The Party's Chief Atheist, Called 'the Soviet Priest'
Khrushchev recalled: "In the Party we called Yaroslavsky 'the Soviet priest.'" His own maxim: "The struggle against religion is the struggle for socialism."
Yaroslavsky was the supreme ideologue of Soviet anti-religious policy. As chairman of the League of Militant Atheists (1925–1943), he directed the USSR's organized campaign against religion. Joining the RSDLP in 1898, he led the Moscow armed uprising in October 1917 and served as Military Commissar of the Moscow Military District. As Secretary of the Party Collegium (1924–1934), he helped enforce party discipline and purges. He authored The Bible for Believers and Unbelievers, was Stalin's loyal supporter and the official interpreter of Party history, and was elected to the Academy of Sciences in 1939.
Career timeline
1898Joined RSDLP; organized Social-Democratic circles on the Transbaikal Railway
1905–1907Led military-combat organizations in Petersburg & Moscow; delegate to 4th & 5th Party Congresses
1907–19175 years' katorga, then exile in Yakutia; served as director of Yakutsk Museum of Local Lore
1917.10Member of Moscow MRC; first Commissar of the Kremlin
1918–1919Military Commissar of the Moscow Military District
1921Secretary of the CC RKP(b); member of the Orgburo
1924–1934Secretary of the Party Collegium, Central Control Commission
1925–1943Chairman, League of Militant Atheists & Anti-Religious Commission
SR Party founder who chaired the last unified anti-Bolshevik government, overthrown by Kolchak
Trotsky called him 'the complete caricature of a statesman. A really charming teacher of language in a ladies' seminary in Oryol — that is really all you can say about him.'
A founder and right-wing leader of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, he led the SR faction in the 1905 St. Petersburg Soviet and served as Minister of the Interior and chairman of the Pre-Parliament in Kerensky's Provisional Government. During the Civil War, as the culmination of efforts to unite the anti-Bolshevik camp, he was elected chairman of the Provisional All-Russian Government (Ufa Directory) at the Ufa State Conference. Arrested and expelled by Kolchak's coup in November 1918, he continued émigré journalistic work in Paris and New York. His political trajectory encapsulates the collapse of democratic socialism in the Russian Revolution, crushed between armed extremes.
Career timeline
1905SR faction leader, vice-chairman of the St. Petersburg Soviet
1907Elected to SR Central Committee; exiled to Obdorsk, escaped abroad
1907–1917Edited SR newspaper Znamya Truda in Paris exile
1917Chairman of All-Russian Soviet of Peasants' Deputies; Minister of Interior
1917Chairman of the All-Russian Democratic Conference and Pre-Parliament
1918Chairman, Ufa State Conference; headed the Provisional All-Russian Government
1918–1940Émigré political work in Paris; Freemasonry; published Sovremennye Zapiski
1940–1943Published Za Svobodu (For Freedom) in New York
IMEL director and the first Marxist philosopher to publicly anoint Stalin as a theorist
"Lenin teased me as 'Aduracky' — foolish — for my naivety." — family memoirs
A Bolshevik philosopher from Kazan. In 1929 he was the first to publicly hail Stalin as 'theoretician of Leninism.' As IMEL director (1931–1939), his Marx-Engels edition defined how the communist world read the classics for decades.
Career timeline
1897–1903Entered Kazan University mathematics, switched to law; joined revolutionary movement 1900; graduated 1903, fled abroad
1904–1908Joined RSDLP in Geneva (1904); arrested on return, exiled to Astrakhan; led illegal Bolshevik newspaper Rabochy in Kazan (1905)
1908–1918Exile in Paris, London, Berlin; interned in Munich as civilian prisoner in WWI; repatriated via Lenin's prisoner exchange
1920–1928Deputy head of Central Archive Administration; professor at Moscow University; published Marxist Dialectics in Lenin's Works (1922)
1928–1931Deputy director, Lenin Institute; published 'Stalin as Theoretician of Leninism' in Izvestia (Dec 1929); took over Lenin Works after Bukharin's fall
1931–1939Director, Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute; edited 15 vols in Russian, 8 in German; prepared correspondence edition
1936–1939Concurrently director, Institute of Philosophy AN SSSR; chaired Marx-Engels archive purchase commission
1939–1945Stepped down as director due to illness, remained chief editor at IMEL; evacuated to Alma-Ata during war; died Moscow, 1945
The leader born to a poor Georgian family who came to dominate party and state
At 4:30 a.m. on 22 June 1941 Zhukov and Timoshenko came to the Kremlin to report the German invasion. By Zhukov's account Stalin was pale, holding an empty, untobaccoed pipe. When Molotov reported Germany's declaration of war, he sank silently onto a chair and fell into a long pause.
Born 18 December [O.S. 6 December] 1878 to a poor family in Gori, Georgia, he joined the Marxist RSDLP as a youth and edited Pravda, raising Bolshevik funds through robberies and kidnappings while enduring repeated arrests and internal exile. After the October Revolution of 1917 he entered the party's governing Politburo and helped oversee the founding of the USSR in 1922, the year he became General Secretary. Collectivisation and rapid industrialisation followed, along with the 1932–33 famine and the Great Purge, then victory in the Second World War. He died at the Kuntsevo dacha on 5 March 1953. In his lifetime 1879 was also held to be his birth year.
Career timeline
1902–1917Underground work, repeated exile; Pravda in 1917
1913Published Marxism and the National Question
1917–1922Commissar of Nationalities; the Tsaritsyn front
1922General Secretary: the power of appointment
1924Published Foundations of Leninism
1928–1933The Great Break: collectivization, the Five-Year Plans
1936–1938The Great Terror
1941–1945Chairs the GKO; Supreme Commander
1945–1953Postwar rule and Cold War; dies March 1953
1952Published Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR
Tatar lawyer and Duma deputy who headed the national administration of Idel-Ural
Born in 1878 in the village of Tashsu near Kazan, he studied law at the University of Paris in 1901–1906 on Ismail Gasprinsky’s advice. In 1906 he joined the Central Committee of Ittifaq al-Muslimin, and he sat for Kazan province in the Second and Third State Dumas. In 1917 he was on the executive committee of the All-Russian Muslim Council, and on 5 January 1918 he was elected chairman of the Milli Idare, the body of national-cultural autonomy of the Muslims of Inner Russia and Siberia, becoming head of the Idel-Ural State. When the Bolsheviks took Kazan and Ufa provinces he fled to Finland; at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 he pleaded for the peoples of Idel-Ural, without result. He moved to Turkey in 1925, became a professor of legal history and a member of parliament, and died in Istanbul in 1957.
Career timeline
1901–1906Law studies at the University of Paris
1906Member of the Central Committee of Ittifaq al-Muslimin
1907–1912Member of the Second and Third State Dumas for Kazan province
1917Member of the executive committee of the All-Russian Muslim Council
1918Chairman of the Milli Idare (head of the Idel-Ural State)
1925–1957Professor of legal history in Ankara and Istanbul
1931–1954Member of the Turkish parliament (three terms)
Worker-Bolshevik who gave his name to Dnipropetrovsk and led Soviet Ukraine for two decades
In February 1915, a tsarist court stripped him of all rights and sentenced him to lifelong exile in Turukhansk — punishment for a worker-deputy who had spoken against the war.
A worker-Bolshevik, born the son of a tailor, who began laboring at age eleven. Elected to the Duma (1912), he was exiled to Siberia for anti-war speeches. After the October Revolution, as People's Commissar of Internal Affairs, he helped found the Cheka. From 1919 to 1938 he served as Soviet Ukraine's head of state, signed the 1922 treaty creating the USSR, and was a candidate Politburo member. He survived the Great Purge but was dismissed in 1939, ending his career as deputy director of the Museum of the Revolution. The city of Ekaterinoslav was renamed Dnipropetrovsk in his honor in 1926 and carried his name until 2016.
Career timeline
1897–1898Joined Ekaterinoslav Union of Struggle; joined RSDLP
1900–1903Arrested twice; secretary of Ekaterinoslav Soviet in 1905
1912–1914Bolshevik workers' deputy to the Fourth Duma; 32 speeches
1914–1917Arrested for anti-war activity; lifetime exile in Turukhansk
1917.11–1919.03People's Commissar of Internal Affairs: co-founded Cheka, signed Red Terror directive
1919–1938Chairman of the All-Ukrainian CEC (head of state, Ukrainian SSR)
1922–1938Co-chairman of the USSR Central Executive Committee
1926–1939Candidate member of the Politburo
1939–1940Stripped of all posts; unemployed for one year
1940–1958Deputy director of the Museum of the Revolution, Moscow
Weimar finance minister who founded the CDU in the Soviet zone in 1945 and was deposed for opposing the land reform
The son of a Cologne railway worker, he studied agriculture and from 1911 worked at the International Institute of Agriculture in Rome. A member of the Catholic Centre Party, he became Minister of Food in 1920 and was Minister of Finance from 1922 until the Cuno cabinet resigned in August 1923. Arrested after the Nazis took power, he later served as an economic adviser to the government of Colombia. Back in Germany he joined the resistance around Goerdeler, was arrested after 20 July 1944 and sentenced to death in January 1945, but his wife delayed the execution until the Red Army took Berlin. On 26 June 1945 he became the first chairman of the CDU of Berlin and the Soviet zone; because he refused to agree to the land reform without compensation, SMAD deposed him in December. In the West he founded the German Farmers’ Association and argued for reunification.
Career timeline
1911–1914Department director at the International Institute of Agriculture, Rome
1920Reich Minister of Food
1922–1923Reich Minister of Finance
1945Sentenced to death by a Nazi court
1945Chairman of the CDU in the Soviet zone; deposed in December
The Comintern's first secretary, who taught Mussolini and branded him traitor
"I had never seen a more wretched human being" — on first meeting Mussolini in Lausanne
Russian-born Italian socialist. First secretary of the Comintern, she taught Mussolini Marxism and publicly denounced him as a traitor when he embraced fascism. She broke with Bolshevism in 1922 and led Italy's maximalist socialist faction.
Career timeline
1897Left Russia for Brussels; earned a doctorate in philosophy and literature at the New University
1900Joined the Italian Socialist Party (PSI); organised immigrant textile workers
1912–1914PSI Central Committee member and Avanti! editor; worked alongside Mussolini
1915–1916Participated in the Zimmerwald and Kienthal anti-war conferences
1917Returned to Russia and joined the Bolshevik Party
1919–1920First secretary of the Comintern; organised the 1st and 2nd Congresses
1922–1930Broke with Bolshevism; returned to Italy to lead the PSI maximalist faction
1930–1945Led the PSIm (Maximalist Socialist Party); anti-fascist work in Swiss, French, and US exile
The Duma monarchist who took the tsar's abdication and became an ideologue of the White movement
At the tsar's train in Pskov, Shulgin — unwashed and unshaven for four days — appeared before Nicholas II in a dirty jacket. A member of the suite told him: 'We will not forget this little jacket of yours.'
Vasily Shulgin was a leading conservative politician in the late Russian Empire, a deputy in the II, III, and IV State Dumas and editor of Kievlyanin, who championed Russian nationalism and constitutional monarchy. In March 1917 he traveled to Pskov with Alexander Guchkov and personally received Nicholas II's abdication, but could not avert the revolutionary catastrophe. During the Civil War he served as an ideologue of the White movement, then emigrated to Yugoslavia; in 1944 he was arrested by Soviet forces and spent 12 years in Vladimir Central Prison. Amnestied in 1956, he remained in the USSR, wrote memoirs, and appeared in the 1965 documentary The Verdict of History, a living witness to the old order who was defeated but never submitted.
Career timeline
1907–1917Deputy, II, III, IV State Dumas (Volhynia)
1913–1917Editor, Kievlyanin newspaper
1915Co-founder, Progressive Bloc; led Progressive Nationalists
1917.03With Guchkov, received Nicholas II's abdication in Pskov
1918–1920White movement propagandist and ideologue; editor of Rossiya and Velikaya Rossiya
1920–1944Exile in Yugoslavia; wrote memoirs Dni and Three Capitals
1947–1956Sentenced to 25 years; served 12 in Vladimir Central Prison
1956–1976Amnestied; lived in Vladimir, wrote Lenin's Experiment, starred in The Verdict of History
Terrorist, Counter-Revolutionary: the Black Horse of the Revolution
At his 1924 trial: 'I am Savinkov, of the Plehve and Grand Duke Sergei assassinations. All my life I worked for the people, yet now I am charged with bearing arms against the workers' and peasants' power.'
Revolutionary and novelist who led the SR Combat Organization, directing assassinations of high-ranking tsarist officials. His The Pale Horse (1909) novelized the psychology of terrorism. After the October Revolution he led anti-Bolshevik armed struggle, was arrested in an OGPU trap, and died at Lubyanka.
Career timeline
1903Joined SR Combat Organization
1904Organized assassination of Interior Minister Plehve
1905Directed assassination of Grand Duke Sergei
1909Published The Pale Horse — a psychological anatomy of terrorism
1917.04Returned to Russia, appointed Commissar of the 7th Army
1917.07Assistant Minister of War — mediated between Kerensky and Kornilov
1917.08Dismissed from all posts and expelled from SR party over Kornilov affair
1918Founded Union for Defense of Motherland and Freedom, led anti-Bolshevik uprisings
1920–1921Organized Russian units fighting alongside Poland against the Bolsheviks
1924Lured back to USSR by OGPU's Operation Trust, arrested
1925Died in Lubyanka prison (official: suicide by defenestration; suspected: OGPU murder)
Chairman of the Rada of the Belarusian People’s Republic from 1919 until his death, leading it in exile from Prague
Born in 1879 into the family of a village church deacon in the Grodno Governorate, he graduated from the seminary in Vilnius, worked as a teacher and from 1909 was employed at the Vilnius State Bank. In 1917, as chairman of the Borisov Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, he was a delegate to the First All-Belarusian Congress and joined its executive committee. In 1918 he was state controller and then secretary for finance and for trade in the People’s Secretariat, and became one of the leaders of the Socialist Federalist party. He became chairman of the Rada on 13 December 1919, went into exile in 1920 and represented the Rada from Kaunas and Berlin and, from 1923, Prague. In 1921 he organised a conference in Prague that condemned the Peace of Riga, and in 1925 he refused to accept the decision to dissolve the government in exile. He died in Prague in 1928.
Career timeline
1902Graduated from the Vilnius seminary; teacher
1909Employee of the Vilnius State Bank
1917Chairman of the Borisov Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies
1918State controller, then secretary for finance and for trade in the People’s Secretariat
1918Secretary of the Rada of the Belarusian People’s Republic
1919–1928Chairman of the Rada of the Belarusian People’s Republic
The Polish revolutionary who ran Lenin's financial pipeline from Kraków to Stockholm
April 13, 1917, Stockholm station. Parvus waited for Lenin, who arrived on the sealed train. Lenin refused to meet him in person and used Ganetsky as intermediary. Parvus asked: "Peace is necessary. What does he intend to do?" Ganetsky relayed the question; Lenin answered: "I am not interested in diplomacy. My task is social-revolutionary agitation."
A Polish revolutionary from Warsaw who co-founded the SDKPiL and became Lenin's trusted financial operative. During World War I he partnered with Alexander Parvus to establish trading companies in Copenhagen and Stockholm, channelling profits from scarce wartime goods into revolutionary coffers, a route central to the 'German gold' controversy. After the October Revolution he helped build the Soviet financial system as deputy head of the State Bank and a collegium member of Narkomvneshtorg, later serving as plenipotentiary to Latvia and signing the Treaty of Kars before perishing in the Great Terror.
Career timeline
1896–1912Co-founded SDKPiL; party leadership; alternate RSDLP CC member
1912–1915Arranged Lenin's move to Kraków; became his closest aide
1915–1917Ran trading firms with Parvus in Copenhagen and Stockholm; funded Bolsheviks
1917–1920Deputy head of State Bank; Deputy Commissar of Finance; director of Gokhran
1920–1923Plenipotentiary to Latvia; signed Treaty of Kars; Narkomindel and Narkomvneshtorg
1923–1935Collegium member of Narkomvneshtorg and VSNKh; director of GOMETs
1935–1937Director of the Museum of the Revolution, Moscow
1937Arrested by NKVD; 15-minute trial; executed; posthumously rehabilitated 1954
From Cheka deputy to civil aviation: the revolution's all-weather organizer
At his Military Collegium trial on 28 July 1938 he retracted the confession extracted from him, stating he had never belonged to the 'Polish Military Organisation', but the hearing lasted about twenty minutes and ended in a death sentence.
Born into a Jewish petty-bourgeois family in Mława, then in the Płock Governorate of the Russian Empire, he trained as an electrical engineer at the Higher Technical Courses in Warsaw and joined the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL) in 1900. Sources agree he was arrested repeatedly between 1902 and 1913 and spent years in Tsarist prisons and Siberian exile, but they differ on the number of arrests, recording six in some accounts and seven in others. In 1917 he sat on the Irkutsk Soviet as a Bolshevik, served on the Petrograd Soviet executive and the Military Revolutionary Committee during the October uprising, and was elected to the Constituent Assembly. From 1921 he was deputy chairman of the Cheka and later the GPU, and from 1925 to 1930 deputy chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council; arrested in 1937, he was shot in 1938 and rehabilitated in 1956.
Career timeline
1900Joins SDKPiL; aligns with Bolshevik RSDLP faction
1900–1917Arrested six times; years in Tsarist prisons and exile
The orator who built the Red Army, felled by an ice axe
25 October 1917, the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets in Petrograd. As Menshevik and Right SR delegates walked out in protest against the Bolshevik insurrection, Trotsky declared of them from the chair: 'Go where you belong from now on, into the dustbin of history!'
Born on 7 November 1879 (O.S. 26 October) in Yanovka, Kherson Governorate, in the Russian Empire, into a Jewish farming family. After the February Revolution of 1917 he joined the Bolsheviks and, as chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, helped lead the October rising. As People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs he negotiated the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, and from 1918 to 1925 he headed Military and Naval Affairs, building the Red Army and leading it to victory in the Civil War. From 1923 he led the Left Opposition, but Stalin outmanoeuvred him: expelled from the party in 1927, exiled to Alma-Ata in 1928, deported in 1929, and stripped of Soviet citizenship in 1932. In exile he argued in The Revolution Betrayed (1936) that the USSR had become a degenerated workers' state, and founded the Fourth International in 1938. He was killed in Mexico City in August 1940 by the NKVD agent Ramón Mercader.
Career timeline
1905Chairs the Petersburg Soviet at 26
1906Published Results and Prospects, an early formulation of permanent revolution
1907–1914Exile journalism in Vienna and Paris; publishes Pravda
1914–1917Anti-war立场; exile in Paris and New York, Nashe Slovo and Novy Mir
1917.05Returns to Russia, joins the Mezhraiontsy — the inter-district unity faction
1917.08VI Congress: Mezhraiontsy merge into the Bolshevik Party
1917.09–10Chairs the Soviet and the MRC; designs the rising
1918–1925War Commissar: builds the Red Army, wins the civil war
1923–1927The Left Opposition: defeat and expulsion
1929–1940Deportation; the Fourth International (1938); killed in Mexico
1930Published the autobiography My Life
1930–1932Published the three-volume History of the Russian Revolution
Geographer of the “Red map” who was twice prime minister and killed himself in 1941 as German troops crossed Hungary
Born in Budapest to an aristocratic family from Transylvania, he was a geographer, university professor, member of the Academy of Sciences and chief scout of the Hungarian Scout Association. In 1918–19 he compiled the “Red map” of ethnic distribution based on the 1910 census. As foreign minister he attended the signing of the Treaty of Trianon in 1920, became prime minister in July and led the government of the numerus clausus period until April 1921. Prime minister again from 1939, he wrote the preamble to the Second Anti-Jewish Law and prepared the Third. He killed himself on 3 April 1941 when German troops were about to cross Hungary to invade Yugoslavia.
The New Culture revolutionary who founded the CCP and led it for six years
“Only science and democracy — these two gentlemen we must take as our teachers.” — New Youth
Principal founder of the Chinese Communist Party and its first General Secretary (1921–1927). He spearheaded the New Culture Movement through the journal New Youth. Dismissed by the Comintern after the collapse of the First United Front, he later embraced Trotskyism.
Career timeline
1896Passes imperial exam, earns xiucai degree
1901–1908Studies in Japan; joins anti-Manchu revolutionary circles at Waseda
1915Founds New Youth (Xin Qingnian) in Shanghai
1917–1919Dean of the School of Letters, Peking University; intellectual backdrop to May Fourth
1920Forms Shanghai Marxist study group; liaises with Comintern emissary Voitinsky
1921–1927First General Secretary of the CCP; leads party through First United Front
1927Denounced for 'right opportunism'; dismissed and expelled
1929–1931Turns Trotskyist; elected leader of unified Trotskyist organization
1932–1937Arrested by Nationalists; imprisoned for five years
Finnish forest scientist and statesman who built forest-type theory and led the cabinet on the eve of war
During the Winter War the poorly equipped reservists, sent out with little beyond civilian clothes, a belt and a rifle, were popularly nicknamed 'Model Cajander'. The label stuck to him as premier, though responsibility for the defence shortfalls was not his alone.
Finnish forest scientist and politician. Born in Uusikaupunki, he took a botany doctorate in 1903 based on Siberian fieldwork, became docent in botany at Helsinki in 1904 and professor of silviculture in 1911. Acting director-general of the Forest Board (Metsähallitus) in 1918 and director-general in 1934, he led state forest administration until his death. He was prime minister three times, in 1922, 1924 and 1937, and chaired the National Progressive Party from 1933. He resigned after the Winter War began and died at the Parliament House on 21 January 1943.
Career timeline
1903Doctorate in botany based on Siberian fieldwork
1904Docent in botany, University of Helsinki
1911–1934Professor of silviculture, University of Helsinki
Bricklayer turned Social Democrat who chaired the Revolutionary Governing Council of the Hungarian Soviet Republic
Raised in a Protestant family in Kiskunhalas, he worked as a bricklayer, joined the labour movement and in 1901 the Social Democratic Party, and led the building workers’ union and the Workers’ Insurance Fund. He backed the merger of the Social Democrats and Communists on 21 March 1919 and, as chairman of the Revolutionary Governing Council, became the Soviet Republic’s formal head of state and prime minister, though real power lay with Béla Kun. After the fall he was education minister in the Peidl government; captured by the Romanian army, he escaped from Cluj and lived in exile in Bratislava, Vienna and Paris. Refused permission to return after the war, he died in Paris in 1947.
Career timeline
1901Joined the Social Democratic Party
1903Chairman of the National Federation of Building Workers
1908Chairman of the Workers’ Insurance Fund
1919Chairman of the Revolutionary Governing Council
A polemicist who turned from revolutionary internationalism to wartime patriotism
In July 1917, he placed the material alleging Lenin was a German agent in Zhivoe Slovo.
Grigory Alexinsky rose as a Bolshevik activist and Second Duma deputy during the 1905 revolutionary period, but the pressures of war and revolution drove him sharply toward social patriotism. In 1917 he joined Plekhanov’s Yedinstvo group, attacked the Bolsheviks, and helped place Ensign Yermolenko’s inadequate testimony into the public claim that Lenin was a German agent. The exposure strengthened anti-Bolshevik politics among soldiers and in the soviets, while revealing the path by which a revolutionary became an émigré opponent of Bolshevism.
Career timeline
1899–1904Student at Moscow University; participated in student movement
1905Agitator for the Moscow Bolshevik organization
1905–1907Central Committee member of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party; writer for Bolshevik publications
1907Deputy in the Second Duma; Bolshevik orator in the Social Democratic faction
1909–1914Leader of the left-Bolshevik Vpered group
1914–1917Pro-war Social Democrat; co-editor of the Paris journal Prizyv
1917Leader in Plekhanov’s Yedinstvo group; elected to the Petrograd Soviet
1919–1967Russian émigré politician and polemicist; chairman of the Russian Council in Paris
Iranian revolutionary who led the Jungle movement of Gilan and proclaimed the Soviet Republic of Gilan in 1920
Born in Rasht in 1880, the son of a Gilani merchant, he joined the Iranian Constitutional Revolution and in 1909 was a junior commander of the constitutionalist force that took Tehran. In 1914–1915 he launched the Jungle movement in the forests of Gilan, demanding provincial autonomy, an end to central government corruption and foreign interference, and land reform. When a Soviet flotilla entered Enzeli in 1920 he agreed to cooperate on condition of non-interference, proclaimed the Soviet Republic of Gilan on 5 June and became its head, but split with the communists over his refusal to redistribute land. He returned as head of government in May 1921, but after the Soviets withdrew their support he was defeated by Reza Khan’s government troops and died of frostbite while fleeing into the Talesh mountains. His severed head was displayed in Rasht.
Career timeline
1909Junior commander in the constitutionalist capture of Tehran
1914–1921Leader of the Jungle movement of Gilan
1920Head of the provisional government of the Soviet Republic of Gilan
1921Again head of the provisional government of the Gilan republic
A peasant-movement diplomat who shaped the Riga peace
When the talks stalled over the border, Dąbski proposed confidential one-to-one negotiations with his Soviet counterpart Adolph Joffe, a move that broke the impasse and led to the preliminary treaty.
Jan Dąbski was a Polish peasant-movement politician and journalist who connected agrarian politics, parliamentary work, and diplomacy after independence. As Poland’s delegation head in the final phase of the Polish-Soviet War, he sought a compromise between military gains and the realities of an eastern border settlement. In Riga he held confidential talks with Adolph Joffe, helped secure the preliminary treaty of 12 October 1920, and signed the definitive peace treaty the following year. He later defended peasant parties and parliamentary democracy, while the partition of Ukrainian and Belarusian lands under the Riga settlement remained a lasting historical consequence of the diplomacy he led.
Career timeline
1905Joined the Polish peasant movement in Galicia
1907–1913Parliamentary correspondent in Vienna and co-editor of Kurjer Lwowski
1913–1918Worked in Polish national and military organizations; served in the Polish Legions
1919–1922Deputy to the Legislative Sejm; member of its agricultural committee
1920–1921Deputy Foreign Minister; head of Poland’s delegation at Minsk and Riga peace talks
1921Head of the Foreign Ministry in Wincenty Witos’s cabinet
1923–1931Peasant-party leader and Deputy Marshal of the Sejm
1931Published The Riga Peace memoirs; died in Warsaw
Founder of the Lithuanian Communist Party who headed Soviet Lithuania and Litbel
When Lenin demanded he recruit more Lithuanians into the Red Army, he refused, warning it would erode what support his government had.
Founder of the Lithuanian Communist Party, he headed the Soviet government of Lithuania from December 1918 and Litbel in 1919, without winning peasant support. After the defeat he handled Baltic affairs in the Comintern and died in Moscow in 1935.
Career timeline
1903Joined the Lithuanian Social Democratic Party
1914Met Lenin in Kraków
1917Joined the Bolsheviks in Petrograd; commissar for Lithuanian affairs
1918Central Committee of the Lithuanian Communist Party; editor of Tiesa
1918–1919Headed Soviet Lithuanian government, then Litbel's Council of People's Commissars
1923–1935Worked on the Comintern Executive Committee
Trade union leader who commanded the Finnish Red Guards from January to March 1918
Born in Kuopio in 1880, he joined the labour movement while studying law at Helsinki University. He was one of the leading Red Guard organisers in Helsinki during the 1905 general strike and in 1907 became the first chairman of the Finnish Trade Union Federation, losing the post in 1911 over his drinking. One of the most radical voices of 1917, openly calling for armed revolution, he was elected to the five-man committee of the Red Guards and in January 1918, without any military training, succeeded Ali Aaltonen as their commander-in-chief. Removed on 20 March after a series of defeats, he organised the defence of Viipuri with Edvard Gylling and escaped to Petrograd in May. He helped found the exiled Communist Party of Finland and worked in the Karelian Workers’ Commune, but was arrested in the Great Purge and shot in Petrozavodsk in 1937.
Career timeline
1907–1911First chairman of the Finnish Trade Union Federation (SAJ)
1917Commander of the Kymi Paper Mill Red Guard; member of the five-man Red Guard committee
1918Commander-in-chief of the Red Guards; member of the People’s Delegation
1920–1923Several posts in the Karelian Workers’ Commune
1931–1935Head of the revolution research department, Karelian Research Institute
A Menshevik who defended the revolution against its Bolshevik direction
After the June 1917 crisis, he called for firm measures against the Bolsheviks in the name of defending the revolution.
Born Mikhail Goldman, Mikhail Liber was a revolutionary who rose through the Bund, the Jewish workers’ movement, to become a leading Menshevik. At the 1903 RSDLP Congress he defended the Bund’s organisational autonomy, while in 1917 he tried to combine revolutionary democracy with a policy of revolutionary defensism. In the Petrograd Soviet and the All-Russian Central Executive Committee he supported coalition with the Provisional Government, and after the June 10 demonstration crisis he became a leading advocate of firm measures against the Bolsheviks. His opposition to the October uprising and to negotiations with the Bolsheviks was followed by repeated arrests and exile; executed in 1937, he was rehabilitated posthumously.
Career timeline
1896Joined the Lithuanian Social Democratic Party
1897–1902Founding-generation Bund activist; joined its Central Committee in 1902
1903Bund delegate to the Second Congress of the RSDLP
1905Executive Committee member of the St Petersburg Soviet
