People of the Revolution and the USSR

Social Democratic Party of Finland Non-Bolshevik socialists 1881–1966 ○ War-responsibility prisoner 1946–1948

The Social Democratic realist who faced Stalin as Finland's Winter War foreign minister, rising from the cooperative movement

At the final meeting on 9 November 1939, when Finland refused even the reduced demands, 'the eyes of our opposite numbers opened wide.' Stalin asked: 'You don't even offer Ino?'

The politician who rebuilt Finland's Social Democratic Party from the ashes of the 1918 civil war into a parliamentary-democratic force. He became prime minister of Finland's first leftist government in 1926, and during the Moscow negotiations on the eve of the Winter War he joined Paasikivi at the table, urging Helsinki to accept a territorial exchange. It was Tanner who later recorded that when Finland rejected even the reduced Soviet demands at the final meeting of 9 November 1939, Stalin's and Molotov's 'eyes opened wide.' After the war he served a five-and-a-half-year prison sentence under Soviet pressure, but returned to parliament and led the party into the early 1960s.

Russian Empire Non-Bolshevik socialists 1881–1970 → Exile

The orator ground away between revolution and counter-revolution

In March 1917, taking the rostrum of the Petrograd Soviet to announce his acceptance of the Justice Ministry, he cried: "I cannot live without the people. In the moment you begin to doubt me, then kill me!" The workers and soldiers filling the hall erupted in wild applause.

The face of the Provisional Government and its last premier. In August 1917 he armed even the jailed Bolsheviks to stop Kornilov; in October, no army anywhere would come to save him. The story of his escaping in a dress is a Soviet fabrication. He spent half a century in exile lecturing on what had gone wrong, and died in New York.

Socialist Revolutionary Party (PSR/SR) Non-Bolshevik socialists 1882–1906 ✕ Executed

Combat commander of the Moscow uprising and founding leader of the Maximalist SRs

His last words on the way to the gallows in Taganka Prison: "Tell mother that I died calmly."

One of the founding leaders of the Union of Socialists-Revolutionaries-Maximalists (SSRM), the radical left faction that split from the PSR in 1906. During the December 1905 Moscow armed uprising he commanded a combat druzhina on the Kazan Railway and fought at Chistye Prudy and Presnya, leading the spectacular expropriation of 875,000 rubles from the Moscow Mutual Credit Society in March 1906. A Moscow University natural-sciences student arrested in 1904, he was freed by the October Manifesto amnesty and immediately returned to armed struggle; rejecting the PSR's two-stage revolution, he demanded immediate full socialization and a 'Toilers' Republic'. Wounded resisting arrest in August 1906, he was tried by field court martial and hanged at Taganka Prison at the age of 24.

Socialist Revolutionary Party (PSR/SR) Non-Bolshevik socialists 1882–1940 ○ Died in prison

SR Combat Organization veteran who chaired the first-convocation VTsIK in 1917

Arrested in 1907 and sentenced to eight years of katorga, he was settled in Usolye, Irkutsk province, where he joined the anti-war internationalist 'Siberian Zimmerwaldists.'

Born in Moscow into a Jewish tea-merchant family, he followed his elder brother Mikhail Gots into the Socialist Revolutionary Party and joined its Combat Organization in 1906. Arrested in 1907 and sentenced to eight years of katorga, he was settled in Usolye, Irkutsk province, in 1915. Back in Petrograd in 1917, he led the SR faction in the Petrograd Soviet and was elected chairman of the VTsIK at the First Congress of Soviets. Opposing the October Revolution, he led the Committee for Salvation of the Homeland and Revolution; at the 1922 SR trial he was the main defendant and received a death sentence, commuted in 1924, followed by exile to Ulyanovsk in 1925. Rearrested in 1937, he was sentenced to 25 years in 1939 and died in 1940 in a Krasnoyarsk labour camp.

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.

Socialist Revolutionary Party (PSR/SR) Non-Bolshevik socialists 1884–1940 ○ Heart attack

Bessarabian politician who presided over Sfatul Țării and the Moldavian Democratic Republic and saw through its union with Romania

Born to a peasant family in Răzeni, Bessarabia, in 1884, he graduated from the Chișinău seminary and Saint Petersburg University and worked as a physicist at the Meteorological Observatory. After the February Revolution he joined the Socialist Revolutionary Party and sat in the Petrograd Soviet, and Kerensky sent him to Bessarabia as the Provisional Government’s representative. At first he said Bessarabia should remain part of Russia, but as president of Sfatul Țării and of the Moldavian Democratic Republic he steered the vote for union with Romania in April 1918. After the union he became Minister of State for Bessarabia; in 1923 he took his wing of the Bessarabian Peasants’ Party into the National Liberal Party, and he later served as minister of health, of the interior and of communications and as vice-president of the Council of Ministers. He died of a heart attack in 1940.

Belarus state institutions Non-Bolshevik socialists 1884–1942 ○ Died in prisoner transit

Founder of the Hramada who, as prime minister of the Belarusian People’s Republic, sought its recognition at the Paris Peace Conference

Born into an impoverished noble family in Šiauliai in 1884, he founded the Belarusian Revolutionary Hramada (later the Belarusian Socialist Hramada) with his brother Ivan and others in 1903. In Vilnius he brought out the first Belarusian newspapers, Nasha Niva among them, and under German occupation in 1915 he led the clandestine Belarusian People’s Committee. As president of the Belarusian Council of Vilnius he took part in the declaration of independence in 1918, and in October he became prime minister and then foreign minister. In 1919 he led the delegation to the Paris Peace Conference and negotiated a union with Poland, but with no result he resigned in February 1920. He devoted himself to publishing and education in Western Belarus until the Soviet authorities arrested him in 1939, and he died in 1942 while being transferred to a prison camp.

Socialist Revolutionary Party (PSR/SR) Non-Bolshevik socialists 1884–1971 ○ Died

Bessarabian Socialist Revolutionary who headed the first government of the Moldavian Democratic Republic and put land reform first

Born in Tănătari, Bessarabia, in 1884, he graduated from the Chișinău seminary and the Faculty of Letters in Saint Petersburg and taught. A Socialist Revolutionary, he returned to Bessarabia in 1917 with Inculeț at Kerensky’s urging and was elected chairman of the governorate peasants’ soviet and to the Russian Constituent Assembly. In December 1917 he became President of the Council of Directors General, the Moldavian Democratic Republic’s first government, and Director General for Agriculture, putting land reform first. His view that the republic should bear the majority people’s name prevailed; he put the entry of Romanian troops to a vote, yet protested their presence, fearing they would be used to block land reform. He voted for union but resigned amid charges of a pro-Russian stance, and later sat in the Romanian Senate. He fled to Bucharest in 1940 and died there in 1971.

Mensheviks (RSDLP) Non-Bolshevik socialists 1885–1938 ✕ Executed

The Menshevik Labour Minister sent to calm the crowds during the April Crisis

On 20 April 1917, as 15,000 armed soldiers and sailors gathered before the Mariinsky Palace outraged by Milyukov's note, Skobelev and Gots were sent to address them: their speeches were unavailing.

A son of Baku's wealthy Molokan merchant class, he studied at the Vienna Polytechnic and helped edit Trotsky's Vienna Pravda. After the February Revolution he became deputy chairman of the Petrograd Soviet; during the April Crisis he was sent with Abram Gots to calm the armed crowds outside the Mariinsky Palace, and on 5 May 1917 he entered the first coalition government as Minister of Labour. He opposed the October Revolution but later reconciled, joining the Bolshevik Party in 1922 and working in the Soviet foreign trade system until his execution during the Great Purge in 1938.

Party of Left Socialist Revolutionaries Non-Bolshevik socialists 1889–1922 ✕ Killed in GPU firefight

The man whose name became the rebellion: SR leader of the Tambov 'Antonovshchina,' the largest peasant uprising against Bolshevik rule

'Power was not torn from the hands of the tsarist executioners to be handed over to a handful of executioner-communists' — from a leaflet distributed during the uprising

A Socialist Revolutionary militant who served a twenty-year katorga sentence in the Schlisselburg Fortress under the Tsar for armed expropriations. Freed by the February Revolution, he became chief of the Kirsanov district militia, but the Bolsheviks' grain requisitioning and local repression drove him underground in 1918. In August 1920 he seized leadership of the Tambov peasant uprising, building a partisan army of roughly twenty regiments and an alternative government based on Unions of the Working Peasantry: the revolt was so identified with him that it became known as the 'Antonovshchina.' He was killed in a firefight with GPU forces alongside his brother Dmitri in June 1922.

French Section of the Workers' International (SFIO) Non-Bolshevik socialists 1889–1946 ○ Natural causes

SFIO general secretary who led the Tours vote to join the Comintern, became the first PCF general secretary and left in 1923

At the 1920 Tours Congress, Frossard led the move to join the Comintern and became the French Communist Party’s first general secretary, but left in 1923. Later a minister, he joined Pétain’s cabinet in 1940, voted for his full powers, and was acquitted of collaboration after the war.

A teacher from the Belfort region, he joined the SFIO and became its general secretary in 1918. After visiting Moscow with Cachin in 1920 he backed joining the Comintern at the Tours congress and became the first general secretary of the new French Communist Party. Clashing with the Comintern’s demands for discipline, he left in January 1923 and returned to the SFIO. He served as a minister in several governments in the 1930s and joined Pétain’s first cabinet in June–July 1940, but declined to serve Vichy; after the war he was tried for collaboration and acquitted.

Germany state institutions Non-Bolshevik socialists 1889–1953 ○ Natural causes

The social democrat who became the voice of divided Berlin

“People of the world, look upon this city! You cannot, you must not, forsake us!”

Ernst Reuter was a German politician whose path from social democracy through communism and back reflected the upheavals of twentieth-century Europe. After Nazi persecution and exile in Turkey, he returned to Berlin and joined municipal administration to a practical social-democratic politics. During the Berlin Blockade, he gave West Berliners’ resolve an international voice and helped make the divided city a symbol of freedom and self-government. His career also reveals the tensions of a generation that moved from revolutionary radicalism toward democratic local government.

Socialist Revolutionary Party (PSR/SR) Non-Bolshevik socialists 1889–1968 ○ Natural causes

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.

Socialist Revolutionary Party (PSR/SR) Non-Bolshevik socialists 1890–1918 ✕ Executed

The SR activist who shot Lenin, believing him a 'traitor to the revolution'

At her Cheka interrogation: 'Today I shot Lenin. I did it on my own. I consider him a traitor to the Revolution. I favoured the Constituent Assembly and am still for it.'

Born into a Jewish teacher's family in Volhynia, Fanny Kaplan took up anarchism at 15 and was arrested at 16 for a bomb plot against the governor of Kiev, earning a life sentence to Siberian hard labour. During eleven years in prison she went blind and partially recovered, and under Maria Spiridonova's influence joined the Socialist Revolutionary Party. Freed by the February Revolution of 1917, she came to see Lenin as a traitor to the revolution after the Bolsheviks dissolved the Constituent Assembly, and on 30 August 1918 fired three shots at him outside Moscow's Michelson factory. The attempt, along with the same-day assassination of Moisei Uritsky, triggered the Red Terror; Kaplan was shot in the Kremlin four days later.

France state institutions Non-Bolshevik socialists 1890–1936 ✕ Suicide

The Popular Front's interior minister, hounded to death by the far-right press

In a note to Blum before turning on the gas, he wrote: "If they could not succeed in dishonouring me, they will at least bear responsibility for my death. I am neither a deserter nor a traitor."

A Socialist politician, mayor of Lille, and Blum's interior minister. In the strike wave of June 1936 he refused to clear the occupied factories by force, and he carried out the dissolution of the far-right leagues, the first item of the Popular Front programme. When the far-right weekly Gringoire barraged him with a fabricated story of desertion in the First World War, a military court of honour and an overwhelming vote of the Chamber cleared him twice over; the campaign did not stop, and on 17 November he took his own life at his home in Lille. Hundreds of thousands came to his funeral, and his death set off the debate on legislating against press defamation.

Non-Bolshevik socialists 1891–1920 ✕ Murdered by officers

Socialist writer and Népszava journalist murdered with Béla Somogyi in 1920 for writing against the White Terror

Born in Kassa (Košice), he began as a journalist on the local Kassai Napló and published the novel A Sefcsik ház in 1918. In 1919 he joined Népszava, writing about proletarians, the peasants’ hunger for land and migration, and against the White Terror associated with the names of Iván Héjjas, Pál Prónay and Gyula Ostenburg-Moravek. For this the Ostenburg detachment abducted him and his editor Béla Somogyi on 17 February 1920 and shot them, throwing the bodies into the Danube.

Non-Bolshevik socialists 1892–1956 ○ Natural causes

A socialist constitutional scholar who sought to ground sovereignty in the people

At the 1944 Lebanon Conference, he sought to carry the Resistance's representation from liberated Greece into a national government.

Alexandros Svolos was a Greek constitutional scholar and socialist politician whose work connected labour rights to democratic constitutional order. During the Axis occupation, he chaired the Political Committee of National Liberation, helping lead administration in liberated areas and articulate institutions grounded in popular representation, while seeking cooperation between the Resistance and the government in exile at the Lebanon Conference. After liberation he became finance minister in the government of national unity, but resigned with the EAM ministers rather than endorse the dissolution of the resistance army. He pursued an independent socialist democracy between the established right and the communist movement, a position that gave his politics both influence and isolation in postwar Greece.

Spanish Republic Non-Bolshevik socialists 1892–1956 ○ Heart attack

The physiologist trained in Leipzig who sent the Republic's gold to Moscow and chose to fight to the end as its last prime minister

The Thirteen Points he put to Franco in May 1938: full Spanish independence, a government chosen by universal suffrage, regional autonomy, freedom of conscience, land reform, and no reprisals for acts of war. Franco''s answer was unconditional surrender.

A physiologist turned PSOE politician. He studied medicine at Kiel and Leipzig, became professor of physiology in Madrid at twenty-nine and built the laboratory that trained the future Nobel laureate Severo Ochoa, joined the PSOE in 1929 and entered parliament in 1931. As finance minister from September 1936 he moved the national gold reserve to Cartagena and signed the decision to place it in Soviet hands, and after the Barcelona May Days he became prime minister in May 1937, centralizing the Popular Army under the slogan that to resist is to win. He leaned on the communists and the Soviet advisers because under Western non-intervention there was nowhere else to buy arms, and was called a puppet of Moscow for it for the rest of his life. His Thirteen Points of May 1938 were an attempt to negotiate; Franco would accept only unconditional surrender, and in March 1939 Colonel Casado''s coup drove him out of Spain. Expelled from the PSOE in 1946, he was rehabilitated by the party only in 2008.

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.

Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD) Non-Bolshevik socialists 1893–1939 ✕ Suicide

German Jewish Expressionist playwright who took part in the Bavarian revolution

After volunteering for the German army in World War I and being wounded at Verdun, Toller was discharged in 1917; his wartime experience turned him toward pacifism, and he joined the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany. In April 1919 he served six days as president of the Bavarian Soviet Republic and took part in its armed resistance; sentenced to five years for high treason, he wrote several major plays in prison. Exiled after the Nazis came to power, he continued warning against Nazism and died by suicide in New York in 1939.

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.