People of the Revolution and the USSR

Labour Party (United Kingdom) Non-Bolshevik socialists 1856–1915 ○ Pneumonia

Former miner who founded the British Labour Party and opposed the First World War to the end, urging an anti-war general strike

Elected to Parliament in 1892 after organising miners, Hardie helped lead the Independent Labour Party and the new Labour movement. At the outbreak of the First World War, he campaigned against the conflict.

Born into poverty in Scotland and working in the pits from about the age of ten, he rose as a miners’ organiser to become in 1892 the first working-class member of parliament. He founded the Independent Labour Party in 1893 and became Labour’s first parliamentary leader in 1906, supporting women’s suffrage and Indian self-rule. At Copenhagen in 1910 he proposed a general strike in the arms industries to prevent war. He attended the Brussels Bureau meeting of July 1914 and opposed the war until his death in 1915.

Labour Party (United Kingdom) Non-Bolshevik socialists 1863–1935

British Labour organizer and politician who led the international disarmament effort.

Henderson worked as an iron foundryman and became active in the trade-union movement. He helped establish the Labour Representation Committee in 1900, chaired the conference that formed the Labour Party in 1906, and served as party secretary from 1911 to 1934, building its organization and broadening its base. He was president of the Board of Education in 1915–16, home secretary in 1924, and foreign secretary from 1929 to 1931. Elected president of the League of Nations Disarmament Conference in 1932, he pursued international negotiations even as the conference ultimately failed; his work for peace and disarmament earned him the 1934 Nobel Peace Prize.

Labour Party (United Kingdom) Non-Bolshevik socialists 1866–1937 ○ Natural causes

Politician who gave up the Labour chairmanship in 1914 over war credits and later became Britain’s first Labour prime minister

He resigned as Labour chairman in 1914 over Britain’s entry into the war and war spending; in 1931 he led a national government and lost Labour’s support.

Born into poverty in Lossiemouth, Scotland, he became an organiser of the Independent Labour Party and Labour and was chairman of the party from 1911. When Labour backed the government’s war credits in August 1914 he resigned the chairmanship and was fiercely attacked for his opposition to the war. In 1924 he became Britain’s first Labour prime minister and recognised the Soviet Union, returning as prime minister in 1929. Forming a National Government with the Conservatives in the crisis of 1931, he was expelled from Labour. He died at sea in 1937.

Labour Party (United Kingdom) Non-Bolshevik socialists 1881–1951 ○ Natural causes

A pragmatic statesman who carried trade-union power into postwar diplomacy

At the 1946 Moscow conference, after Molotov’s repeated attacks, Bevin rose and shouted, “I've had enough of this I 'ave!”

Ernest Bevin was a Labour politician and trade-union organizer who rose from poverty to lead Britain’s largest union. His wartime management of labour shaped a postwar diplomacy that treated reconstruction as a question of organized work and state capacity. As Foreign Secretary, he and Georges Bidault organized the European response to Marshall’s Harvard speech, linking British security and western European cooperation to American aid and an Atlantic alliance. His firm anti-communism and defence of imperial interests also show how the postwar international order combined reconstruction with continuing forms of power.

United Kingdom state institutions Non-Bolshevik socialists 1883–1967 ○ Pneumonia

The laconic reformer who replaced Churchill mid-Potsdam and built Britain's postwar welfare state

After winning the 1945 election, Attlee stood in silence with George VI at Buckingham Palace before volunteering, "I've won the election." The King replied, "I know. I heard it on the Six O'Clock News."

Clement Attlee was the man who replaced Winston Churchill as British prime minister in the middle of the Potsdam Conference, after Labour's landslide victory in July 1945. He had served loyally as Churchill's deputy in the wartime coalition, but voters chose the unassuming reformer over the war hero and his promise of a welfare state. His government created the National Health Service, nationalised major industries, and began dismantling the British Empire by granting independence to India and Pakistan. Abroad, he championed the Marshall Plan and NATO, aligning Britain firmly with the United States as the Cold War took shape.

Non-Bolshevik socialists 1892–1982 ○ Natural causes

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.

Australian Labor Party (ALP) Non-Bolshevik socialists 1894–1965 ○ Pneumonia

Australia's Foreign Minister who led the small and medium powers' fight against the great-power veto at San Francisco

On the emergency subcommittee with Stettinius and Gromyko, Evatt displayed 'an attitude of conciliation' and proposed the draft that on 20 June broke the deadlock over the General Assembly's powers of discussion.

An Australian Labor politician and jurist, Evatt was appointed the youngest-ever High Court justice at 36 and later served as Attorney-General and Minister for External Affairs under the Curtin and Chifley governments. At the 1945 San Francisco Conference he led the small and medium powers' resistance to the Security Council veto, submitting 38 amendments, and sat on the emergency subcommittee with Stettinius and Gromyko that resolved the deadlock over the General Assembly's powers of discussion. As President of the UN General Assembly in 1948 he guided the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and chaired the Ad Hoc Committee on Palestine that paved the way for the partition plan. He became Labor leader in 1951 but the party split over communism and three successive election defeats drove him from politics in 1960.

Non-Bolshevik socialists 1903–1950 ○ Tuberculosis

The democratic socialist who came back wounded from the POUM militia and dissected the language of totalitarianism

Homage to Catalonia, on reaching Barcelona in December 1936: “It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle.”

Born Eric Arthur Blair. Five years in the Indian Imperial Police in Burma and his reportage on destitution in Paris and London made him a writer; in December 1936 he went to Spain, joined the POUM militia through the Independent Labour Party, spent four months on the Aragon front and was shot through the throat at Huesca. The street fighting he witnessed in Barcelona while convalescing in May 1937, and the outlawing of the POUM that followed, broke him with Soviet communism for good, and he crossed the border with his wife with a warrant out for him as a Trotskyist. Homage to Catalonia, his account of it, sold 683 copies in its first six months. Orwell called himself a democratic socialist to the end, and Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four anatomize the hardening of a revolution into a new rule, and the language that holds it up.

Labour Party (United Kingdom) Non-Bolshevik socialists 1930–2019 ○ Natural causes

Harvard sinologist whose Origins of the Cultural Revolution trilogy and Mao’s Last Revolution dissected China’s elite politics

A journalist in London through 1961 who covered Chinese developments from afar, he first reached mainland China only in 1972; he went on to study elite Chinese politics from the founding of the People's Republic through the Cultural Revolution.

A Briton born in India, he was a journalist and a Labour MP before becoming a scholar, and founded and edited The China Quarterly. The three volumes of The Origins of the Cultural Revolution (1974–1997) traced the line struggles inside the top leadership from the Hundred Flowers of 1956 to 1966, showing the Cultural Revolution as the outcome of political conflicts accumulated since the failure of the Great Leap rather than a personal whim of Mao. Mao’s Last Revolution (2006, with Michael Schoenhals) is the standard narrative of 1966–1976. He was a professor at Harvard and director of its Fairbank Center.