People of the Revolution and the USSR

Independent activity Counter-revolutionary forces 1797–1877 ○ Stroke

July Monarchy premier who as chief executive in 1871 crushed the Paris Commune and became the Third Republic’s first president

After ordering the suppression of the Paris Commune in 1871, Thiers secured the early departure of German troops from French territory, then resigned in 1873 amid monarchist opposition.

A lawyer and journalist from Marseille who made his name with a History of the French Revolution, he helped bring Louis-Philippe to the throne in 1830 and served the July Monarchy as interior minister and premier, putting down the Lyon silk workers’ and Paris risings of 1834. Under the Second Empire he led the liberal opposition. The National Assembly made him chief executive in February 1871; when the seizure of the Montmartre cannon failed on 18 March he moved the government to Versailles and crushed the Commune in Bloody Week. President from August 1871, he paid off the German indemnity early but was forced out by the monarchist Assembly in 1873.

Counter-revolutionary forces 1904–2005 ○ Natural causes

The American diplomat and historian whose 1946 Long Telegram and X article laid the intellectual foundations of containment

'The main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies,' from the 1947 X article.

An American diplomat and historian who, in his 1946 'Long Telegram' from Moscow and his 1947 X article in Foreign Affairs, articulated the strategy of long-term, patient, and vigilant containment of Soviet expansion. As the first Director of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff, he played a central role in designing the Marshall Plan and laid the intellectual groundwork for the Truman Doctrine, NATO, and the architecture of the early Cold War. Yet he spent the rest of his long life as a critic of what containment became: opposing the militarization of his ideas, the Vietnam War, and NATO enlargement, and insisting that the Soviet threat had always been political, not military.