A Polish-born Soviet general who commanded the suppression of the Poznań uprising
On 28 June 1956, arriving in Poznań around 2 p.m., he at once ordered troops to take control of the situation before the security headquarters.
Born into a Polish peasant family in Podolia, Ukraine, and illiterate until eighteen, he was drafted into the Red Army and rose to become a Soviet general. At the end of the Second World War he commanded the Polish First Army in the battle for Berlin and was made a Hero of the Soviet Union. After the war he stayed on in the high command of the Polish army as a Soviet overseer, and in June 1956, as deputy defence minister, directed the military suppression of the Poznań workers' protest on the ground.
Career timeline
1923Drafted into the Red Army
1935–1938Frunze Military Academy
1944–1945Commanded the Polish First Army, Battle of Berlin
1945Hero of the Soviet Union
1949–1956Deputy Minister of National Defence, Poland
1956Commanded the suppression of the Poznań June protest
1956–1963Returned to the Soviet Defence Ministry, retired as army general
The national communist who returned in the Polish October of 1956 to test a 'Polish road to socialism'
To the Politburo, October 1956 — 'You can govern a nation with bayonets, but whoever realizes that possibility also realizes that he has lost everything.'
Born in 1905 in Galicia, in the Austrian Partition, into a worker's family, he was a plumber from the age of fourteen. He joined the Communist Party of Poland in 1926 and became general secretary of the underground Polish Workers' Party in 1943. In 1948 he was removed for 'rightist-nationalist deviation' and imprisoned from 1951 to 1954. After the June 1956 Poznań workers' protests were harshly suppressed, he was elected first secretary on 20 October 1956; he insisted Poland would resist advancing Soviet troops but keep the alliance, and the Soviets yielded. The 1967-68 antisemitic campaign and support for the invasion of Czechoslovakia ended the reform line, and in December 1970 he ordered the army to shoot striking shipyard workers in Gdańsk and Gdynia. Death caused by lung cancer.
Career timeline
1926Joins the Communist Party of Poland
1934–1935Studies at the International Lenin School, Moscow
1943–1948General Secretary, Polish Workers' Party
1948–1951Purged for 'nationalist deviation'; arrested 1951
1954–1956Released, rehabilitated; returns in the Polish October
1956–1970First Secretary, Polish United Workers' Party
1970.12Bloody suppression of strikes against price rises; heart attack; removed from office 20 December
A writer who joined Jewish and Catholic memory and organized public remembrance
Born Jewish and later baptized a Catholic, he called himself with the title of his best-known story: 'I am the Jew from the Wedding.'
Roman Brandstaetter was a Polish writer who composed poetry, fiction and drama in Polish and translated the Hebrew Bible and Shakespeare. Born into a Jewish family, he explored Zionism and assimilation, then converted to Catholicism in Rome while retaining Jewish tradition as a living tension in his literature. After the war he settled in Poznań, where he joined biblical imagination to historical memory in major works including the four-volume Jesus of Nazareth. In 1980 he chaired the Social Committee for Construction of the Monument to the Victims of Poznań June 1956, helping organize the workers’ uprising’s passage into public memorial form.
Career timeline
1926Literary debut with poetry and criticism
1929–1932Studied in Paris and earned a doctorate in philosophy on Adam Mickiewicz
1933–1935Directed the literary section of the Zionist Polish-language journal Opinia
1940–1946Worked for the Polish Telegraph Agency in Palestine
1947–1948Cultural attaché at the Polish embassy in Rome
1948–1950Literary director at the Polish Theatre and Grand Theatre in Poznań
1960–1987Worked as a full-time writer in Poznań, translating scripture and writing Jesus of Nazareth
1980Chaired the Social Committee for Construction of the Poznań June 1956 Monument
The transitional First Secretary of 1956 who turned Khrushchev's Secret Speech into a mass document and then yielded power to Gomułka
In October 1956, as Khrushchev threatened military intervention, Ochab placed Polish forces in defensive positions around Warsaw and told Soviet leaders that 'under the circumstances, Gomułka was the best choice to lead the country.'
A Polish communist from Kraków who joined the Communist Party of Poland in 1929 and spent six and a half years as a political prisoner under the Sanation regime. After serving as a political commissar in Berling's Polish Army in the USSR, he rose through the PPR and PZPR as Central Committee member, minister of public administration, deputy defence minister, and Politburo member. As First Secretary in March 1956 after Bierut's death, he authorized mass printing and distribution of Khrushchev's Secret Speech through party channels and public meetings, and copies were even sold at Warsaw's Różycki market, setting off the speech's worldwide leak. He approved the suppression of the Poznań uprising, stood down Soviet military intervention in October, handed power to Gomułka, and resigned all offices in 1968 in protest against the anti-Semitic campaign.
Career timeline
1929Joins the Communist Party of Poland
1939Defends Warsaw, moves to Soviet Union
1943Political commissar, 1st Infantry Division; Battle of Lenino
1944–1946PPR Central Committee member, Minister of Public Administration
1949–1950Deputy Minister of Defence, head of military political division
1956.03–10PZPR First Secretary; authorizes mass distribution of the Secret Speech
1964–1968Chairman of the Council of State (head of state)
1968Resigns all offices in protest of anti-Semitic campaign
The PZPR Warsaw first secretary whose unauthorized print run of 15,000 copies broke Khrushchev's Secret Speech out of party control
At a Central Committee plenum break in March 1956, he pressed Khrushchev on Stalin's anti-Semitism; Khrushchev, his hands trembling, disclosed that Stalin had been planning pogroms against Soviet Jews.
Born to a Jewish merchant family in Warsaw, he joined the communist youth movement at 14, studied at the International Lenin School, and alternated between underground party work in Poland and extended stays in the USSR. Arrested by the NKVD in 1938, he spent eight years in the Kolyma camps before returning to Poland in 1945, where he enforced the Stalinist line in propaganda, the press, and agricultural procurement. As PZPR Warsaw first secretary from 1955, he pivoted after the Twentieth Congress: he urged rank-and-file members to study the secret speech and authorized 15,000–20,000 unofficial copies, turning the speech from a closed party document into a global one. He clashed with Gomułka after the Polish October, was dismissed in 1957 and expelled in the 1968 anti-Semitic campaign, and later backed the democratic opposition, converting to Catholicism.
Career timeline
1921Joins the Young Communist League of Poland
1926–1929Studies at the International Lenin School, Moscow
1930–1932Secretariat of the Central Committee, Communist Party of Poland
1938–1945Arrested by the NKVD; 8-year sentence in Kolyma labour camp
1945–1948Propaganda secretary, Katowice Voivodeship PPR; editor of Trybuna Robotnicza
1948–1954Head of the Press and Publishing Department, PZPR Central Committee
1955–1957First Secretary, PZPR Warsaw Committee
1957–1958President of the Polish Press Agency (PAP)
1968Expelled from the PZPR in the anti-Semitic campaign
Marxist historian of Trotsky's definitive biography, who coined the 'non-Jewish Jew'
"I still believe!" — indicting the Cold War and the Vietnam War before thousands of students at the 1965 Berkeley teach-in
Born into a Polish Jewish family, a prodigy in Hasidic scripture who became an atheist in his teens. Joined the Polish Communist Party in 1927; co-founded its first anti-Stalinist group and was expelled in 1932. Exiled to London in 1939. His Stalin: A Political Biography (1949) made him a world authority. Drawing on the Harvard Trotsky Archives, his three-volume life of Trotsky is widely regarded as among the greatest political biographies. A mentor to the 1960s New Left, he died suddenly in Rome in 1967.
Career timeline
1927Joins the illegal Communist Party of Poland (KPP) — editor of underground press
1931Tours the Soviet Union — declines professorships at Moscow and Minsk Universities
1932Co-founds the KPP's first anti-Stalinist group — expelled for opposing the 'social fascism' line
1939Exiled to London — joins The Economist as Soviet and military-affairs correspondent
1946–1947Leaves journalism to write books full-time
1949Publishes Stalin: A Political Biography — becomes a leading authority on Soviet affairs
1954–1963Completes the Trotsky trilogy: The Prophet Armed (1954), Unarmed (1959), Outcast (1963)
1965Speaks at the first Berkeley Vietnam teach-in — emerges as an intellectual mentor of the New Left
1966–1967Delivers the G. M. Trevelyan Lectures at Cambridge — posthumously published as The Unfinished Revolution
Co-discoverer of spontaneous fission, a pillar of the Soviet atomic project
After they removed the neutron source, their ionization chamber kept firing. To rule out cosmic rays, they hauled the apparatus 50 meters underground into Moscow's Dinamo metro station, where the signal persisted: uranium fissions all by itself.
Soviet nuclear physicist. In 1940, together with Georgy Flyorov, he discovered the spontaneous fission of uranium-235, a finding that established the scientific foundation for the Soviet atomic bomb project. Drafted into the Red Army in 1941 and recalled to Kazan in 1942, he developed the associated-particle method for measuring neutron source yields and created express techniques for plutonium detection under Kurchatov. In 1947 he founded the neutron physics and nuclear fission laboratory at the Khlopin Radium Institute, which he led for nearly four decades, and in 1949 he established the nuclear physics department at the Lensovet Technological Institute, training generations of Soviet nuclear engineers.
Career timeline
1919–1928Porcelain and glass painter, Malaya Vishera glass factory
1931–1936Leningrad State University, Physics Faculty; diploma supervised by Igor Kurchatov
1936–1941Postgraduate researcher, Khlopin Radium Institute (RIAN), under Kurchatov and Khlopin
1940Co-discovered spontaneous fission of uranium with Flyorov (USSR State Discovery No. 33)
1941–1942Served in Red Army, lieutenant; recalled to Kazan for the atomic bomb project
1947–1986Founded and headed the Neutron Physics and Nuclear Fission Laboratory, RIAN
1949–1984Founded and chaired the Nuclear Physics Department, Lensovet Technological Institute
1948Awarded Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences
Chief designer of the KV and IS heavy tanks, builder of Tankograd
A fellow designer said of him: 'Kotin won't sleep at night if he hasn't hooked someone.' His tanks bore the names Kirov, Voroshilov, and Stalin.
A giant of Soviet heavy-tank design: the engineer-administrator who gave the Red Army the KV series, the IS (Iosif Stalin) heavy tanks, and the SU-152 and ISU-152 self-propelled guns. Appointed chief designer at the Kirov Plant in 1937 at just 29, he began by upgrading the T-28, then, drawing lessons from Spain, turned to developing heavily armoured breakthrough tanks. After the German invasion he served as Deputy People's Commissar for the Tank Industry while personally directing the evacuation of factories from Leningrad to Chelyabinsk, forging the vast 'Tankograd' complex that produced 18,000 tanks and SPGs during the war. After 1945 he designed the PT-76 amphibious tank, the T-10 heavy tank, and the K-700 tractor, before capping his career as Deputy Minister of Defence Industry in 1968.
Career timeline
1932–1937Engineer and design bureau chief, Research Dept., Military Academy of Mechanisation and Motorisation
1937–1968Chief Designer of SKB-2, Kirov Plant (Leningrad / Chelyabinsk)
1941–1943Deputy People's Commissar for the Tank Industry and Chief Designer
1943–1945Director and Chief Designer, Experimental Tank Plant No. 100 (Chelyabinsk)
1949–1968Director and Chief Designer, VNII-100 Tank Research Institute
1968–1972Deputy Minister of Defence Industry, USSR
A diplomat who widened room for negotiation amid East-West tension
On 2 October 1957 he presented to the UN General Assembly his plan for a nuclear-free zone comprising Czechoslovakia, Poland, East and West Germany; it was never adopted.
Adam Rapacki was born on 24 December 1909 in Lemberg, Austria-Hungary (now Lviv), and raised in Warsaw. A Polish socialist politician, economist and diplomat, he translated the security demands of the socialist bloc into the language of international negotiation. He proposed a nuclear-free zone in Central Europe in 1957 and called for a European security conference in 1964, helping shape an agenda that fed into the Helsinki process. He was also a Communist politician who served in the PZPR leadership and government, and was nominated for the 1966 Nobel Peace Prize. Regarded as a leader of the party's liberalising wing, he opposed the persecution of people of Jewish origin and was removed as foreign minister in December 1968; he died in Warsaw on 10 October 1970.
Career timeline
1931Joined the Union of Independent Socialist Youth
1939–1945Educational and political activity in German prisoner-of-war camps
1947–1950Polish Minister of Shipping
1950–1956Minister of Higher Education and Science, later Higher Education
1956–1968Polish Minister of Foreign Affairs
1964Proposed convening a European security conference
1968Withdrew from political life after the March events
1948–1968PZPR Politburo member (deputy member 1954–56)
1968.12Removed as foreign minister for opposing anti-Jewish measures
After workers rose against the 1976 price plan, it was withdrawn within a day.
Piotr Jaroszewicz was a communist politician and former military officer who connected Poland’s postwar state administration with economic management. He implemented Edward Gierek’s growth strategy, financed partly by Western credit, while rising consumption and debt deepened pressures on food supply and prices. His announcement of sharp food-price increases in 1976 helped provoke worker protests in Radom and Ursus; the government withdrew the plan, while the repression helped bring workers and intellectual opponents together in KOR. Removed as premier in 1980, he was murdered at home with his wife in 1992.
Career timeline
1929–1939Primary-school teacher and headmaster
1943–1945Political-education officer in the Polish forces in the USSR
1945–1952Senior command and political-education posts in the Polish Army
1952–1970Deputy Prime Minister of Poland
1954–1956Minister of Mining and Coal Mining
1956–1970Polish representative to Comecon and deputy chair of the Economic Committee
1970–1980Prime Minister of the Polish People’s Republic
1981–1992Retired from politics; interned after martial law in 1981
A resistance survivor who became a guardian of the system
On Poznań radio on 29 June 1956, he warned that the people's government would chop off the hand of anyone raised against it.
Józef Cyrankiewicz was a prewar socialist activist and a leader of the resistance inside Auschwitz, yet after the war he became a central politician of the Soviet-aligned Polish People's Republic. As one of Poland's longest-serving prime ministers, he helped coordinate reconstruction and consolidate communist rule, including the absorption of the independent socialist tradition into the ruling party. His support for force against the Poznań workers in 1956 and against coastal workers in 1970 reveals the tension between his resistance past and his responsibility within the state he defended. Removed from power in 1970, he remained active in official peace organizations.
Career timeline
1931Joined the Polish Socialist Party and socialist youth movement
1935–1939Secretary of the Kraków District Workers' Committee of the Polish Socialist Party
1942–1945Imprisoned at Auschwitz and Mauthausen; active in camp resistance
1945–1948General Secretary of the Central Executive Committee of the Polish Socialist Party
1947–1952Chairman of the Council of Ministers of Poland
1954–1970Chairman of the Council of Ministers of Poland
1970–1972Chairman of the Council of State
1973–1986Chairman of the Polish Peace Committee and member of the World Peace Council
The minister whose broken promise sparked the Poznań Uprising
On 27 June 1956, before the gathered ZISPO workforce, he withdrew the promises he had made to their delegation in Warsaw only the day before.
A Polish communist technocrat with a mechanical-engineering background who became Minister of Machine Industry in 1955. On 26 June 1956 he promised the ZISPO workers' delegation in Warsaw wage increases and refunds of withheld taxes, only to withdraw these promises in Poznań the next day, a reversal that lit the fuse of the 28 June uprising. He then continued in the planning apparatus, serving as an industrial bureaucrat of the Polish People's Republic until retirement.
Career timeline
1938Graduated Warsaw Polytechnic as a mechanical engineer
1942–1944Engineer at Magnitogorsk metallurgical works
1949Undersecretary of State, Ministry of Heavy Industry
1952Undersecretary of State, Ministry of Machine Industry
1955–1956Minister of Machine Industry
1958Undersecretary of State, Council of Ministers; deputy chair of the Foreign Economic and Scientific-Technical Cooperation Committee
–1968Deputy chair of the Planning Commission at the Council of Ministers
Korolev's deputy who designed the brains of Sputnik and then wrote the history of the Soviet space program
On May 2, 1945, Major Boris Chertok scrawled his name on the walls of the fallen Reichstag — the moment he would forever call 'the happiest achievement of my life.' Three months later he was knee-deep in V-2 wreckage, opening the first page of the Soviet space program.
Korolev's closest deputy, he designed the guidance and control systems that steered Soviet rocketry for half a century — from the R-7 ICBM through Sputnik, Vostok, Soyuz, and Mir. A Hero of Socialist Labor (1961) and full member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, he published his four-volume memoir 'Rockets and People,' the definitive insider history of the Soviet space program, and kept writing until age 99.
Career timeline
1930–1938Electrician, then aircraft special-equipment designer at Plant No. 22
1940–1945Electrical and radio equipment engineer at Bolkhovitinov OKB
1945–1947Germany mission: studied V-2 guidance; Institute Rabe and Institut Nordhausen
1946–1956Head of control systems at NII-88; began work under Korolev
1956–1974Deputy chief designer at OKB-1: control systems for R-7, Sputnik, Vostok, Soyuz
1974–1992Deputy general designer at NPO Energia: Mir station, Energia rocket controls
1994–1999Published four-volume memoir 'Rockets and People'; NASA English edition 2005–11
2000Elected full member (academician) of the Russian Academy of Sciences
First Secretary who led a decade of Western-credit modernisation: only for debt and Solidarity to bring the curtain down
To workers at a January 1971 rally — 'So, comrades, will you help?' (the hall answered with feeble applause)
A coal miner in France and Belgium, he became PZPR First Secretary after the 1970 workers' revolt and pursued a 'socialist consumer society' fuelled by Western credit. Living standards rose visibly — but the debt crisis and the 1980 strikes forced him out.
Career timeline
1931Joins French Communist Party in the Lens coalfield
1934Leads occupation strike at Leforest mine; deported to Poland
1937–1946Moves to Belgium; joins Belgian CP and Witte Brigade resistance
1948–1954Returns to Poland; Katowice party secretary, then head of Heavy Industry Dept, CC
1957–1970First Secretary, Katowice Voivodeship — his pragmatic 'duchy'
1970–1980First Secretary, PZPR — the 'Gierek decade'
1976–1980Concurrently member of the Council of State
1981Expelled from PZPR; interned under martial law (Dec 1981–Dec 1982)
The missile designer who overtook Korolev under Khrushchev's patronage, then faded when his patron fell
On March 8, 1958, Chelomey hired Nikita Khrushchev's son Sergei as an engineer at OKB-52. With that single hire, he gained a direct line to the Soviet leader — and over the next six years, backed by Khrushchev's patronage, he rose to the pinnacle of the Soviet space program, surpassing even Korolev.
A leading Soviet rocket and spacecraft designer, he headed OKB-52 (later NPO Mashinostroyeniya) and created the Proton launch vehicle, the UR-100 ICBM, the Almaz military space stations, and the TKS spacecraft. He chaired the Council of Chief Designers from 1961, succeeding Korolev (aided by Khrushchev's patronage, since Khrushchev's son Sergei worked under him). After Khrushchev's ouster, Ustinov sidelined him, and by 1981 his space programs were shut down. The Proton rocket still flies today; the UR-100 was the most mass-deployed ICBM in Soviet history.
Career timeline
1937Graduated Kyiv Aviation Institute; thesis on vibration stood out
1941Joined CIAM and the Communist Party
1944–1953Director and Chief Designer of OKB-51: 10Kh cruise missile based on the V-1
1955Chief Designer of OKB-52 (now NPO Mashinostroyeniya)
1961–1964Chair of the Council of Chief Designers, succeeding Korolev
1965Proton rocket first launch; UR-100 ICBM deployment began
1970sDeveloped Almaz military stations and TKS spacecraft
1981–1984Space programs ordered shut; taught at his alma mater until his death
A Polish courier who connected resistance, exile, and radio
On 29 July 1944, he told Home Army leaders that substantial Western support was impossible, but the decision to rise did not change.
Jan Nowak-Jeziorański was a courier and journalist who linked the Polish Home Army with the government-in-exile in London. Returning from London in July 1944, he warned Home Army leaders that Western support for an uprising would be limited, but he could not stop the decision to rise, and he broadcast during the Warsaw Uprising. After the war he directed the Polish Service of Radio Free Europe, making exile broadcasting a sustained instrument of political communication. He returned to Poland in 1989 and continued to advocate its integration with the West.
Career timeline
1936Assistant in economics at the University of Poznań
1941–1943Worked in the Home Army's intelligence and propaganda networks
1943–1944Courier between the Home Army and the government-in-exile in London
1944.07–10Announcer and editor for Radio Lightning during the Warsaw Uprising
1948–1951Editor with the BBC Polish Service
1951–1976Founding director of the Polish Service of Radio Free Europe
1979–1996National director of the Polish American Congress
1989–2005Public advocate of Poland's integration with the West after returning home
A legal functionary who defined order against a workers’ revolt
On 17 July 1956, he said the investigation would distinguish striking workers from “trouble-makers, criminals and provocateurs.”
Marian Rybicki was a Polish lawyer and communist politician who helped institutionalize the postwar state through senior party, legal, and administrative work. After the Poznań workers’ revolt in 1956, as Prosecutor General, he publicly advanced a “two currents” line distinguishing striking workers from “trouble-makers, criminals and provocateurs.” The distinction separated workers’ economic grievances from alleged criminal responsibility, but it also framed the investigations and trials that followed. He later served as justice minister and worked as a legal scholar concerned with law and governance in a socialist state.
Career timeline
1937Graduated in law from the University of Warsaw
1945–1947Worked in the Legal Department of the Presidium of the National National Council
1947–1948Served on the Executive Committee and Secretariat of the Polish Socialist Party
1948–1954Member of the Organizational Bureau of the Polish United Workers’ Party Central Committee
1952–1956First Secretary of the Council of State
1956–1957Prosecutor General of the Polish People’s Republic
1957–1965Minister of Justice
1965–1983Professor at the Polish Academy of Sciences’ Institute of State and Law, and secretary of the All-Poland Committee of the Front of National Unity
Deputy head of Poland’s security Department X whose 1953 defection and broadcasts exposed the ministry’s torture and purges
Born Izaak Fleischfarb into a Jewish family in Medyn in Galicia, he worked as a shoemaker in Kraków and moved from a Zionist group to the Communist Youth. Captured by the Germans in 1939, he escaped, only to be deported into the Soviet interior; in 1943 he married and took his wife’s surname. A political officer in Berling’s army, he joined the Ministry of Public Security, took part in arresting Home Army members and in falsifying the 1946 referendum, and as deputy director of its Department X arrested Gomułka and others on Bierut’s personal orders. On 5 December 1953, on official business in East Berlin, he defected to the US military mission in West Berlin. His revelations on Radio Free Europe about torture and the struggles inside the party led to the break-up of the ministry and contributed to the Polish October. He died in the United States in 1994.
The Trotskyist theorist who defined the USSR as bureaucratic state capitalism and built Britain's Socialist Workers Party
The slogan the Cliff group raised in 1950, when a handful of supporters brought out Socialist Review: “Neither Washington nor Moscow but international socialism.” It was a refusal of both camps of the Cold War, and the sentence that defined this current for the next half century.
Born Yigael Glückstein. Raised in Palestine in a family of Polish-Jewish immigrants, he left the Zionist left in his teens for Trotskyism, served twelve months in a British Mandate prison for anti-war agitation, and moved to Britain in 1947. In The Nature of Stalinist Russia (1948) he defined the USSR not as a degenerated workers'' state but as bureaucratic state capitalism, breaking with Fourth International orthodoxy, and on that base he built the theory of the permanent arms economy, which explained the postwar boom by East-West military spending, and of deflected permanent revolution, in which neither bourgeoisie nor working class but intellectuals and officers carry the revolution out. The organization he started as the Socialist Review Group in 1950 became the International Socialists and, in 1977, the Socialist Workers Party. He left a study of Rosa Luxemburg and four-volume biographies of Lenin and of Trotsky, and, never granted British citizenship, remained stateless all his life.
Career timeline
1917Born Yigael Glückstein at Zikhron Ya'akov in Ottoman Palestine, to Polish-Jewish immigrant parents
1931–1933Began in the youth section of Mapai, then Poale Zion, inside the Zionist left
late 1930sBecame a Trotskyist and an anti-Zionist; active in the small Palestinian Trotskyist movement
1939Arrested by the British Mandate authorities and held twelve months in Acre prison
1945Married the South African socialist Chanie Rosenberg
1947Moved to Britain, was refused leave to remain, and worked in Dublin instead
1948Published The Nature of Stalinist Russia, defining the USSR as bureaucratic state capitalism
1950Founded the Socialist Review Group: neither Washington nor Moscow
1952Allowed back into Britain and settled in London
1959Published Rosa Luxemburg: A Study, first using the pen name Tony Cliff
1962–1963Renamed the group the International Socialists and formulated deflected permanent revolution
1977Founded the Socialist Workers Party
1975–1993Wrote his four-volume Lenin and four-volume Trotsky
2000.04.09Died in London after heart surgery, still a stateless person
Historian of revolution’s social foundations and later memory
Born in Alexandria in 1917 and raised in Vienna and Berlin, he wrote the ‘long 19th century’ trilogy, beginning with The Age of Revolution, on the making of industrial capitalism and nationalism.
A British Marxist historian who taught at Birkbeck for many years, Hobsbawm treated the French and Industrial Revolutions together in The Age of Revolution. Echoes of the Marseillaise examined the French Revolution’s reception in later politics and historical writing. The course uses his work to consider class, social structures and changing revolutionary legacies. His interpretations must be distinguished from contemporary primary sources and from other historians’ readings.
Career timeline
1947Lecturer in history, Birkbeck College, London
1952Co-founder of the journal Past & Present
1970–1982Professor of history, Birkbeck College
1982Retired as Emeritus Professor of History, Birkbeck
1984–1997Visiting professor, The New School for Social Research
“Let your Spirit descend and renew the face of the earth!” he appealed in Warsaw.
Karol Józef Wojtyła was a Polish priest and philosopher who was elected John Paul II in 1978 and led the Catholic Church until 2005. Having lived through Nazi occupation and state socialism, he made human dignity, religious freedom, and national memory central to his pastoral and political language. About 11 million people saw him during his 1979 pilgrimage to Poland, helping a society dispersed under communist rule recognize itself as a community. He was an important factor in creating the conditions for Solidarity, while the movement’s workers and political actors remained its own agents.
Career timeline
1946Ordained priest of the Archdiocese of Kraków
1958Auxiliary Bishop of Kraków
1964Archbishop of Kraków
1967Made a cardinal
1978Elected the 264th pope, John Paul II
1979First papal pilgrimage to Poland
1980Witnessed the emergence of the Solidarity movement
Historian who interpreted the Kronstadt uprising as the last stand of Soviet democracy
One day a discussion had to be broken off at 11am; when Getzler returned five hours later, he resumed exactly where he had left off, without a single lubricating word of linkage: 'And seventhly, Lenin…'
Born in Berlin to a Polish-Jewish immigrant family, Getzler was deported by the Nazis to Poland, resettled in a Siberian gold-mining settlement by Soviet authorities, and eventually emigrated to Australia, where he earned a history degree and taught at the University of Adelaide. His 1967 biography of Yuli Martov recovered the Menshevik leader as a serious democratic alternative to Lenin, and his Kronstadt 1917–1921 (1983) used fleet muster rolls to show that 93.9% of the Petropavlovsk and Sevastopol crews had enlisted before 1918, proving the rebels were veteran revolutionaries and not peasant conscripts in White-Guard disguise. He became professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1971, insisted that individual and group choices shaped Soviet history, and in his later years marched against Israeli settlement policy into his eighties.
Career timeline
1938Deported with family to Poland by the Nazis
1941Resettled by Soviet authorities to a Siberian gold-mining settlement
c. 1945Emigrated to Australia
1950sEarned history degree at University of Adelaide; later gained tenured post
1960sResearch at Hoover Institution archives, Stanford University
1967Published Martov: A Political Biography of a Russian Social Democrat
1971Became professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem
1983Published Kronstadt 1917–1921: The Fate of a Soviet Democracy
2002Published Nikolai Sukhanov: Chronicler of the Russian Revolution
Poland's leader between martial law and the Round Table
The 1989 Round Table shows the collision, within one career, of responsibility for repression and a negotiated peaceful transition.
A military and communist leader of the Polish People's Republic, he imposed martial law in 1981 and repressed Solidarity, but in 1989 accepted Round Table negotiations and partially free elections, participating in a negotiated transition.
Career timeline
1981Imposes martial law
1981–1989First secretary of the Polish United Workers' Party
1989Accepts Round Table talks and partially free elections
The Cold War's leading conservative interpreter of Russian history who framed October as a coup
What occurred in October 1917 was a classical modern coup d'état accomplished without mass support... a surreptitious seizure of the nerve centres of the modern state, carried out under false slogans.
Polish-born American historian who became the intellectual architect of the 'totalitarian school' of Soviet studies. His magisterial two-volume history argued that the October Revolution was a coup by a tiny band of power-hungry intellectuals, not a popular uprising, and that Bolshevik rule was repressive and authoritarian from its inception. As head of Team B (1976) and Reagan's NSC Director of Soviet Affairs (1981–82), he translated his scholarship into policy, helping to shape the hard-line turn that many credit with hastening the Soviet collapse.
Career timeline
1958–1996Professor of Russian History, Harvard University
1968–1973Director, Russian Research Center, Harvard
1976Head of Team B, CIA competitive analysis of Soviet strategic capabilities
1981–1982Director of East European and Soviet Affairs, NSC, Reagan administration
1990Published The Russian Revolution
1994Published Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime
1997Published Three Whys of the Russian Revolution
