Led sections of the Hungarian Working People’s Party Central Committee Secretariat and rural department
1951–1954Sentenced to 15 years in a purge trial, then rehabilitated and released in 1954
1956Reformer around Imre Nagy and member of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party provisional executive committee
1958–1960Sentenced to 12 years in the Imre Nagy trial and released by individual reprieve in 1960
1976–1985Cooperative research fellow and organizer of opposition dialogue and the 1985 Monor Meeting
1989Posthumously rehabilitated when the Imre Nagy trial verdict was annulled
A social democrat who made reconciliation a politics of divided cities
After the Wall was built, he said: “The Wall must go, but until it goes, the city must live.”
Willy Brandt was a German social-democratic politician shaped by exile and resistance to the Nazi dictatorship. As Governing Mayor of West Berlin, he defended the city’s morale after the Wall was built and pressed the West to honor its responsibilities, helping popularize the name “Wall of Shame.” As chancellor, he pursued Ostpolitik and “change through rapprochement,” easing Cold War confrontation and earning the 1971 Nobel Peace Prize.
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1933–1945Exile and resistance activist against the Nazi dictatorship
1948–1953SPD representative in Berlin
1957–1966Governing Mayor of West Berlin
1964–1987Chairman of the SPD
1966–1969Foreign Minister and Vice Chancellor
1969–1974Federal Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany
The Cold Warrior who opened détente with Moscow and Beijing, then became the only U.S. president to resign
At the 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow, standing before a model kitchen, Nixon told Khrushchev, "There may be some instances, for example, color television, where we are ahead of you," in an impromptu debate that became known as the Kitchen Debate.
A tenacious politician who rose from anti-communist congressman to vice president, Nixon overcame two bitter defeats to capture the presidency in 1968. The quintessential Cold Warrior, he unexpectedly became the architect of détente, visiting Moscow in May 1972 to sign the ABM Treaty and the SALT I Interim Agreement with Leonid Brezhnev; the first legally binding limits on the superpowers' nuclear arsenals. He ended U.S. combat involvement in Vietnam and opened relations with Mao's China, yet his presidency collapsed in the Watergate scandal; on August 9, 1974, he became the only U.S. president to resign. He spent his final decades rehabilitating his image as an elder statesman, but his legacy remains suspended between the achievement of détente and the crimes that destroyed his presidency.
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1946–1950U.S. Representative (CA-12); gained national fame through the Alger Hiss case on HUAC
1950–1953U.S. Senator from California
1953–1961Vice President of the United States (Eisenhower administration); 1959 Moscow 'Kitchen Debate'
1961–1968Law practice, writing; lost 1962 California gubernatorial race, then rebuilt politically
1969–197437th U.S. President; signed SALT I and ABM Treaty at the 1972 Moscow Summit, ended Vietnam War, visited China; resigned 1974 over Watergate
A founder of the northern Shaanxi base, purged for sixteen years, who opened Guangdong’s special economic zones
He built the Shaanxi–Gansu base with Liu Zhidan that became the Long March's destination, was purged in 1962 and confined for sixteen years, then opened the special economic zones as Guangdong's first secretary in 1978.
From Shaanxi, he founded the Shaanxi–Gansu base with Liu Zhidan, the destination of the Long March. After 1949 he headed the Northwest Bureau and served as State Council secretary-general and vice-premier, but in 1962 Kang Sheng denounced the novel Liu Zhidan as an “anti-party” defence of Gao Gang and Xi was purged, spending sixteen years in confinement and rural exile. Returning as Guangdong first secretary in 1978, he asked the centre for the power to “take one step ahead” to stem the flight to Hong Kong, which led to the Shenzhen, Zhuhai and Shantou special economic zones in 1980. A Secretariat member in the 1980s, he supported Hu Yaobang and opposed his removal in 1987. He was Xi Jinping’s father.
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1959–1962Vice-Premier and Secretary-General of the State Council
1978–1980First Secretary of the Guangdong Party Committee
The unelected president who steered détente into its final phase
On the train to Vladivostok, when Ford grumbled how snarled Washington's traffic grew in snow, Brezhnev leaned over the table: "Well, that will be our first deal. We'll send you Soviet snowplows."
A Republican who spent twenty-five years in the House and served as vice president before succeeding Nixon after his resignation in 1974, Ford remains the only American president never elected to national office. He carried on Nixon's détente, meeting Brezhnev at Vladivostok in 1974 to fix the SALT II framework of 2,400 delivery vehicles and a 1,320 sub-limit on MIRVed systems, and a year later signed the Helsinki Final Act while turning the Jackson-Vanik amendment into law. His pardon of Nixon was the defining controversy of his presidency, and he lost the 1976 election to Carter.
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1949–1973U.S. Representative, Michigan's 5th district
1965–1973House Minority Leader
1973–1974Vice President
1974–197738th President of the United States
1974.11Vladivostok summit: agreed the SALT II framework with Brezhnev
The congressman who made emigration a condition of trade
In 1974, he brought the Jackson–Vanik amendment to the House, making freedom of emigration a condition of trade.
Charles Vanik was a Democratic congressman rooted in Cleveland's East Side, representing workers and communities of Eastern European immigrant background. He paired domestic reform concerns, including tax fairness, Social Security, Medicare, and Lake Erie cleanup, with an assertive role in foreign economic policy. In 1974 he co-sponsored the Jackson–Vanik amendment with Henry Jackson, conditioning normal trade relations with non-market economies that restricted emigration. The law became a lever for the emigration of Soviet Jews and other religious minorities, while also making congressional human-rights conditions a direct intervention in détente and trade policy.
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1938–1939Member, Cleveland City Council
1940–1942Member, Ohio Senate
1942–1945U.S. Naval Reserve officer, served in the Atlantic and Pacific theaters
1947–1954Judge, Cleveland Municipal Court
1955–1969U.S. Representative, Ohio's 21st district
1969–1981U.S. Representative, Ohio's 22nd district
1973–1981Chair, House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Trade
1985–1995Lawyer, Squire Sanders & Dempsey's Washington office, Eastern European trade
Brezhnev-era industrial technocrat who ran the Russian republic for 12 years
Brezhnev, appointing Solomentsev as RSFSR premier: 'We have no separate Communist Party of Russia — I lead the Russian party organizations as General Secretary, and I ask you to be my deputy for the Russian Federation.'
A mechanical engineer from the Leningrad Polytechnical Institute who rose from defense-plant floors to chair the RSFSR Council of Ministers for an unprecedented 12 years (1971–1983), managing the economy of the largest Soviet republic as Brezhnev's unofficial 'deputy for the Russian Federation.' Elevated to the Politburo and chairmanship of the Party Control Committee in 1983, he led the 1987–1988 commission to rehabilitate victims of Stalin-era repression but was abruptly purged by Gorbachev at the September 1988 CC plenum.
Career timeline
1940Graduated Leningrad Polytechnical Institute; assigned to defense plant
1941–1948Party organizer at evacuated defense plants in the Urals
1948–1954Chief engineer then director of plants in Zlatoust and Chelyabinsk
1955–1959Secretary, Second Secretary of Chelyabinsk Oblast, then Sovnarkhoz chairman
1959–1962First Secretary, Karaganda Oblast Committee, Kazakhstan
1962–1964Second Secretary, CC of Communist Party of Kazakhstan
1964–1966First Secretary, Rostov Oblast Committee
1966–1971CC Secretary and Head of Heavy Industry Department
1971–1983Chairman, RSFSR Council of Ministers
1983–1988Chairman, Party Control Committee; full Politburo member
1987–1988Chaired Politburo Commission for rehabilitation of victims of 1930s–1950s repression
1988Dismissed from all posts at September CC plenum; retired
Belarusian partisan leader who rose to Brezhnev's Politburo and served as USSR First Deputy Premier for thirteen years
If I were asked today to lead such an operation, I would not accept. I ask the Czechs to forgive us.
A Belarusian partisan leader who became First Secretary of the Communist Party of Belarus in 1956, then served as a full Politburo member and First Deputy Premier of the USSR for thirteen years from 1965, overseeing economic policy and acting as Brezhnev's political supervisor during the 1968 Warsaw Pact intervention in Czechoslovakia.
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1933–1936Technician, Parichi district road department; graduate of Gomel Highway Technical School
1936–1938Red Army service; then political department of Belarusian Railways
1940–1941Secretary, Gomel City Komsomol → First Secretary, Brest Regional Komsomol
1942–1943Representative of Central Partisan Staff in Belarus; secretary of underground Komsomol CC (Lt. Colonel → Colonel)
1943–1947Second Secretary → First Secretary, CC of Komsomol of Belarus
1949–1950Second → First Secretary, Minsk City Committee, CP(b) of Belarus
1950–1953First Secretary, Minsk Regional Committee, CP of Belarus
1953–1956Chairman, Council of Ministers of the Byelorussian SSR
1956–1965First Secretary, CC of the Communist Party of Byelorussia
1957–1965Candidate member, CPSU Presidium
1965–1978Full Politburo member & First Deputy Chairman, USSR Council of Ministers; on-site political supervisor for 1968 Warsaw Pact intervention in Czechoslovakia
1986–1989First Chairman, All-Union Council of War and Labour Veterans
The Donetsk-born Soviet economic manager who led Ukraine's government for 15 years through the Brezhnev era
"The explosion was reported to central authorities within hours, but the full implications were not realized until two days later." — At a Kyiv press conference on 8 May 1986, explaining the information lag in the early Chernobyl response.
Rising from an engineer in the Donetsk industrial belt through the party apparatus, Lyashko chaired the Council of Ministers of Soviet Ukraine from 1972 to 1987, the longest tenure in that post's history, spanning the entire Brezhnev era of stability and the onset of perestroika. In 1986 he headed the republican government commission dealing with the Chernobyl disaster, telling a press conference that central authorities had been informed within hours although the full scale emerged only two days later. Alongside First Secretary Shcherbitsky, he embodied the institutional stability of a party-government division of labour that faithfully executed central policy. After retirement he published a four-volume memoir, The Burden of Memory.
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1941–1945Graduate of 2nd Kharkiv Tank School, tank platoon commander on the North Caucasus Front, then instructor at Samarkand tank school
1945–1952Engineer, deputy shop chief, deputy director, party organiser at Novokramatorsk Machine-Building Plant
1952–1954First Secretary, Kramatorsk City Party Committee
1954–1960Secretary, then Second Secretary, Stalino (Donetsk) Oblast Party Committee
1960–1963First Secretary, Donetsk Oblast Party Committee
1963–1966Secretary, CC CPU; Chairman, CC Bureau for Industry and Construction
1966–1969Second Secretary, CC of the Communist Party of Ukraine
1969–1972Chairman, Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR; Deputy Chairman, Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet
1972–1987Chairman, Council of Ministers, Ukrainian SSR
1986Chairman, Republican Government Commission for Chernobyl accident consequences
The quantitative defense secretary who led the Vietnam War and helped prevent nuclear war in the Cuban Missile Crisis
The major lesson of the Cuban missile crisis: the indefinite combination of human fallibility and nuclear weapons will destroy nations.
The eighth U.S. Secretary of Defense (1961–1968), and its longest-serving holder, leading the Pentagon under both Kennedy and Johnson for over seven years. In the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, he was the first in EXCOMM to propose a naval 'quarantine' over an airstrike and became its fiercest advocate, arguing it would show Khrushchev resolve while remaining a controlled choice that need not escalate into military conflict. Yet in Vietnam, the same quantitative analyst who championed escalation grew privately skeptical, and 27 years after leaving office he confessed in his memoir that the war was 'wrong, terribly wrong.' He later served as president of the World Bank (1968–1981), redirecting its focus from infrastructure to poverty reduction.
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1943–1946USAAF Office of Statistical Control, discharged as Lt. Col.
Refused to cooperate at his show trial: tried separately and hanged two months before Imre Nagy
At his April 1958 trial, final statement: 'Even had October shown nothing else, it showed the Hungarian people will not tolerate tyranny dressed in socialist guise, and will rise and sacrifice their lives for freedom and the independence of their homeland.'
A Communist lawyer from Debrecen, he was dismissed from all party posts in 1949 after questioning the basis of the László Rajk trial and later joined Imre Nagy's reform circle. During the 1956 Revolution he served as Nagy's personal secretary and head of the prime minister's secretariat; after the Soviet intervention on 4 November he took refuge in the Yugoslav Embassy and was deported to Romania. For over a year he refused to cooperate with interrogators, swore his innocence, and went on hunger strike, leading to his case being separated from the main Nagy trial. He was hanged on 24 April 1958, two months before Nagy, and reburied alongside him on Heroes' Square on 16 June 1989.
Career timeline
1938–1939Joined illegal CP; law doctorate, Debrecen University
1940–1944Arrested, sentenced to 3 years; freed 1944, went underground
1945–1946Debrecen police chief; organised national police HQ
1947–1949Headed party military/security dept; Central Control Committee
1949Dismissed for questioning the Rajk trial
1953–1956Joined Nagy reform circle; expelled from party early 1956
1956.10–11Nagy's personal secretary, head of PM secretariat
The youngest U.S. president, who took the world to the brink of nuclear war and back
Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.
The 35th president of the United States (1961–1963), elected at 43 as the youngest president and the first Catholic. He authorized the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, and later that year his tense Vienna summit with Khrushchev helped convince the Soviets to place nuclear missiles in Cuba. In the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, he chose a naval 'quarantine' over an airstrike and, through his brother Robert, secretly traded the removal of Jupiter missiles from Turkey for the withdrawal of Soviet missiles, pulling the world back from nuclear war. He was assassinated in Dallas on November 22, 1963; after his death, his civil rights and tax-cut agenda passed through Congress.
Belarus's premier for nearly 20 years who rose to First Secretary and candidate Politburo member, then died of cancer two years later
He seized on the idea of the Minsk Metro and lobbied Moscow relentlessly until he got his way. He laid the first stone himself.
Born into an Old Believer peasant family in Gomel and trained as a teacher of Belarusian language and literature, Kiselyov served nearly twenty years as Chairman of the Byelorussian SSR Council of Ministers (1959–1978), steering the republic's postwar reconstruction and industrialisation as a pragmatic economic manager. He tenaciously lobbied Moscow to secure the Minsk Metro and the Zhlobin steel plant, rose to Deputy Chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers in 1978, then returned to Minsk in 1980 as First Secretary of the Communist Party of Belarus and candidate member of the CPSU Politburo, succeeding Pyotr Masherov. He prioritised stable management over reform but died of cancer barely two years into the role.
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1936–1941Teacher of Belarusian language and literature, Yelsk district schools
1941–1944School director, Krasnyanskaya school, Stalingrad region (evacuation)
1944–1952Instructor, Gomel Regional Committee → Head of Agitation and Propaganda, CPB CC
Following the 1991 collapse, Kulmiye and other Hawiye officers were neither arrested nor expelled from Mogadishu.
A Somali police officer and politician who joined Barre’s regime after the 1969 coup. He became interior minister in 1970 and one of the revolutionary council’s vice-presidents in 1971. His career illustrates the military-police leadership’s control over state administration.
Career timeline
1945Joined the Italian colonial police
1950–1954Instructor and translator at the Mogadishu police school, then trained at the Rome officer academy
1960Aide-de-camp to President Aden Abdulle Osman
1970Interior minister (to 1974)
1971Vice-president of the Supreme Revolutionary Council
1976Vice-president and Politburo member of the Revolutionary Socialist Party
1987Deputy prime minister and national planning minister
“Let your Spirit descend and renew the face of the earth!” he appealed in Warsaw.
Karol Józef Wojtyła was a Polish priest and philosopher who was elected John Paul II in 1978 and led the Catholic Church until 2005. Having lived through Nazi occupation and state socialism, he made human dignity, religious freedom, and national memory central to his pastoral and political language. About 11 million people saw him during his 1979 pilgrimage to Poland, helping a society dispersed under communist rule recognize itself as a community. He was an important factor in creating the conditions for Solidarity, while the movement’s workers and political actors remained its own agents.
Career timeline
1946Ordained priest of the Archdiocese of Kraków
1958Auxiliary Bishop of Kraków
1964Archbishop of Kraków
1967Made a cardinal
1978Elected the 264th pope, John Paul II
1979First papal pilgrimage to Poland
1980Witnessed the emergence of the Solidarity movement
In July 1975 he proposed a united front of 'all the forces that rejected the ancient regime, built from the base'; Mengistu and his supporters opposed this strategy.
An Ethiopian officer who became Derg chairman in late 1974. He served as head of state during nationalization of land and major industries but could not contain the internal military struggle. He was killed in February 1977, after which Mengistu consolidated predominance.
Career timeline
1941Joined the Ethiopian Army
1967Military attaché in Washington, D.C.
1974Brigadier general, 4th Division
1974–1977Chairman of the Derg (PMAC) and head of state
The miner's son and technocrat who led the Prague Spring government, then signed the Moscow Protocol under duress
In July 1968, amid controversy over the 'Two Thousand Words' manifesto, Černík told parliament: 'This declaration is certainly not an expression of counterrevolution but only the opinion of one segment of the Party.'
Reform communist prime minister of Czechoslovakia (1968–1970). A technocrat from a mining family, he served as minister of fuels and energy and chairman of the State Planning Commission before his appointment as premier at the April 1968 Central Committee plenum that adopted the Action Programme. Together with Dubček he led the Prague Spring; after the August invasion he was seized and taken to Moscow, where he signed the Moscow Protocol. He promised to continue reforms upon his return, but under Husák was removed and expelled from the party in 1970, spending the next twenty years as a deputy director of a research institute.
Career timeline
1921Born into a mining family in Ostrava, works as a lathe operator
1945–1949Joins KSČ, graduates from Ostrava Higher School of Mining
1956–1960Secretary of the KSČ Central Committee
1960–1963Minister of Fuels and Energy
1963–1968Deputy PM and Chairman of the State Planning Commission
