People of the Revolution and the USSR

Belgium state institutions Non-Bolshevik socialists 1866–1938 ○ Natural causes

Chairman of the International Socialist Bureau who led the Second International and joined Belgium’s wartime government in 1914

At the 1919–20 Paris Peace Conference, he secured treaty clauses favouring labour, including an eight-hour day. As Belgium’s foreign minister, he helped negotiate the 1925 Pact of Locarno.

A leader of the Belgian Labour Party and a jurist, he chaired the International Socialist Bureau from 1900 and became the face of the Second International. When Germany invaded neutral Belgium in August 1914 he entered the government as minister of state and backed national defence, trying to hold the Bureau together against the Zimmerwald movement. After the war he served as justice and foreign minister, signing the Locarno treaties in 1925, and chaired the Labour and Socialist International from 1923.

Germany state institutions Non-Bolshevik socialists 1867–1919 ✕ Assassinated

Journalist who overthrew the Bavarian monarchy in Munich in November 1918, proclaimed the People’s State and was assassinated the next year

He organized the November 1918 Bavarian Revolution, overthrew the monarchy and proclaimed the People’s State; he was assassinated in February 1919 while on his way to resign.

Born to a Jewish merchant family in Berlin, he was a theatre critic and editor of the SPD’s Vorwärts before moving to Munich. He joined the USPD against the war and was jailed for leading the munitions strike of January 1918. On 7 November he led demonstrators from a rally on the Theresienwiese round the barracks, and the next day proclaimed the People’s State of Bavaria and became premier. His publication of documents on German war guilt earned him the right’s hatred. Heavily defeated in the January 1919 election, he was assassinated by Count Arco-Valley on 21 February on his way to resign.

Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) Non-Bolshevik socialists 1867–1924 ○ Heart attack

Co-author of permanent revolution who arranged Lenin's sealed train: the 'merchant of revolution'

In December 1917, Lenin refused Parvus's request to return to Russia with the words: 'the cause of the revolution should not be touched by dirty hands.'

A Marxist theorist and journalist in the German SPD who co-developed the theory of permanent revolution with Leon Trotsky in 1904–1905. During World War I, he built a revolutionary network inside Russia with German government funding and played the decisive role in arranging Lenin's return via the 'sealed train' in April 1917. After the Bolsheviks took power, Lenin refused his request to return, declaring that 'the cause of the revolution should not be touched by dirty hands'; Parvus remained in Germany and became an advisor to early Weimar Republic leaders. Criticized for commodifying his principles between revolutionary Marxism and realpolitik, he remains one of the most controversial figures of 20th-century socialism.

Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) Non-Bolshevik socialists 1868–1916 ✕ Executed

He raised the workers' flag and the republic's on a single staff

Too wounded to stand, he was shot tied to a chair — Kilmainham Gaol, 12 May 1916

A socialist revolutionary who fused Marxism with Irish national liberation. He founded the Irish Citizen Army, commanded the Dublin Brigade in the 1916 Easter Rising, and was executed by the British after its suppression.

Non-Bolshevik socialists 1868–1920 ✕ Murdered by officers

Editor of the Social Democratic Népszava who was murdered by an officer detachment in 1920 for exposing the White Terror

A former schoolteacher, he wrote for Népszava from 1903, led the organisation of teachers, and in 1906 became president of the Free Association of Hungarian Teachers. He was state secretary for education in Mihály Károlyi’s coalition government, but during the Soviet Republic declined any role on grounds of principle and criticised the dictatorship of the proletariat in the National Assembly of Councils. In September 1919 he became responsible editor of Népszava and wrote articles exposing the White Terror. On 17 February 1920 officers of the Ostenburg detachment abducted and murdered him together with his colleague Béla Bacsó and threw the bodies into the Danube. Horthy’s amnesty of 1921 ensured the killers were never punished.

Germany state institutions Non-Bolshevik socialists 1868–1946 ○ Natural causes

SPD defence minister who said “someone has to be the bloodhound” and used the Freikorps to crush the left risings of 1919

He directed the suppression of the 1919 Berlin uprising with Freikorps and army forces, then authorized summary executions by military forces in a March order.

A basket-maker from Brandenburg who became an SPD journalist, he entered the Reichstag in 1906 and was known as its military expert. Sent to Kiel as the government’s representative in November 1918, he calmed the mutiny and became governor. After the Christmas crisis he joined the Council of People’s Deputies for military affairs and, saying “someone has to be the bloodhound”, organised the Freikorps that crushed the January rising and the March battles. First defence minister from February 1919, he resigned after the Kapp Putsch of 1920, later governed the province of Hanover and was arrested after the July 1944 plot.

Georgia state institutions Non-Bolshevik socialists 1868–1953 → Died in exile

Leader of the Georgian Mensheviks who headed the government of the Democratic Republic of Georgia in 1918–1921

Born in Guria, western Georgia, in 1868, he took up Marxism at the Warsaw Veterinary Institute and in the 1890s led Mesame Dasi, Georgia’s first legal Marxist organization. He sided with the Mensheviks in 1903 and sat in the First State Duma in 1906. In 1917 he chaired the Tbilisi Soviet and the National Council of Georgia; in May 1918 he headed the session that declared independence, and from July he led the government of the Democratic Republic of Georgia, carrying out land reform and social legislation. After the Red Army invasion of 1921 he went into exile in France, led the government-in-exile and died near Paris in 1953.

Socialist Revolutionary Party (PSR/SR) Non-Bolshevik socialists 1869–1918 ○ Renal failure

The Okhrana's paid informant who led the revolution's terrorist vanguard

In June 1902, Azef reported to the Okhrana that he had donated 500 rubles to terrorist operations, writing that it was 'necessary to strengthen my position in the party.' He was keeping books for both sides at once.

As head of the Socialist Revolutionary Party's Combat Organization, he orchestrated the assassinations of Interior Minister Plehve (1904) and Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich (1905), reaching the apex of revolutionary terror, while simultaneously working as a paid informant for the Okhrana from 1893 onward, delivering dozens of comrades to arrest and execution. He succeeded Gershuni and commanded Boris Savinkov as his deputy, reshaping the Combat Organization into a centralized, disciplined elite unit; the trust he earned through successful assassinations became the currency of his betrayals. Exposed by Vladimir Burtsev in 1908, he fled to Germany, leaving the SR Party devastated, and remains the darkest point of contact between the revolutionary movement and the Tsarist secret police.

Mensheviks (RSDLP) Non-Bolshevik socialists 1869–1934 → Died

One of the six who built Iskra: the Menshevik theorist who parted with Lenin

Witnessing the October Revolution, Potresov called it "the murder of democracy" and the Bolshevik regime that followed "the socialism of fools."

One of the six original editors of Iskra (1900) and a founding figure of the RSDLP. At the 1903 party congress he sided with Martov and became a leading Menshevik theorist, arguing for a mass party against Lenin's vanguard model. During WWI he led the defensist wing of Menshevism; he rejected the October Revolution and was briefly imprisoned by the Cheka in 1919. He left the USSR in 1925 and continued writing against the Soviet regime from Berlin and Paris until his death.

Spanish Republic state institutions Non-Bolshevik socialists 1869–1946 ○ Illness

The UGT worker-leader they called the Spanish Lenin, a prime minister broken between revolution and war

In November 1936 Largo Caballero appointed four CNT leaders to his cabinet: anarchists whose programme was the abolition of the state took ministerial office in one. One of them, the health minister Federica Montseny, was the first woman to hold a ministry in Spanish history.

A man who left school at seven, worked as a stucco plasterer and became a union leader. At the head of the UGT he was sentenced to life for the general strike of August 1917, and under the Primo de Rivera dictatorship he took a seat on the Council of State to keep the organization alive, a choice argued over for the rest of his life. As labour minister of the Second Republic he pushed through the eight-hour day in the countryside, and around the Asturias rising of 1934 he moved so far left that his supporters called him the Spanish Lenin. In September 1936 he became prime minister and war minister, and in November brought four CNT leaders into the cabinet, seating anarchists in a government for the first time; but he clashed continuously with the communists and the Soviet advisers over rebuilding a regular army and over the pace of the revolution. After the May Days of 1937 he refused to outlaw the POUM, lost his ministers and fell. In exile in France he was seized by the Gestapo and held in Sachsenhausen until the liberation of 1945.

Non-Bolshevik socialists 1869–1947 ○ Natural causes

A historian who linked scholarship with social democracy

In Moscow in 1940, he signed the peace treaty that ended the Winter War.

Väinö Voionmaa was a Finnish historian, professor and Social Democratic politician who helped shape the early republic. He founded institutions for workers’ education and joined scholarship to popular political work through parliament, diplomacy and social policy. As a Social Democratic member of Finland’s delegation to the Moscow Peace Treaty negotiations in 1940, he signed the settlement that ended the Winter War, embodying the difficult compromises imposed on Finland between war and great-power politics.

Socialist Revolutionary Party (PSR/SR) Non-Bolshevik socialists 1870–1908 ○ Pulmonary sarcoma

The 'Tiger of the Revolution' who founded the SR Combat Organization

Arrested in Kiev in May 1903, Gershuni did not resist — instead he kissed his handcuffs and leg irons before the watching gendarmes, a gesture that entered revolutionary legend.

A co-founder of the Socialist Revolutionary Party and the founder and first leader of its Combat Organization, he masterminded the political assassinations that shook the Russian Empire in 1902–1903, beginning with Interior Minister Sipyagin. Born to a Jewish family, he was a pharmacist and bacteriologist who ran cultural-enlightenment schools in Minsk before the limits of legal methods drove him to become a full-time revolutionary; as the 'Tiger of the Revolution' he became the Empire's most wanted man. Arrested in 1903 and sentenced to death, commuted to life at hard labor, he escaped the Akatuy katorga in 1906 hidden in a barrel of sauerkraut, traveling through China, Japan, and the United States to return to Europe, where he died before learning that his deputy and successor Yevno Azef was an Okhrana spy.

Non-Bolshevik socialists 1870–1928 ○ Natural causes

Secretary of the Petrograd Soviet Executive Committee and the lawyer who drafted Order No. 1

Sokolov sat at the desk writing. Soldiers crowded around him, standing and leaning over the table, half dictating, half suggesting what he should write. ... When the work was done, they put the heading 'Order No. 1' on the sheet. Sukhanov, Notes on the Revolution

Born the son of a court archpriest, he turned to defending revolutionaries and became the lawyer for every radical cause in late imperial Russia. On March 1, 1917, as secretary of the Petrograd Soviet Executive Committee, he chaired the soldiers' section meeting that drafted Order No. 1, the document that democratized the Russian army and signaled the Soviet's de facto supremacy over the Provisional Government. Never a party member, he was among the busiest unofficial leaders of the revolution's first months, then worked quietly as a Soviet legal adviser after the Civil War and died in Yalta.

Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) Non-Bolshevik socialists 1870–1940 ○ Died in prison

PSOE right-wing leader, Speaker of the Cortes; joined Casado's coup, refused exile, and died in Franco's prison

"The great majority, the masses, they cannot leave, and I, who have always lived with the workers, will continue with them and with them I will stay. Whatever is their fate will be mine," to the socialist daily La Voz, March 1939

A Marxist revisionist who started as a philosophy professor in Madrid and succeeded Pablo Iglesias as leader of the PSOE and UGT in 1925. As Speaker of the Constituent Cortes (1931) he held to a moderate parliamentarism, and his opposition to the armed rising of October 1934 cost him his party base. During the Civil War he stayed in Madrid seeking a negotiated peace, and in March 1939 joined Colonel Casado's coup against Negrín, serving on the National Defence Council; but Franco demanded unconditional surrender. When every other council member fled, Besteiro refused, telling the socialist daily La Voz that he had always lived with the workers and would share their fate; a Francoist court martial sentenced him to life imprisonment and he died in Carmona prison.

Germany state institutions Non-Bolshevik socialists 1870–1944 ○ Natural death

Social Democratic chancellor whose government accepted the Treaty of Versailles under an Allied ultimatum

Born in Darkehmen in the Province of Prussia, he worked as a lawyer’s clerk, co-founded the office employees’ union and was second chairman of the General Commission of Trade Unions from 1908 to 1918. Elected to the Reichstag for the SPD in 1912, he became labour secretary in Max von Baden’s cabinet in October 1918. When Scheidemann resigned in protest at the Treaty of Versailles in June 1919, Bauer, until then a vocal critic of the treaty, succeeded him and got it through the National Assembly. His government carried out tax reform and extended social insurance, but was forced out in March 1920 over the negotiations conducted with the Kapp putschists. He was later vice-chancellor and treasury minister, and the Barmat corruption scandal cost him his seat in 1925. He died in Berlin in 1944.

Austria state institutions Non-Bolshevik socialists 1870–1950 ○ Natural death

Austrian Social Democratic leader who signed the Treaty of Saint-Germain and founded the Second Republic in 1945

Born to an ethnic German farming family in Moravia, he studied law in Vienna, joined the Social Democrats and entered the Imperial Council in 1907. An Austromarxist theorist of “personal autonomy” on the national question, he was criticised by Lenin and Stalin. In 1918 he became the first chancellor of German-Austria, leading a grand coalition that introduced the eight-hour day among other reforms, and had to accept the ban on union with Germany and the territorial losses of Saint-Germain. He supported the Anschluss in 1938. In April 1945, at Soviet direction, he formed a provisional government, and that year became president. He died in Vienna in 1950.

Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) Non-Bolshevik socialists 1871–1925 ○ Peritonitis

SPD leader who headed the revolutionary government of 1918, steered the councils into parliamentary democracy and became the first president

During the November Revolution of 1918, Ebert led the Council of People’s Representatives and advocated elections to a National Assembly. Elected the first president of the German Republic in 1919, he served until 1925.

Born to a tailor in Heidelberg, he worked as a saddler, became a party organiser in Bremen and in 1913 succeeded Bebel as SPD co-chairman. In the war he backed war credits and the Burgfrieden. Taking over the chancellorship on 9 November 1918, he led the Council of People’s Deputies and that night won the army’s support in a secret pact with General Groener. Elected president by the National Assembly in February 1919, he put down risings from left and right with the army, the Freikorps and emergency decrees under Article 48. He died in office in 1925 after an appendicitis operation.

Independent activity Non-Bolshevik socialists 1871–1944

A French journalist who moved from antimilitarist socialism toward nationalist authoritarian politics.

“When war comes, do not fire on your brothers ... You will not march to defend the capitalists’ strongbox.”

A former history teacher, Hervé was dismissed from teaching in 1901 after publishing an antimilitarist article and became a socialist journalist. He took part in founding the French Section of the Workers' International (SFIO) in 1905 and was active in the General Confederation of Labour (CGT); through his paper La Guerre sociale, he advocated antimilitarism and insurrection in the event of war. At the outbreak of the First World War he turned to patriotism and support for the war, and in 1919 he helped launch the National Socialist Party. Between the wars he attacked parliamentary government and called for an authoritarian republic led by Philippe Pétain. He briefly supported German Nazism in the 1930s but condemned its persecution of Jews.

Non-Bolshevik socialists 1871–1944 ○ Died

The Marxist economist who became a priest and built the theological system of Sophia

At the funeral of his four-year-old son Ivan in 1909, Bulgakov recorded: 'I understood what "God spoke" means' — a mystical experience he regarded as the final step in his return to Orthodoxy.

A Russian Orthodox theologian and economist whose trajectory from legal Marxist to ordained priest traced the defining intellectual pilgrimage of 20th-century Russia. Gaining recognition in the 1890s for Marxist economic writings, he discovered the limits of Marx's theory in his two-volume Capitalism and Agriculture (1900) and, passing through Kant and Vladimir Solovyov's philosophy, returned to the Orthodox Church. His landmark Vekhi essay 'Heroism and Asceticism' (1909) indicted the intelligentsia's atheistic revolutionism; exiled on the 'Philosophers' Ship' in 1922, he co-founded the St. Sergius Orthodox Theological Institute in Paris and completed his sophiological theological system.

Mensheviks (RSDLP) Non-Bolshevik socialists 1871–1947 ○ Lung cancer

Menshevism's theoretical pillar who stood for democratic socialism against Lenin

In 1943, the lifelong anti-Bolshevik Menshevik leader Dan wrote in The Origins of Bolshevism that Bolshevism had been chosen by history to be 'the carrier of socialism, the key idea of our epoch.'

Fyodor Dan was a revolutionary, physician, and a founding leader and chief theorist of the Menshevik faction of the RSDLP. At the 1903 Second Congress he sided with Martov against Lenin; after the February Revolution he became the leading ideologist of 'revolutionary defencism' and served on the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet and the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee. Exiled in 1922, he headed the Menshevik Foreign Delegation from Martov's death in 1923 until 1940, upholding democratic socialism against both Bolshevik authoritarianism and Western social-democratic accommodation. In The Origins of Bolshevism (1943) he recognized Bolshevism as the historical carrier of socialism while arguing for political liberalization in the Soviet Union.

Non-Bolshevik socialists 1871–1968 ○ Natural causes

Secretary of the Second International from 1905 to 1922 who kept its Bureau alive in the war and later became Belgian prime minister

In 1917, the Socialist International’s Bureau, led by Huysmans, sought to mediate among socialists in the belligerent countries through a Stockholm peace conference; Allied governments’ refusal to issue passports prevented it from taking place.

A Flemish teacher and journalist, he was secretary of the International Socialist Bureau from 1905 to 1922. When war came he moved the Bureau to the neutral Netherlands, tried to bring the belligerent parties back together and prepared the Stockholm conference of 1917. Between the wars he was a Belgian deputy and education minister; in the Second World War he fled to London and again served as the International’s secretary. He was prime minister of Belgium in 1946–1947.

Italian Socialist Party (PSI) Non-Bolshevik socialists 1872–1926 ○ Heart failure

Italian Socialist leader who took his party into the Comintern but refused to expel the reformists, causing the Livorno split of 1921

He moved the Socialist Party left during the war and led it into the Comintern, but in 1921 refused to break with reformists as the Communists split away.

Born in Spotorno, he became a central leader of the Italian Socialist Party and in 1914 succeeded the ousted Mussolini as editor of Avanti!. He pushed the party left during the war, joined the Zimmerwald movement and after the October Revolution led the PSI into the Comintern. At the Second Congress of 1920 he sat on the presiding committee and was elected to the Executive, but in 1921 he rejected the principle of breaking with the reformists and stayed at the head of the Socialist Party as the Communists split away. In 1924 he led the party’s left wing into the Communist Party, and in 1926 died of heart failure on his way to an underground party meeting.

French Section of the Workers' International (SFIO) Non-Bolshevik socialists 1872–1950 ○ Heart disease

France's first Socialist prime minister, who left behind paid holidays and the 40-hour week

'I rarely left my desk while in power; but whenever I went out and crossed the Paris suburbs and saw the roads covered with processions of jalopies, motorcycles and tandems, with working-class couples in matching pullovers, I had the feeling that, despite everything, I had brought a kind of clearing, a break in the clouds, into difficult and obscure lives', statement at the Riom trial, March 1942

A literary critic drawn into politics by the Dreyfus affair, he kept the Socialist SFIO's 'old house' standing at the 1920 Congress of Tours when the majority left to found the Communist Party. As prime minister of the 1936 Popular Front government he brokered the Matignon Agreements and enacted two weeks of paid holidays and the 40-hour week, becoming France's first Socialist and first Jewish head of government and a target of the far right. One of the eighty parliamentarians who voted against full powers for Pétain in 1940, he turned Vichy's Riom trial into a platform for defending the Popular Front, survived internment near Buchenwald, and briefly headed a caretaker government in late 1946.