A social democrat who moved from municipal politics into state power amid Germany's division
On 30 November 1948, he was elected Lord Mayor of the “provisional democratic magistrate” in Berlin's Soviet sector.
Friedrich Ebert Jr. was a German politician who moved from the Social Democratic Party to the leadership of the Socialist Unity Party, carrying both the symbolism of being the first president's son and the consequences of his own choices. The Nazis detained him in concentration camps for illegal political activity; after the war, he became a central figure in the Soviet zone as social democracy was forcibly fused with communism and the SED consolidated power. On 30 November 1948 he led the extraordinary assembly in the Soviet sector that deposed Berlin's elected magistrate and installed a rival East Berlin magistrate, then combined municipal reconstruction with senior work in East German state institutions.
Career timeline
1919–1925Editor of the Social Democratic daily Vorwärts
1927–1933Brandenburg an der Havel city councillor
1928–1933Member of the Reichstag
1946–1949President of the Brandenburg Landtag
1946–1979SED Central Committee and Politburo member
1948–1967First Lord Mayor of East Berlin
1949–1979People's Chamber and Council of State leadership
1971–1979Chairman of the SED People's Chamber faction
Nazi Party leader and Hitler’s deputy, sentenced to life imprisonment at the Nuremberg trials.
Hess joined the Nazi Party in 1920 and became a close associate of Hitler. He was appointed deputy party leader in 1933, and in 1939 Hitler placed him second after Hermann Göring in the line of succession. In May 1941 he flew alone to Scotland in an attempt to negotiate an end to the war with Britain; the British government rejected his proposals and held him as a prisoner of war. After the war, the Nuremberg tribunal convicted him of crimes against peace and sentenced him to life imprisonment, which he served at Spandau Prison.
First USSR People's Commissar for Health, a founder of Soviet preventive medicine
Memoirists report that at the June 1937 plenum he criticised the NKVD and Beria, but the sessions were not stenographed, so the wording of his remarks is not documentarily confirmed.
Born on 20 October (Old Style) 1895 in Ekaterinoslav into a Jewish blacksmith's family; English-language scholarship gives only 1 November 1895. He joined the Bolsheviks in 1913, founded the newspaper Kommunar in Tula and led its city and provincial soviets and Military Revolutionary Committee, and was sent to Azerbaijan in 1920. He led agricultural cooperatives and Kolkhozsentr and drove collectivisation, though in 1925 he opposed barring kulaks from co-operatives. At the June 1937 plenum he criticised the NKVD and submitted material on Beria; he was arrested on 25 June and shot on 10 February 1938, and rehabilitated in 1955.
Career timeline
1913–1917Joined the Bolsheviks; distributed Pravda in Minsk; entered Moscow University medical faculty in 1915 (completed two courses); secretary of the Tula Bolsheviks
1917–1920Chairman of Tula Military Revolutionary Committee, Tula Soviet executive committee; political commissar 2nd Army; first editor of Kommunar
1920–1921First Secretary of the Azerbaijan Communist Party CC, chairman of Baku Soviet
1922–1929Deputy chairman of the Agricultural Cooperatives Union, chairman of Vserabotzemles and of Kolkhozsentr; drove collectivisation
1929–1930Head of the CC Agitation and Mass Campaigns Department
1930–1934Secretary of Moscow Party Committee, Second Secretary, chairman of Moscow Oblast Executive Committee
1934–1937RSFSR People's Commissar for Health (Feb 1934 – Mar 1937), USSR Chief Sanitary Inspector from 1935, and first USSR People's Commissar for Health (Jul 1936 – Jun 1937)
The Bloody Dwarf, an executor of the Great Terror shaped by the party personnel apparatus
"I know no more ideal worker than Yezhov. Rather, not a worker but an executor... Yezhov has only one flaw: he does not know how to stop." Ivan Moskvin, Yezhov's patron, to his son-in-law Lev Razgon
Yezhov was born in 1895 in Kovno governorate to a peasant father from Tula and a Lithuanian mother; his 1922 and 1924 forms instead claimed a St Petersburg birth in a Russian worker family and a 'March 1917' party entry, which the record and his own interrogation contradict. He was actually admitted to the RSDLP in Vitebsk on 3 August 1917, and his NKVD career was an extension of the party personnel apparatus.
As NKVD chief, under Stalin's leadership, he organized the mass arrest and execution operations of 1937–38. At least 1.3 million people were arrested and 681,692 executed for state crimes, while the Gulag population grew by 685,201. He was no career Chekist, yet he took part in torture and personally carried out the sentence on A. S. Kalygina on 27 November 1937. Arrested on 10 April 1939, he was executed in February 1940; a Russian court denied his rehabilitation in 1998.
Career timeline
1922–1934Rises through cadre work in the apparatus
1934–1936Oversees the Kirov investigation
1936.09Commissar of Internal Affairs
1936–1938Directed operations abroad: ran the NKVD station in Spain and widened the hunt for Trotskyists outside the USSR
1937–1938Administers the Terror: the Yezhovshchina
1938.11Shunted to Water Transport, in effect deposed
From baker to General Secretary: the leader who steered Spanish communism through the Popular Front and Civil War
“We are fighting for the Democratic Republic, for a democratic and Parliamentary Republic of a new type, with deep social content.” — Report to the PCE Central Committee, Valencia, 5 March 1937
As General Secretary of the Communist Party of Spain (PCE), José Díaz led the party through the Popular Front strategy, transforming it from a small sect into a mass party central to the Republican war effort. A Sevillian baker who cut his teeth in the anarcho-syndicalist CNT, he joined the PCE in 1927 and rose to General Secretary in 1932. At the 7th Comintern Congress (1935), he stood with Georgi Dimitrov in championing the anti-fascist united front, and during the Civil War he committed the party wholly to military victory under the banner of a “democratic republic of a new type.” Stricken by stomach cancer, he died in Tbilisi in 1942; his decade of leadership laid the foundations of the Spanish communist tradition for generations.
Career timeline
1913Joins La Aurora, the Seville bakers' union
1917Leads bakers' strike in Seville
1920Participates in the CNT general strike
1925Arrested in Madrid under Primo de Rivera dictatorship; imprisoned
1927Joins PCE; leads the Andalusian party organization
1932.034th PCE Congress — elected to Central Committee
1932.09Joins Politburo; soon appointed General Secretary
19357th Comintern Congress — backs Dimitrov's anti-fascist united front line
1936.02Elected to Cortes for Madrid
1936–1939Leads PCE through Civil War — prioritizes military victory and Republican unity
1938.12Transferred to USSR for stomach cancer treatment; operated in Leningrad
1939–1942Comintern Secretariat cadre — oversees Spain, South America, British India
In an August 1945 telegram to Stalin he vowed that the friendship of the Mongolian and Soviet peoples would remain indestructible forever.
A military and political participant in Mongolia’s 1921 revolution. He consolidated power through close Soviet ties and directed major purges in the late 1930s. State-building and political and religious repression are inseparable parts of his leadership period.
Career timeline
1924–1928Commander-in-chief of the People's Revolutionary Army
1928–1930Chairman of the Presidium of the Little Khural
1930Foreign minister
1935–1939First deputy prime minister
1936Named Marshal of the Mongolian People's Republic
SPD leader who survived ten years in Nazi camps and, after the war, refused the merger with the Communists
Born in Kulm in West Prussia, he lost his right arm in the First World War and joined the SPD in 1918. As a member of the Württemberg Landtag and the Reichstag he fought the Nazis. Arrested in July 1933, he refused to sign a renunciation of political activity and spent ten years in concentration camps. In 1945 he rebuilt the party from Hanover, rejected the merger with the Communists urged by Otto Grotewohl in the Soviet zone, and called the KPD “red-painted Nazis”. Elected SPD chairman in 1946 and the Bundestag’s first leader of the opposition in 1949, he called for the nationalisation of heavy industry and a united Germany and opposed Adenauer’s integration with the West. He died in Bonn in 1952.
Career timeline
1918Joined the SPD
1930–1933Reichstag deputy
1933–1943Held in Nazi concentration camps
1946–1952SPD chairman
1949–1952Leader of the opposition in the Bundestag
Stalin-era party boss who ruled Azerbaijan for two decades
His statements at trial were said to have been only a few sentences, one of them: "What ruined me was my faith in Stalin."
First Secretary of the Azerbaijan Communist Party from 1933 to 1953, governing the republic for two decades. A former Cheka/GPU/OGPU chairman and People's Commissar of Internal Affairs, he led the mass repression of the republic's party, state and cultural cadres during the Great Terror, and was executed by shooting in May 1956 after Beria's fall.
Career timeline
1917Joined Bolsheviks (Mar 1917 or 1918 — disputed); deputy chairman, Quba Revolutionary Committee
1918–1920Russian Civil War: regimental commander, divisional military commissar, chairman of Revolutionary Military Tribunal
1921–1927Chairman of Cheka/GPU/OGPU and People's Commissar of Internal Affairs, Azerbaijan SSR
1929–1930Chairman of GPU/OGPU, Azerbaijan SSR (second term)
1932–1933Chairman, Council of People's Commissars, Azerbaijan SSR
1933–1953First Secretary, CC of Communist Party of Azerbaijan (20 yrs); concurrently First Secretary of Baku City Committee until 1950
1953Candidate member, CPSU Presidium (Mar–Jul); Chairman, Council of Ministers, Azerbaijan SSR
1954–1956Arrested Mar 1954; death sentence Apr 1956, shot in May 1956 (sources give 26 May or 7 May)
The Socialist left's tribune who wrote 'Everything is possible', the Popular Front's left frontier
'Everything is possible', the title and the conclusion of his front-page article in Le Populaire as the strikes surged, 27 May 1936
A schoolmaster who became the leader of the Socialist SFIO's left. In 1935 he founded the Revolutionary Left tendency, supporting the Popular Front while arguing for a revolutionary way beyond it, and at the height of the strikes in May 1936 he planted himself at the centre of the argument with 'Everything is possible' in Le Populaire. He ran the premier's press service under Blum without ceasing to radicalize, and when the party expelled him in 1938 he founded the Workers' and Peasants' Socialist Party (PSOP). Exiled in Mexico during the war, he returned to the SFIO afterward and stood on its left and in the anticolonial camp until his death.
Career timeline
1895–1914Teacher's family in Seine-et-Marne; trained and worked as a schoolmaster
1914–1918The war turns him into an antimilitarist
1924–1935SFIO Paris federation; teachers' union activist
1935Founds the Revolutionary Left tendency inside the SFIO
1936.05Publishes 'Everything is possible'
1936–1937Runs the premier's press and information service
1938Expelled; founds the Workers' and Peasants' Socialist Party
1940–1946Exile in Mexico
1946–1958Returns to the SFIO; on its left and in the anticolonial camp
First woman to lead a major European communist party, and its sharpest anti-Stalinist apostate
“We are condemned to death, since terror reigns in Leningrad.” — her letter to Maslow, intercepted by Soviet censorship and read aloud at a Comintern special session, sealed her break with Stalin (February 1926).
Co-chair of the KPD (1924–1925), the first woman to lead a major European communist party. Born to a Vienna philosophy professor, she co-founded the Austrian Communist Party in 1918 and then, with Arkadi Maslow, led the KPD's ultra-left in Berlin, providing the theoretical groundwork for the 1923 uprising. A fierce factional warrior who publicly denounced Trotsky at the Fifth Comintern Congress, she was expelled in 1926 after refusing to submit to Stalin and spent the rest of her life as an anti-Stalinist left intellectual. Her dramatic trajectory took her from Comintern leadership to US intelligence cooperation in exile, and finally back toward communism in her final years.
Career timeline
1918Co-founds the Austrian Communist Party (KPÖ); member no. 1
1919–1921Moves to Berlin, joins the KPD
1921–1923Berlin district leader; with Maslow develops the left-wing 'theory of the offensive'
1924–1925KPD co-chair; Reichstag and Prussian Landtag deputy; candidate member of the Comintern Executive
1924Leads the German delegation to the Fifth Comintern Congress; publicly denounces Trotsky
1925–1926Detained in Moscow; refuses Stalin's demand to submit to the party line
1926Expelled from the KPD for supporting the United Opposition
1928Briefly joins the Leninbund, soon departs
1933–1941Exile in Paris; cooperates with Trotsky, founds the Gruppe Internationale
1941–1955Exile in the US; publishes Stalin and German Communism (1948)
1947Testifies before HUAC against her brothers Gerhart and Hanns Eisler
1955–1961Returns to Paris; publishes From Lenin to Mao (1956), renouncing anti-communism
SPD organiser in the Soviet zone who signed the merger with the KPD, then left the SED in 1948 and fled west
The son of a shipyard worker in Elbing, he joined the SPD in 1913 and became a white-collar union official in Brunswick, where he worked closely with Otto Grotewohl. Under the Nazis he belonged to a Social Democratic resistance circle and was imprisoned with Grotewohl in 1938. In May 1945 he and Grotewohl rebuilt the SPD in Berlin; he sat on its Central Committee and was the first SPD signatory of the agreement with the KPD and of the unity declaration. Elected to the SED Central Secretariat in 1946, he was isolated as the party was Stalinised and in September 1948 was relieved of all functions. In October he wrote a letter of resignation warning that the “party of a new type” would lead to a totalitarian dictatorship, and fled to the West. He died in 1964.
Career timeline
1913Joined the SPD
1938Imprisoned with Grotewohl
1945Member of the SPD Central Committee
1946Member of the SED Central Secretariat
1948Relieved of all functions, left the SED and fled west
On the Western Front in 1941, German bombers flying in formation toward Moscow made Bulganin frantic: 'Why aren't we shooting them down?' Zhukov looked up from his map: 'Calm yourself, Nikolai Alexandrovich. If we shoot here they will bomb our own positions; let the rear units deal with them.'
A Chekist-turned-administrator, Bulganin rose through Moscow city administration, the MELZ electric-lamp plant and the RSFSR premiership to Stalin's trust. From 1938 he was a deputy chairman of the Council of People's Commissars and twice headed the Gosbank board, and during the war he served on the military councils of the Western, 2nd Baltic and 1st Belorussian fronts. Made a Marshal in November 1947 so that the parade reviewer's rank would not fall below the parade commander's, he was valued not as a strategist but as a reliable executor. After Stalin's death he took Defence, then in 1955 the premiership, forming the 'B&K' duo with Khrushchev and touring Yugoslavia, India and Britain. In the 1957 Anti-Party Group crisis he vacillated between the camps; in 1958 he lost both the premiership and the marshal's rank. He died in Moscow in 1975.
Career timeline
1918–1937Served in the Cheka, then in the Moscow electrical trust and as MELZ plant director, before chairing the Moscow City Soviet executive committee
1944–1947Wartime administrator in the State Defense Committee and military administration
1947–1949Minister of the Armed Forces, involved in postwar military reorganization
1953–1955Minister of Defence, the military-administrative figure in the post-Stalin collective leadership
1955–1958Chairman of the Council of Ministers, governing with Khrushchev after Malenkov
1957–1958Vacillated between the camps in the Anti-Party Group crisis and lost the premiership after its defeat
The man who built the Soviet table, and the negotiator “from Ilyich to Ilyich”
About 14:55 on 6 November 1942, at Lobnoye Mesto on Red Square. The deserter Dmitriev, mistaking it for Stalin's car, fired three rifle shots at Mikoyan's government car. Mikoyan and the other occupants were not harmed.
Soviet politician and statesman, a Bolshevik from 1915 who sat on the Central Committee from 1923 for over fifty years. The youngest commissar of External and Internal Trade in 1926 and a Politburo member from 1935, he toured the United States in 1936 as Food Industry Commissar (1934–38). In 1937 he signed death lists and was sent to Yerevan to conduct the Armenian purges, and in March 1940 he signed the order for the execution of 26,000 Polish officers. He was the only Politburo member to oppose sending Soviet troops into Hungary in 1956, the first Soviet official to visit post-revolutionary Cuba in 1960, and in 1962 he spent three weeks in Havana persuading Castro to accept the missile withdrawal. In December 1965 he was forced out of the Politburo and the head-of-state post.
Career timeline
1926–1930Commissar of Trade, the youngest commissar, in his thirties
1934–1938Food Industry Commissar: the 1936 US tour; canning, frozen food, mass ice cream
The only non-Bolshevik on all three leading Comintern bodies. And author of the first critical Stalin biography.
Ten days after the Bolsheviks seized power, the twenty-two-year-old Souvarine wrote on 17 November 1917: "It is to be feared that, for Lenin and his friends, the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' must be the dictatorship of the Bolsheviks and their leader. This could become a calamity for the Russian working class, and eventually, for the world proletariat. […] What we wish is agreement among socialists to organise a stable power that truly becomes the power of the people and not the power of a man." — 'La Commune maximaliste,' *Ce qu'il faut dire*, No. 78
The only non-Bolshevik to serve on all three leading Comintern bodies. Expelled in 1924 for defending Trotsky, he turned independent anti-Stalinist and published the first critical biography of Stalin (1935), remaining a pioneering Sovietologist throughout his life.
Career timeline
1914Mobilised into the French Army; experiences trench warfare on the Western Front
1916Joins the SFIO and writes for the anti-war minority paper *Le Populaire*; adopts pseudonym 'Souvarine'
1919Joins the Committee for the Third International; distributes Comintern propaganda across Europe
1920.05Arrested in government crackdown on 'anarchist plot'; writes *Bulletin Communiste* from La Santé prison
1920.12Tours Congress: Souvarine motion adopted, creating the French Communist Party (SFIC); named honorary president
1921–1924Member of the ECCI, Presidium, and Secretariat — the only non-Bolshevik on all three leading Comintern bodies
1924Defends Trotsky at the 13th Bolshevik Congress; expelled from the Comintern and the French Communist Party
1926First publishes Lenin's Testament in France, received from Krupskaya via Christian Rakovsky
1927–1935Breaks with Trotsky, analysing the USSR as state-capitalist; organises the Democratic Communist Circle (CCD)
1935Publishes *Staline, aperçu historique du bolchévisme* — the first critical biography of Stalin
1935Founds the Institute of Social History — French branch of the Amsterdam-based IISH
1939.05Predicts the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact 100 days in advance in *Le Figaro*
1940–1947Arrested by the Vichy regime, freed through an officer's intervention, exiles to the USA; returns to Paris in 1947
1947–1976Edits *Est & Ouest* and *Le Contrat Social* — leading voice of anti-Stalinist left Sovietology during the Cold War
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
“¡No pasarán!”: the voice of anti-fascism that refused to let Franco's armies pass
“If we let the fascists continue the crimes they are committing in Spain, aggressive fascism will fall upon other peoples of Europe too. The Spanish people prefer to die on their feet than live on their knees.” — Paris solidarity rally, 3 September 1936
The iconic leader of the Spanish Communist Party (PCE), whose cry of "¡No pasarán!" during the Civil War became the universal rallying cry of anti-fascism. She resisted the Franco dictatorship from exile and publicly opposed the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.
Career timeline
1917Joins the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE)
1918First article in El Minero Vizcaíno; adopts pen name 'Pasionaria'
1922Co-founds the unified Communist Party of Spain (PCE)
1930Elected to the PCE Central Committee
1933Founding president of the Union of Anti-Fascist Women
19357th Comintern Congress — elected candidate member of the ECCI
1936.02Elected to the Cortes for Asturias
1936.07Radio address “¡No pasarán!” — calls for the defence of Madrid against the fascist armies
1937Elected Vice-President of the Cortes
1939–1942Soviet exile — continues Comintern work
1941–1963Directs short-wave Radio España Independiente (Radio Pirenaica)
1942–1960General Secretary of the PCE
1945Co-founds the Women's International Democratic Federation; Vice-President
1960–1989Chair of the PCE
1968Publicly opposes the Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia
1977Returns to Spain after Franco's death; re-elected to the Cortes after 41 years
The 21-year-old commissar who brought Kronstadt sailors to the revolution
Freed from Kresty Prison on the day of the October Revolution, he went straight to the front as political commissar of the combined sailor-soldier detachment blocking the Kerensky-Krasnov advance on Petrograd.
The young Bolshevik who led Kronstadt and brought the Baltic Fleet sailors to the revolution. Freed from Kresty Prison during the October Revolution, he helped repel Kerensky's counter-offensive, then was sent to the Romanian Front where a clandestine officers' group murdered him.
Career timeline
1912–1914Revolutionary circle at 10th Gymnasium; expelled for organizing all-school conference
1914Joined RSDLP(b); organized workers at Putilov factory insurance office, Narva district
1915Mobilized to Northern Front; arrested for front-line propaganda, imprisoned in Kresty
The ideology manager whose name marked Stalinist culture
In September 1947, at the founding conference of the Cominform, he declared that world political forces had divided into 'two major camps: the imperialist and anti-democratic camp, and the anti-imperialist and democratic camp', codifying the USSR's official Cold War worldview.
Stalin's close ally, Zhdanov became Leningrad party first secretary in 1934 and, as a Politburo member during the Great Terror, personally approved 176 documented execution lists; a 1989 CPSU Central Committee resolution named him one of the organizers of the mass repressions of the 1930s-40s. Emerging after the war as the party's de facto second-in-command, he drove the Zhdanovshchina campaigns against literature, music and philosophy from 1946, organized the Cominform in 1947 and codified the 'two camps' worldview. He lost Stalin's favour in June 1948 and died on 31 August 1948.
Career timeline
1920sRises in the Nizhny Novgorod party organization as a Stalin-aligned regional official
1934–1945After Kirov's murder, becomes Leningrad First Secretary and controls the city organization (relinquished January 1945 to Kuznetsov)
1941–1944Oversees political mobilization and city leadership during the siege of Leningrad
1946–1948CC secretary driving campaigns against literature, music and philosophy
1947Helps found Cominform and articulate the two-camps line
1948Dies, leaving Zhdanovshchina as the name for postwar cultural control
The communist leader who turned Czechoslovakia into a people's democracy through the February 1948 coup
We are the party of the Czechoslovak proletariat and our supreme chief of staff is indeed Moscow. We go to Moscow to learn from the Russian Bolsheviks how to wring your necks. That grin will be wiped off your faces! Maiden speech in the Czechoslovak National Assembly, 21 December 1929
Born into a poor Moravian peasant household, he helped found the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ) in 1921 and became its general secretary in 1929, leading it until his death. A Comintern secretary from 1935 to 1943, he helped shape the Popular Front line, and in May 1945 he returned to Prague as deputy prime minister and National Front chairman. After the KSČ won 38 per cent in the 1946 elections he became prime minister, and following the February 1948 coup he was elected Czechoslovakia's first Communist president on 14 June 1948. As president he drove nationalisation and agricultural collectivisation and instigated the trials of Milada Horáková, executed in 1950, and of Rudolf Slánský and Vlado Clementis, executed in 1952; he died on 14 March 1953.
Career timeline
1921Co-founds the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ)
1929–1945General Secretary of the KSČ Central Committee
1935–1943Secretary of the Comintern
1938–1945Exile in Moscow; leads Czechoslovak communist resistance
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.
Career timeline
1916–1921POW in Russia; joins the Red Army and the party
1930–1944Moscow exile; agrarian research for the Comintern
1945–1946Agriculture Minister: land reform
1953–1955Premier: the New Course, camps closed, peasant burdens eased
1955Removed and expelled
1956.10–11Premier of the rising: multi-party rule, neutrality
Nazi Gauleiter of Schleswig-Holstein who, as Reichskommissar for Ostland in 1941–1944, ordered the ghettoisation and expropriation of Jews
Born into a peasant family in Schleswig-Holstein, he was severely wounded in the First World War. He joined the Nazi Party in 1923, became Gauleiter of Schleswig-Holstein in 1925 and in 1933 also Oberpräsident of the province. Appointed Reichskommissar for Ostland on 25 July 1941, he shuttled between Riga and Kiel; his decree of 27 July ordered lists of Jews, the yellow badge, the confiscation of their property and their concentration in ghettos. Asked to explain his order forbidding the execution of Jews in Libau (Liepāja), he wrote on 15 November asking whether all Jews were to be liquidated regardless of economic interests, yet he stayed at his post for three more years. He fled Ostland without authorisation on 13 August 1944 and was removed. Sentenced in 1948 to ten years, he was released for ill health in 1951 and died in his home village in 1964.
A revolutionary who pursued workers' unity across communist divisions
After his arrest in 1936, Maurín remained in prison throughout the war, leaving the POUM under Andreu Nin's leadership in his absence.
Joaquín Maurín was a Spanish communist politician and labor activist who sought a mass revolutionary politics rooted in Catalonia. He led the Workers' and Peasants' Bloc while breaking with the Communist Party's Stalinist line, then co-founded the POUM with Andreu Nin in 1935 and became its first general secretary. Trapped in the insurgent zone when the military uprising began in 1936, he was arrested and spent the Civil War in prison, leaving Nin to lead the party in his absence. After his release and exile, he worked in New York as a writer and news-agency organizer, documenting the experience of the Spanish revolution.
Career timeline
1914–1920Taught in Lleida and joined the CNT
1920–1922Lleida CNT secretary and editor of Lucha Social
1921–1922Provisional secretary of the CNT national executive
1924–1930Organizer of the Catalan-Balearic Communist Federation
1931–1935General secretary of the Workers' and Peasants' Bloc
1935–1936Co-founder and first general secretary of the POUM
1936Popular Front deputy for Barcelona
1949–1973Founder of the American Literary Agency and writer in New York
CPGB founding member, chief theoretician for half a century, and pioneer of Marxist historiography on India
After Khrushchev's 1956 Secret Speech, Dutt told the CPGB Political Bureau: 'On Stalin's sun there were, unsurprisingly, some spots.' The Soviet system, he added, had 'demonstrated the ability of a socialist society to recognise and correct its mistakes.'
Founding member of the Communist Party of Great Britain and its chief theoretician for half a century, a Marxist historian and journalist. His Fascism and Social Revolution (1934) analysed fascism as an extreme form of monopoly-capitalist crisis, his India Today (1940) pioneered Marxist historiography on India, and he served as CPGB General Secretary in 1939–1941, replacing Harry Pollitt over the party's anti-war line at the outbreak of World War II.
Career timeline
1920Founding member, CPGB
1921–1974Founded and edited Labour Monthly (53 years)
1923–1965Member, CPGB Executive Committee
1924Alternate member, ECCI Presidium
1925–1935Comintern representative (Belgium & Sweden); supervised Communist Party of India
The PCF's number two for 37 years: a Stalinist who moved between parliament and the underground
'There was opportunism, legalitarianism and parliamentary illusions... If we courageously carry out this self-criticism before the Party, we shall arouse among the masses a state of mind favourable for the fight,' founding Cominform conference, Szklarska Poręba, September 1947
Number two in the French Communist Party leadership for 37 years alongside Maurice Thorez, entering parliament by defeating Léon Blum in Paris's 20th arrondissement. He directed the clandestine PCF throughout the German occupation and served as vice-president of the National Assembly after the war. At the founding Cominform conference in 1947, he publicly admitted that the party's participation in government had been 'parliamentary illusions,' symbolising the PCF's turn to militant opposition against the Marshall Plan. In 1969, he won 21.3% of the vote as the Communist presidential candidate, the party's best-ever result.
Career timeline
1915–1917Fights at Verdun, wounded; captured at Chemin des Dames
1920–1926Founding PCF member; enters Central Committee and Chamber of Deputies
1928–1936Defeats Léon Blum; enters Political Bureau; Chamber vice-president
1940–1944Heads the clandestine PCF; directs the Communist Resistance
1945–1947Deputy and vice-president; PCF in tripartite government
1947–1953Cominform self-criticism; anti-Marshall Plan turn; acting secretary-general
1959–1975Senator, Communist group president; 21.3% in 1969 presidential election
