People of the Revolution and the USSR

Hungary Socialist-bloc reform leader 1896–1958 ✕ Executed

Premier for thirteen days

Refusing clemency after his secret trial death sentence, June 1958: "My only consolation is the conviction that sooner or later the Hungarian nation and the international working class will clear me of these grave charges."

A Hungarian communist. Taken prisoner by the Russian army in the First World War, he joined the Bolsheviks and became an agrarian expert during his Moscow exile. As agriculture minister in 1945 he carried out the land reform, but clashed with Rákosi and Gerő over the pace of collectivization in 1948–49 and was pushed aside. Prime minister from July 1953, he pursued a 'New Course' of lower investment, security for individual farms and the closing of the internment camps, until his dismissal in 1955. Returning as premier in the 1956 revolution, he proclaimed a multi-party system and neutrality, and was executed after a secret trial in 1958.

Hungary Socialist-bloc reform leader 1917–1958 ✕ Executed

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.

Czechoslovakia Socialist-bloc reform leader 1921–1994 ○ Car crash

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.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Socialist-bloc reform leader 1932–2010 ○ Natural causes

The communist who split his party from Moscow and became independent Lithuania's first president

When Gorbachev flew to Vilnius in January 1990 to press him to reverse the party's split, he did not yield: the congress had decided, and not even he had the authority to undo it.

A manager of the Soviet Lithuanian economy, Brazauskas became first secretary of the Lithuanian Communist Party in 1988 with Sajudis's backing, and in December 1989 led the party's decision to split from the CPSU, the first ruling party of a union republic to break with Moscow. After independence he won the first direct presidential election in 1993, showing that a former communist could come to power by ballot, managed relations with Russia while opening the road to NATO and the EU, and served as prime minister from 2001 to 2006.

Hungary Socialist-bloc reform leader 1932–2013 ○ Illness

Hungarian foreign minister who cut the Iron Curtain, and reform prime minister

On 27 June 1989, Horn and Austrian Foreign Minister Alois Mock took bolt cutters to the barbed-wire fence on the Hungarian-Austrian border, cutting the first hole in the Iron Curtain before the cameras of the world.

A Hungarian reform-communist diplomat who became prime minister after democratization, Horn as foreign minister in June 1989 took bolt cutters to the barbed-wire border fence with Austria alongside Alois Mock, staging the iconic image of the Iron Curtain's demise. He drove the decision to open Hungary's border to East German refugees seeking passage to West Germany, a breach that helped trigger the fall of the Berlin Wall and German unification. Leading the Hungarian Socialist Party to a landslide in 1994, he served as prime minister and imposed the Bokros austerity package, laying the framework for Hungary's market-economy transition. His political life embodied the contradictions of 20th-century Hungarian socialism, suspended between his service in the armed militia that crushed the 1956 revolution and his historic 1989 opening of the border.

Russian Federation state institutions Socialist-bloc reform leader 1936–

Moscow's first elected mayor, who told the U.S. ambassador of the coming coup

On 20 June 1991 Popov handed U.S. Ambassador Jack Matlock a note warning of a coup and naming Pavlov, Kryuchkov, Yazov and Lukyanov; the warning reached Gorbachev via Washington, though Matlock later wrote in his memoirs that it may have been a false alarm.

Born in Moscow on 31 October 1936 to parents from the Azov Greek community, he graduated from Moscow State University's economics faculty, became a candidate of economic sciences in 1963, a doctor in 1970 and a professor in 1971. He headed the production management laboratory in 1967–1971 and the management department in 1971–1988, and served as dean of the economics faculty (sources differ on a 1977 or 1978 start), then edited Voprosy Ekonomiki in 1988–1990, popularizing the concept of the 'command-administrative system'. Elected a USSR People's Deputy in 1989, he co-chaired the Interregional Deputies Group with Sakharov, Yeltsin and others, chaired the Moscow City Council from 1990 and on 12 June 1991 became Moscow's first elected mayor with 65.3% of the vote.

Russian Federation state institutions Socialist-bloc reform leader 1937–2000 ○ Heart attack

Constitutional Assembly chairman and first elected mayor of Saint Petersburg

"Volodya, just don't turn to bronze" — last words to Putin, February 2000

Anatoly Sobchak was a legal scholar and democratic reformer who became the first democratically elected mayor of Saint Petersburg (1991–1996) and co-authored the 1993 Constitution of the Russian Federation as chairman of the Constitutional Assembly. A popular Leningrad State University law professor whose students included Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev, he was elected to the Congress of People's Deputies in 1989 and co-chaired the Inter-Regional Deputies Group alongside Andrei Sakharov and Boris Yeltsin. During the August 1991 coup he organized resistance in Leningrad, negotiating with the military commander to keep troops off the streets and rallying 200,000 citizens on Palace Square. Corruption allegations forced him into exile in Paris from 1997 until Putin, then prime minister, secured his return in 1999.

Lithuania state institutions Socialist-bloc reform leader 1943–2026 ○ Stroke

She tried to negotiate independence through pragmatism; her resignation removed the last obstacle to the military option

She wept before her cabinet. "It seems we have failed to achieve anything. We are doomed."

Lithuania's first post-independence prime minister (1990–1991), she led the country through the most dramatic ten months of the Soviet collapse. A founding member of Sąjūdis, she rose from deputy prime minister of the Lithuanian SSR to prime minister, and as the 'Amber Lady' (a name the Western press coined after her meetings with Bush, Thatcher, and Kohl) she gave the newborn republic a diplomatic presence. Unlike the uncompromising parliamentary chairman Vytautas Landsbergis, she was a pragmatist who sought negotiated exit, but on 8 January 1991 Gorbachev refused her request for a guarantee of no military action; she resigned the next day. Five days later Soviet forces killed 14 civilians in Vilnius. She narrowly lost the 2004 presidential runoff to Valdas Adamkus and later served as agriculture minister.

Russian Federation state institutions Socialist-bloc reform leader 1945–2022 ○ Natural causes

The philosopher who proposed the one sentence that declared the Soviet Union dead at Belovezh

At the Belavezha hunting lodge, turning to Shushkevich and Kravchuk: 'Would you guys agree to sign a sentence which would state that the Soviet Union as the subject of international law is ceasing to exist?'

Yeltsin's closest aide and the intellectual architect of the Soviet dissolution. A Marxist philosophy teacher from the Urals, he rose through perestroika to become Yeltsin's right hand, and in September 1991 delivered the 'Burbulis Memorandum' (Gaidar's group's strategy document) to Yeltsin at his Black Sea retreat, setting Russia on a course of economic independence. That December in the Belavezha forest, he turned to Shushkevich and Kravchuk and asked, 'Would you agree to a sentence stating the USSR as a subject of international law is ceasing to exist?', and co-signed the accords that opened with those words. He became a lightning rod for criticism of the reforms and was removed by spring 1992, spending his later decades quietly as a Duma deputy and senator.

Hungary Socialist-bloc reform leader 1948–

Hungary's reform premier who opened a gate in 1989

Hungary's border opening accelerated the East European chain of events leading to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

An economic-policy figure in Hungary's ruling party, he became the last prime minister of the Hungarian People's Republic in late 1988. As part of the reform leadership he pursued political and economic transition, and allowed East Germans to cross the Austrian border in 1989.