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.

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.

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.

United Kingdom state institutions Counter-revolutionary forces 1874–1965 ○ Stroke

Britain's wartime prime minister who divided Europe with Stalin on a half-sheet of paper

Churchill's memoir account of the October 1944 Moscow meeting: 'I wrote on a half-sheet: Romania, Russia 90%… I pushed this across to Stalin. He took his blue pencil, made a large tick, and passed it back.' Soviet authorities denied in 1958 that Stalin accepted such a proposal.

A British statesman, army officer and writer, Churchill was born in 1874 at Blenheim Palace into the wealthy aristocratic Spencer family, of mixed English and American parentage. After army service in India, Sudan and the Boer War he entered Parliament in 1900. As a Liberal minister he was President of the Board of Trade, Home Secretary, and First Lord of the Admiralty, where he oversaw the failed Gallipoli campaign; in 1924–1929 he was Chancellor of the Exchequer. Prime minister from May 1940, he led Britain through the Second World War, warned in 1946 of an 'iron curtain', and held office again in 1951–1955. An imperialist, anti-communist and opponent of Indian self-government, he remains a contested figure; he died in 1965.

South Korea state institutions Counter-revolutionary forces 1875–1965 ○ Died

First president of South Korea who demanded unification by force and refused to sign the armistice

In a July 1950 letter to Truman: 'I pray… that we can turn to the offensive, break through the hard crust of enemy forces and start the victorious march north.'

Syngman Rhee was a Korean independence activist imprisoned during the late Joseon period for his activities with the Independence Club; after his release he earned a PhD in political science at Princeton, and in 1919 became the first president of the Korean Provisional Government. In 1948 he was elected the first president of the Republic of Korea, building a fiercely anti-communist state under the National Security Law and publicly demanding the forcible reunification of the peninsula by marching north across the 38th parallel. During the Korean War he refused any armistice short of unification, and in 1953 he unilaterally released 27,000 anti-communist prisoners of war, nearly derailing the ceasefire talks; he never signed the armistice. Forced to resign by the April Revolution in 1960 after a rigged election, he died in exile in Hawaii.