Soviet Union
Soviet communism
1879–1964
○ Natural causes
The Marxist economist who predicted the Great Depression, and was punished for arguing capitalism could adapt
In the late 1920s, when most analysts proclaimed capitalism stable, he predicted the Great Depression; when the Comintern insisted on capitalism's imminent collapse, he predicted its end — and was proven right both times, earning Stalin's confidence.
A Hungarian Marxist economist who directed the USSR Academy of Sciences' Institute of World Economy and World Politics for two decades as the Comintern's foremost analyst. He earned Stalin's confidence by correctly predicting both the onset of the Great Depression and its end, each time against prevailing orthodoxy. After the war, his argument that wartime state intervention enabled capitalism to adapt provoked a fierce campaign: his institute was shut down in 1947 and he was branded a 'bourgeois economist.' Rehabilitated after Stalin's death, he received the Lenin Prize in 1963; a posthumous manuscript, opened per his will, delivered a sharp critique of Soviet bureaucratic degeneration.
Career timeline
1906Joined Hungarian Social Democratic Party; economics editor of party paper Népszava
1909PhD in philosophy, University of Budapest — dissertation on Kant's antinomies
1919People's Commissar of Finance, then Chairman of the Supreme Council of National Economy, Hungarian Soviet Republic
1920Fled to USSR; joined VKP(b); began work in the Comintern
1921–1927Director, Comintern Statistical-Information Institute ('Varga Bureau'), Berlin
1927–1947Director, Institute of World Economy and World Politics (IMKhMP), USSR Academy of Sciences
1939Full member (Academician), USSR Academy of Sciences
1963Awarded Lenin Prize for life's work on modern capitalism
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
Proletkult theorist who became architect of Stalin-era arts censorship
From his front-page Pravda article 'Time Builds Airplanes,' 18 July 1923: 'We lost 7,000 working hours today waiting for a meeting to begin. With that expenditure of labor power, we could have built one or even two airplanes. We waited another half-airplane's worth of time before the meeting finally started.' The article sparked the founding of the Time League.
Joined the Bolsheviks in 1904. As a Proletkult theorist he led the 'Time' League and pioneered Soviet scientific labour organization (NOT). First chairman of the State Committee on the Arts (1936–38), he built the institutional framework for Stalin-era cultural control and later completed his History of the Paris Commune.
Career timeline
1904Joined Bolsheviks, expelled from Moscow University, imprisoned in Taganka
1905–1912Underground work in Nizhny Novgorod, St. Petersburg, Kyiv; Bolshevik press
1912–1917Exile in London, Paris, New York; Pravda correspondent, covered Irish independence
1918–1920Proletkult theorist, Izvestia deputy editor, director of ROSTA
1921–1926Plenipotentiary to Sweden, led NOT research, plenipotentiary to Italy
1928–1930Deputy head Agitprop CC, director of Communist Academy literature institute
1930–1936Administrator of Affairs of Sovnarkom, chairman of All-Union Radio Committee
1936–1938First chairman State Committee on the Arts — suppressed Bulgakov/Meyerhold, purged formalist art
1938–1940Editor-in-chief Small Soviet Encyclopedia; wrote History of the Paris Commune
Russian Orthodox priest-theologian who worked on Soviet electrification while wearing his cassock
Contemporaries noted the remarkable sight of Florensky in his priest's cassock, working alongside other leaders of a Soviet government department.
Pavel Florensky was a Russian Orthodox priest, theologian, philosopher, mathematician, physicist, and electrical engineer, one of the most singular figures in early 20th-century Russian intellectual history. His landmark work The Pillar and Ground of Truth (1914), an Orthodox theodicy, argued that God's truth is grasped not through rational analysis but through intuitive, lived experience of consubstantial love. After the Revolution, on Trotsky's recommendation, he joined the GOELRO electrification plan while continuing to wear his priest's cassock, a double life that became legendary among contemporaries. His 1922 essay 'Reverse Perspective' pioneered the analysis of spatial organization in icons and later influenced the Tartu school of semiotics; he was executed by the NKVD in 1937 during the Great Purge.
Career timeline
1904Graduated from Moscow University, Mathematics
1908Graduated Moscow Theological Academy; completed The Pillar and Ground of Truth
1911Ordained as Russian Orthodox priest
1911–1917Chief editor, Bogoslovskiy Vestnik
1914Published The Pillar and Ground of Truth
1921–1927GOELRO electrification plan; professor at VKhUTEMAS
1922Published Reverse Perspective and Imaginary Numbers in Geometry
1933Arrested; sentenced to 10 years in labor camps
From proletarian poetry to the science of labour: founder of Soviet social engineering who trained half a million workers
"In the social field there must come an era of precise measurements, formulas, blueprints, control gauges, social normals. We must pose the problem of complete mathematization of psychophysiology and economics." 'Our Tasks' (1921)
Born on 8 October 1882 (O.S. 26 September) in Suzdal, Vladimir Governorate, the son of a schoolteacher. Expelled from the Moscow Teachers' Institute in 1902 for organizing a student demonstration, he became a professional revolutionary and chaired the Kostroma Soviet in 1905. Drawing on work as a metalworker in France, he founded the Central Institute of Labour (CIT) and developed 'social engineering' and the scientific organization of labour (NOT); he chaired the All-Union Committee for Standardization in 1932–1936. Arrested in September 1938 on charges of belonging to a counter-revolutionary terrorist organization, he was shot at Kommunarka on 15 April 1939 and rehabilitated in March 1956.
Career timeline
1901Joined RSDLP
1905Chairman, Kostroma Soviet
1906Delegate, 4th RSDLP Congress
1917–1918Secretary, CC, All-Russian Metalworkers' Union
1920–1938Founder & Director, Central Institute of Labour
1931Rejoined VKP(b)
1932–1936Chairman, All-Union Committee for Standardization
Author of 'Notes on the Revolution' and agrarian economist in whose apartment the Bolshevik CC voted for armed uprising
"Sukhanov is one of the best representatives of the petty bourgeoisie" — Lenin, Sept 1, 1917
Born Nikolai Gimmer. A founding member of the Petrograd Soviet Executive Committee after the February Revolution, he belonged to the Menshevik-Internationalists, opposing the war and the Provisional Government while arguing for a united socialist coalition. His seven-volume memoir 'Notes on the Revolution' remains one of the most vivid primary sources on 1917. On October 10, 1917, the Bolshevik CC met in his Petrograd apartment and resolved on armed uprising. Sentenced to 10 years at the 1931 Menshevik Trial and shot on false charges in 1940; posthumously rehabilitated.
Career timeline
1903–1905Joined SR Party; arrested 1904 in Taganka Prison; freed Oct 1905, took part in Moscow December armed uprising
1911–1913Exiled 3 years to Arkhangelsk; compiled agricultural census data
1914–1917Editor of 'Sovremennik' and 'Letopis'; anti-war internationalist; Feb 1917 founding member of Petrograd Soviet Executive Committee, launched first 'Izvestiya'
1917–1918Menshevik-Internationalist; editor of 'Novaya Zhizn'; VTsIK member 2nd–4th convocations; expelled June 1918
1919–1923Wrote and published 7-volume memoir 'Notes on the Revolution' (Записки о революции)
1920–1929Left Menshevik Party; worked in trade agencies & Agrarian Institute; Communist Academy member; 1928 speech opposing forced collectivization
1931Sentenced to 10 years at Menshevik Trial; imprisoned in Verkhneuralsk political isolator
1940Sentenced to death June 29; shot same day in Omsk prison
Russian anarchist intellectual who theorized anarchist synthesis and chronicled the revolution the Bolsheviks suppressed
In Golos Truda, 1917: 'Once their power has been consolidated and legalized, the Bolsheviks… will start running the life of the country and of the people from the top. They will develop an authoritarian political and state apparatus that will crush all opposition with an iron fist.'
Russian anarchist intellectual and leading theorist of the Makhnovshchina. Editor of Golos Truda in Petrograd, co-founder of the Nabat Confederation in Ukraine, and chairman of the Makhnovist Military Revolutionary Council, he developed the theory of anarchist synthesis to unite communist, individualist, and syndicalist anarchists. After exile from Soviet Russia in 1922, he wrote The Unknown Revolution, the definitive anarchist history of 1917–1921, and opposed the Platformist centralization pushed by his comrade Makhno.
Career timeline
1904Drops out of St. Petersburg University law faculty; joins Socialist Revolutionary Party; organizes workers' study groups
1905Participates in Bloody Sunday march and helps form the St. Petersburg Soviet; imprisoned at Peter and Paul Fortress
1907Arrested by Okhrana, deported to Siberia; escapes and flees to France
1911Becomes anarchist under Apollon Karelin's influence; joins Brotherhood of Free Communists in Paris
1915–1916Flees anti-war persecution in France to USA; edits Golos Truda in New York
1917Returns to Petrograd after February Revolution; relaunches Golos Truda as leading anarcho-syndicalist organ
1918–1920Co-founds Nabat Confederation in Ukraine; chairs Makhnovist Military Revolutionary Council; arrested twice by Cheka
1922Exiled from Soviet Russia after hunger strike and Profintern delegate intervention
1924–1939Moves to Paris at Sébastien Faure's invitation; contributes to Anarchist Encyclopedia; writes for anarchist periodicals in five languages
1940Completes The Unknown Revolution in Marseille while living in poverty
1945Dies of tuberculosis in Paris; buried at Père Lachaise near Nestor Makhno
Soviet Union
Soviet communism
1883–1936
○ Died in prison
Red Army commander who was chief of staff of the Tambov suppression and became a historian of the Civil War
Born in Oryol in 1883 into a hereditary noble family of army officers, he graduated from the Nicholas General Staff Academy and in the First World War served as acting chief of staff of a division. In 1918 he joined the army of the Ukrainian People's Republic and in 1919 the Ukrainian Galician Army. Joining the Red Army in 1920, he commanded the 10th Division and the 3rd Army in the Polish–Soviet War; in 1921, as chief of staff of the Tambov forces under Mikhail Tukhachevsky, he co-signed Order No. 0116 on the use of poison gas against the insurgents. He joined the Communist Party the same year. In 1923 he became head of the Civil War history department at the Red Army Staff and was one of the authors of a three-volume history of the Civil War. Arrested in 1930, he died in Yaroslavl prison in 1936.
Career timeline
1910Graduated from the Nicholas General Staff Academy
1915Acting chief of staff of the 71st Infantry Division
1918Assistant to the chief of the General Staff of the Ukrainian People's Army
1919Chief of staff of the 4th Corps of the Ukrainian Galician Army
1920Commander of the Red Army 10th Division and the 3rd Army
1921Chief of staff of the Tambov group of forces
1922Commander of Soviet troops in the Bukhara–Fergana region
1923Head of the Civil War history department at the Red Army Staff
Historian who headed the government of the Belarusian People’s Republic in exile, moved to Soviet Byelorussia and was executed
Born into a landless noble family in the Disna district of the Vilna Governorate in 1883, he had almost no formal schooling. He was active in the Hramada in 1906–1908, was editorial secretary of Nasha Niva and from 1915 openly advocated independence from both Russia and Poland. In 1918 he joined the Rada as a delegate of the Belarusian Council of Vilnius, and in 1919 he led the Belarusian Socialist Revolutionaries. Appointed prime minister in December 1919, he was soon arrested by the Polish authorities; released the following year, he went to Riga and toured European capitals seeking recognition until he stepped down in 1923. In 1927 he moved to Soviet Byelorussia, where he became director of the State Museum and a member of the Academy of Sciences, but he was arrested in 1930, exiled to Saratov and shot in 1938.
Career timeline
1909Editorial secretary of Nasha Niva
1918Member of the Rada for the Belarusian Council of Vilnius
1918Head of the Belarusian representation in Lithuania
1919–1923Prime minister of the Belarusian People’s Republic
1927–1930Director of the Belarusian State Museum
1928Academician of the Belarusian Academy of Sciences
British economist who left the Treasury in protest at the peace treaty and warned of the damage reparations would do
Born in Cambridge, he studied mathematics at King’s College. Entering the Treasury in 1915, he designed the terms of credit between Britain and its continental allies. At the Paris Peace Conference he tried to keep Germany’s reparations within its capacity to pay but was largely excluded from the high-level talks, and the treaty’s outcome led to his resignation from the Treasury. The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), predicting the treaty’s damaging effects, made him internationally famous. In the Depression he argued that aggregate demand determined the level of economic activity and called for fiscal and monetary policy against slumps, publishing The General Theory in 1936. He led the British delegation at Bretton Woods in 1944, where the American plan largely prevailed. He died of heart attacks in 1946.
Career timeline
1915–1919Treasury official
1919Treasury representative at the Paris Peace Conference; resigned
1919The Economic Consequences of the Peace
1936The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money
1944Head of the British delegation at Bretton Woods
Hegelian legal philosopher who deemed October a 'national catastrophe' and became a White émigré ideologue
In On Resistance to Evil by Force (1925), he summoned the courage to 'arrest, condemn, and shoot' — what Maxim Gorky called a 'gospel of revenge.'
A Russian legal philosopher who earned both graduate degrees at Moscow University with a landmark Hegel commentary and became a professor there. Starting as a radical in 1905, he came to regard the October Revolution as a 'national catastrophe,' turned into an anti-Bolshevik theorist, and was expelled on the 'Philosophers' Ship' in 1922. In exile he advocated forceful resistance in On Resistance to Evil by Force (1925) and defended fascism as a 'healthy phenomenon' against Bolshevism. His posthumously published writings became a bedrock of Russian nationalist and authoritarian discourse, influencing figures from Solzhenitsyn to Putin.
Career timeline
1909Privatdozent, Law Faculty, Moscow University
1918Professor of Law, Moscow University; defended Hegel dissertation
1922Expelled from Soviet Russia on the 'Philosophers' Ship'; exiled to Berlin
1923–1934Professor, Russian Scientific Institute, Berlin
1927–1930Editor and publisher, Russkiy Kolokol (Russian Bell)
1938Fled Nazi Germany; settled in Switzerland with Rachmaninoff's financial aid
1948–1954Wrote political essays posthumously compiled as Our Tasks (1956)
Founder of Western Marxism: the Hungarian thinker who reoriented 20th-century Marxist philosophy with History and Class Consciousness
“Now, after the collapse of actually existing socialism, his questions look like the only surviving form of Marxism.” — from a late-life interview
Hungarian Marxist philosopher who founded Western Marxism with History and Class Consciousness (1923), establishing the concepts of reification and class consciousness. Served as commissar/minister of culture in the 1919 Hungarian Soviet Republic and the 1956 Imre Nagy government.
Career timeline
1902–1906Graduates Budapest law faculty; doctorate in law from Kolozsvár University
1909PhD in philosophy from Budapest University with The Form of Drama
1912–1918Lives in Heidelberg, studying with Simmel, Weber and Bloch
1918Joins the Hungarian Communist Party (KMP)
1919.03–08Deputy People's Commissar for Culture; political commissar, Hungarian Red Army
1919–1929Exile in Vienna; elected KMP CC General Secretary 1928, removed for right deviation
1923Publishes History and Class Consciousness; denounced as revisionist by Comintern
1929–1945Resides in Moscow; Marx-Engels Institute and Literary Critic journal
1941Arrested by NKVD; released after 2 months on Dimitrov's intervention
1942Defends The Young Hegel dissertation, USSR Academy of Sciences
1945–1958Professor of aesthetics, University of Budapest; member of parliament
1956.10–11Minister of Culture in Imre Nagy government; interned in Romania
1957–1967Expelled from party; reinstated 1967. The Specificity of the Aesthetic
Philosopher of the not-yet: thinker of concrete utopia and human emancipation in The Principle of Hope
“The true genesis is not at the beginning but at the end, and it begins only when society and existence become radical, i.e. grasp themselves at the root.” — The Principle of Hope
German Marxist philosopher who formulated the philosophy of concrete utopia and the 'not-yet' (Noch-Nicht) in his magnum opus The Principle of Hope. Alongside Lukács, Benjamin, Adorno, and Brecht, he shaped a central current of Western Marxism. Returned to East Germany in 1948 to hold the chair of philosophy at Leipzig and receive the GDR National Prize, but was forced into retirement after the 1956 Hungarian uprising for his humanistic Marxism; defected to West Germany in 1961. His thought profoundly influenced liberation theology and the 1968 student movements.
Career timeline
1905–1908Studies philosophy, physics, music at Munich and Würzburg; doctorate on Rickert
1912–1914In Heidelberg, associates with Max Weber, Simmel, and Lukács
1918Publishes The Spirit of Utopia — first major work
1921Publishes Thomas Müntzer as Theologian of Revolution
1920sFreelance journalist in Berlin; befriends Brecht, Benjamin, and Adorno
1933–1938Flees Nazi Germany for Switzerland, Austria, Czechoslovakia
1935Publishes Heritage of Our Times; analyses fascism's appeal through non-synchronism
1938–1947Writes the three-volume The Principle of Hope in US exile
1949–1957Chair of philosophy, Leipzig University; GDR National Prize (1955); Academy of Sciences
1957Forced into retirement for teaching humanistic Marxism after the Hungarian uprising
1961Defects to West Germany after Berlin Wall built; guest professor at Tübingen
1967Receives the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade
1968–1970sInfluences the 1968 movement and liberation theology; mentors Rudi Dutschke
Victor Serge recalled: "He had driven himself so hard that during meetings it seemed he might at any moment drop off to sleep; but his brain was still fresh, and crammed with statistics."
A Bolshevik economic theorist and co-author, with Bukharin, of The ABC of Communism (1919), the foundational textbook of early communist parties worldwide, he served as a Central Committee Secretary during state-building. As an initiator of the Declaration of 46 (1923) and the Left Opposition's chief polemicist, he formalized the theory of 'primitive socialist accumulation' in The New Economics (1926), arguing that surplus must be transferred from the peasant sector to fund industrialization, framing the NEP debate. He returned to the Stalin line in 1929 but soon broke over collectivization violence, joined an underground opposition group, and was executed in 1937.
Career timeline
1917–1920Central party work and economic theory
1923–1927Left Opposition and the Declaration of 46
Co-founder of Western Marxism, the German philosopher who challenged Marxist orthodoxy with Marxism and Philosophy
“If we get a few more of these Professors spinning out their theories, we shall be lost.” — Zinoviev at the 5th Comintern Congress, 1924, attacking Korsch and Lukács
German Marxist philosopher and revolutionary who, alongside Lukács, laid the foundations of Western Marxism. In Marxism and Philosophy (1923) he applied the materialist conception of history to Marxism itself, arguing for the revolutionary recovery of the Hegelian dialectic, a move that drew fierce denunciation from the Comintern. Served as Justice Minister in the 1923 Thuringian workers' government and as a KPD Reichstag deputy before his expulsion as a left-oppositionist. Fled the Nazis for American exile, where his scholarship left a deep imprint on Brecht, Benjamin, and the Frankfurt School.
Career timeline
1906–1910Studies law and philosophy at Munich, Geneva, Berlin; doctorate in law, University of Jena
1912–1914Legal research in London; joins the Fabian Society
1914–1918German Army service — refuses to carry weapons; awarded the Iron Cross twice for bravery
1917Joins USPD; elected delegate to soldiers' soviet
1920Joins KPD with the USPD left wing; lecturer at University of Jena
1923.03Publishes Marxism and Philosophy; becomes target of fierce Comintern criticism
1923.10–11Justice Minister, Thuringian workers' government — collapses after 27 days under Reichswehr intervention
1924–1928KPD Reichstag deputy; delegate to 5th Comintern Congress
1926.04Expelled from KPD; forms the Resolute Lefts (Entschiedene Linke) opposition faction
1933Flees Germany the night of the Reichstag fire; passes through Denmark and England
1936–1961US exile — Tulane University, Institute for Social Research; teaches Marxism to Brecht
1938Publishes Karl Marx; deeply influences Benjamin's Arcades Project
1950Ten Theses on Marxism Today — declares break with orthodox Marxism
SR leader imprisoned by both Tsar and Bolsheviks, who became founder of Harvard's sociology department
In an open letter written from the Cheka basement in Veliky Ustyug in 1918 while awaiting execution, Sorokin renounced his SR party membership and declared an end to his political activity.
A leading figure in the Socialist Revolutionary Party (SR) during the Russian Revolution, Sorokin served as secretary to Prime Minister Kerensky and was elected to the Constituent Assembly. Imprisoned three times by the Tsarist regime, he was sentenced to death by the Bolsheviks after 1917 and exiled in 1922 on the 'philosophers' ship.' In the United States he founded Harvard's department of sociology in 1930, becoming one of the 20th century's most important sociologists through his work on social stratification, social mobility, and the cyclical theory of sociocultural dynamics in his magnum opus Social and Cultural Dynamics.
Career timeline
1906Joined SR party; arrested and imprisoned in Kineshma
1909–1914Graduated from St. Petersburg University, Faculty of Law, in criminology
1917SR leader, secretary to PM Kerensky, Constituent Assembly deputy
1919–1922Professor at Petrograd University; founded Russia's first sociology department
1922Exiled from Soviet Russia ('philosophers' ship')
1924–1930Professor at University of Minnesota
1930–1959Professor at Harvard; founded and chaired sociology department
1965President of the American Sociological Association
Law professor and Estonia’s last constitutional prime minister who, acting as president, formed the Tief government in 1944
Born in Kirbla Parish in the Governorate of Estonia, he studied law at St Petersburg University and taught Roman and Estonian law at the University of Tartu until 1944. Editor-in-chief of Postimees and speaker of the lower chamber, he was prime minister from 1939 until Soviet troops entered Estonia in June 1940; after President Konstantin Päts was arrested by the Soviets he became, under the constitution, prime minister in the duties of the president. On 29 July 1941 he asked the Germans to let him form an independent government and was refused, and he declined to head the Self-Administration. On 7 February 1944 he appealed by radio for men to answer the call-up, and 38,000 registered. In June he appointed Otto Tief deputy prime minister, and in September, as the Germans withdrew, formed the Tief government. He then reached Sweden, where he died of gastric cancer in January 1945.
Career timeline
1938–1939Speaker of the lower chamber
1939–1940Prime minister of Estonia
1940–1945Prime minister in the duties of the president
1944Backed the call-up; formed the Tief government
Leader of the Bashkir national movement who proclaimed Bashkir autonomy, commanded the Bashkir Army and took it over to the Soviet side
Born in 1890 in Kuzyanovo, Ufa province, he taught Turkic history at the Qasimiya madrasa in Kazan. In 1917 he joined the Socialist Revolutionaries and was elected to the Constituent Assembly; with Sharif Manatov he organised the Bashkir Central Shuro, proclaimed Bashkir autonomy and became commander of the Bashkir Army. Arrested by the Bolsheviks in February 1918 and freed in April, he fought alongside Dutov and Kolchak, but in February 1919 took his troops over to the Soviet side. He became chairman of the Bashrevkom in 1920, resigned in June in protest at the curtailing of autonomy and led the Basmachi movement in Turkestan. He emigrated in 1923, became a Turkish citizen in 1925, a professor at Istanbul University and a doctor of the University of Vienna, and died in Istanbul in 1970.
Career timeline
1909–1915Teacher at the Qasimiya madrasa in Kazan
1915–1917Bureau supporting the Muslim deputies of the State Duma
1917–1919Deputy chairman of the Bashkir Central Shuro; commander of the Bashkir Army
1919–1920Military commissar and deputy chairman of the Bashrevkom; chairman in 1920
1920–1923Leader of the Basmachi movement in Turkestan
The liberal of the New Culture Movement who led the vernacular-language campaign and later served the Nationalists as a diplomat
A Columbia-trained pragmatist under John Dewey, he led the literary revolution that replaced classical Chinese with the written vernacular. A critic of both New Youth's Marxists and the Nationalist abandonment of constitutionalism, he died in Taipei in 1962.
A philosopher trained under John Dewey in the United States, he proposed literary reform in New Youth in 1917 and launched the vernacular-language movement. In the May Fourth years he urged “more study of problems, less talk of isms”, parting ways with Li Dazhao and Chen Duxiu as they turned to Marxism. He was a professor and later president of Peking University and served as ambassador to the United States during the war with Japan. After 1949 he worked in the United States and Taiwan, while the mainland mounted a mass campaign against his thought in the 1950s. He died of a heart attack in Taipei.
Career timeline
1917–1926Professor at Peking University
1938–1942Ambassador of the Republic of China to the United States
Frankfurt School's spectral companion, Marxist critic who dissected capitalist culture through the lens of mechanical reproduction
In the "Theses on the Philosophy of History," Benjamin wrote: "There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism."
Born to a prosperous assimilated Jewish family in Berlin, Walter Benjamin was a singular Marxist cultural critic who intersected deeply with the Frankfurt School yet remained irreducible to any single tradition. His thought, fusing Jewish mysticism with historical materialism, analyzed how capitalist production destroys art's "aura" in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1935), while his posthumous "Theses on the Philosophy of History" (1940) challenged the Marxist faith in progress through the indelible allegory of the "angel of history," drawn from a Paul Klee painting. In exile he pursued the unfinished Arcades Project, an archaeological excavation of 19th-century Parisian commodity culture, and through his tense intellectual friendships with Brecht, Adorno, and Scholem, he expanded the horizons of Western Marxism.
Career timeline
1919PhD summa cum laude, University of Bern, on 'The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism'
1925Withdrew habilitation thesis 'The Origin of German Tragic Drama' from University of Frankfurt
1928Published 'One-Way Street' and 'The Origin of German Tragic Drama'
1933Fled Nazi Germany permanently, exiled to Paris
1935–1936Wrote 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,' published in French
1940Completed 'Theses on the Philosophy of History'; took his own life at Portbou on the Spanish border
Author of the 14-volume History of Soviet Russia; diagnosed a "latent incompatibility" between NEP markets and planning
'There was a latent incompatibility between the principles of the New Economic Policy and the principles of planning.' From Foundations of a Planned Economy (1969).
A British historian and former diplomat, he authored the 14-volume A History of Soviet Russia (1950–1978), a comprehensive account of Soviet political, economic, and social life from 1917 to 1929. In international relations, The Twenty Years' Crisis (1939) helped lay the foundations of classical realism, while What Is History? (1961) redefined the historian's craft as interpretation rather than the accumulation of facts. On the NEP, he judged that there was 'a latent incompatibility between the principles of the New Economic Policy and the principles of planning,' an assessment that became one of four major historiographical positions on the policy's viability. He remained a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, until his death.
Career timeline
1916–1936Diplomat, British Foreign Office; Paris Peace Conference (1919) and Riga embassy (1925–1929)
1936–1947Woodrow Wilson Professor of International Politics, Aberystwyth
1941–1946Assistant Editor, The Times
1950–1978Published A History of Soviet Russia (14 vols.)
1953–1955Fellow and tutor in politics, Balliol College, Oxford
A geologist who helped design the Soviet uranium search
In 1943, he proposed concentrating scarce exploration resources on Central Asia rather than searching everywhere.
Dmitry Shcherbakov was a Soviet geologist, geochemist, geographer, and scientific organizer who studied Central Asia and rare metals. His Pamir and Central Asian expeditions helped develop metallogenic methods for predicting ore deposits, while wartime work directed geological knowledge toward strategic resources. In 1943 he joined the Uranium Commission, wrote a report assessing Soviet uranium prospects, and urged concentrating limited time and resources on exploration in Central Asia. That choice helped organize the uranium prospecting network needed by the nascent Soviet atomic project.
Career timeline
1914Senior collector, Fergana radium expedition
1921–1930Researcher, Commission for the Study of the Natural Productive Forces
1925–1930Head of the mineralogical-geochemical section, State Radium Institute
1928–1936Scientific head, Pamir and Central Asian expeditions
1930–1938Deputy director, Geochemical Institute and Institute of Geological Sciences
1942–1943Head, Caucasus expedition of the Academy of Sciences Institute of Geological Sciences
1943Member, Uranium Commission at the All-Union Institute of Mineral Resources
1953–1966Full member, Academy of Sciences of the USSR
Red commander who drove Kolchak's retreat to its collapse
In late 1919, Eiche's 5th Army drove Kolchak's retreat from the Tobol through Omsk and Tomsk to Krasnoyarsk.
Genrikh Eiche was a Latvian-born revolutionary, Red Army commander and military historian. On the Eastern Front in 1919, he led the 26th Rifle Division in bold operations against White rear areas, then commanded the 5th Army as Kolchak's forces retreated from the Tobol deep into Siberia. He later helped consolidate the Far Eastern Republic militarily, but was imprisoned on false charges during the Great Purge and rehabilitated in 1954.
Career timeline
1915–1917Company commander and staff captain, 245th Infantry Regiment, Imperial Russian Army
1917Chairman, Military Revolutionary Committee of the 245th Infantry Regiment
1918–1919Red Army regimental and brigade commander on the Eastern Front
1919Commander, 26th Rifle Division
1919–1920Commander, 5th Army
1920–1921Commander-in-chief, People's Revolutionary Army of the Far Eastern Republic
1922Soviet forces commander in Belarus and the Fergana region
1924–1936Official in the People's Commissariat for Foreign Trade
1954–1968Military historian and author on the Civil War
The Nationalist diplomat whose presence at the Security Council table triggered the Soviet walkout
In January 1950, as Tsiang took the chair of the Security Council, Malik declared 'This is not a meeting, but a parody of a meeting' and walked out.
A historian of Qing diplomacy who became the Republic of China's most consequential Cold War diplomat. After a Columbia PhD and pioneering work in modern Chinese diplomatic history at Nankai and Tsinghua, he left academia in 1935 to serve the Nationalist government as ambassador to the Soviet Union and later as permanent representative to the United Nations. In January 1950, with Tsiang presiding over the Security Council, Soviet delegate Malik walked out rather than sit with a Nationalist Chinese representative, a boycott that left the Soviet veto unused when the Council voted in June to defend South Korea.
Career timeline
1923–1929Professor and Chair of History, Nankai University
1929–1935Chair of History and Dean of Arts, Tsinghua University
1935–1936Director of Political Affairs, Executive Yuan, Nationalist Government
1936–1938Ambassador of the ROC to the Soviet Union
1944–1946China Representative to UNRRA; Director, CNRRA
1947–1962Permanent Representative of the ROC to the UN and Security Council
1961–1965Ambassador of the ROC to the US (concurrent with UN post)
