- Leon Trotsky
"' (– August 21 1940), born Leon Davidovich Bronstein"', was a Ukrainian-born Jewish Bolshevik revolutionary and Marxist theorist. He was an influential politician in the early days of the Soviet Union, first as People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs and later as the founder and commander of the Red Army and People's Commissar of War. He was also among the first members of the Politburo. - Arthur Koestler
Arthur Koestler (September 5, 1905, Budapest - March 3, 1983, London) was a Hungarian polymath who became a naturalized British subject. He wrote journalism, novels, social philosophy, and books on scientific subjects. In 1931, he joined the Communist Party of Germany, but left the party seven years later, after emigrating to the United Kingdom. By the late 1940s, he was one of the most recognized and outspoken British anti-communists, … - Gerry Healy
Thomas Gerard Healy, known as Gerry Healy, (December 3, 1913 - December 14, 1989) was a Trotskyist activist. Born in Ballybane, County Galway, Ireland, he emigrated to England and worked as a ship radio operator at the age of 14. He soon joined the Communist Party of Great Britain, but then left to join the Trotskyist Militant Group in 1937. He then left to become one of the founders of the Workers International League, led by Jock Haston and Ralph Lee. - Seymour Martin Lipset
Seymour Martin Lipset was a political sociologist from the USA. Seymour Lipset was a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Hazel Professor of Public Policy at George Mason University. Lipset received a doctorate in sociology from Columbia University in 1949. Before that he taught at the University of Toronto. - Roy Medvedev
Roy Aleksandrovich Medvedev a Russian historian, was born in Tbilisi, Georgia and graduated from the Leningrad University. During the Soviet era, Medvedev criticized Stalin and Stalinism from a Marxist viewpoint. Medvedev became a researcher at the Education Academy after joining the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956. In the early 1960s, he was engaged in samizdat publications. In 1969, Medvedev was purged from the CPSU after the publication of his book, … - Anna Akhmatova
Anna Akhmatova (— March 5, 1966) was the pen name of Anna Andreevna Gorenko, the leader and the heart and soul of the St Petersburg tradition of Russian poetry for half a century. Akhmatova's work ranges from short lyric poems to universalized, ingeniously structured cycles, such as "Requiem" (1935-40), her tragic masterpiece on the Stalinist terror. Her work addresses a variety of themes including time and memory, the fate of creative women, … - Pierre Broué
Pierre Broué was a French historian and Trotskyist. His work covers various topics including the history of the Bolshevik Party, the Spanish Revolution and biographical works on Leon Trotsky. The recent republication of Trotsky's Autobiography, "My Life", has a foreword written by Broué. In his youth during the Second World War, as a young member of the French Communist Party Broué fought in the French resistance against the Nazi occupiers. - Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Yevtushenko (born July 18, 1933) is a Russian poet. He also directed several films. - Boris Souvarine
Boris Souvarine was an Imperial Russian-born French socialist and communist activist, essayist, and journalist. - Alfred Rosmer
Alfred Rosmer (1877 - 1964) was a syndicalist leader before World War I and one of the few leaders of that movement to oppose the war from a revolutionary internationalist position. A friendship with Leon Trotsky dated from that period, when the latter was living in Paris. After the war he became a leading figure in the Communist Party of France before being ousted as early as 1924 for opposing Stalinism and the elimination of the Old Bolsheviks, … - Theodore Draper
Theodore H. Draper was an American historian and political writer. He was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received the Herbert Feis Award for Nonacademically Affiliated Historians in 1990 from the American Historical Association. Draper was a long-time contributor first to "Commentary Magazine" and later to the "New York Review of Books". His works include "A Very Thin Line", a history of the Iran-Contra Affair, … - Hilton Kramer
Hilton Kramer (born 1928, Gloucester, Massachusetts) is a U.S. art critic and cultural commentator. Kramer was educated at Syracuse University, Columbia University, Harvard University, Indiana University and the New School for Social Research. He worked as the editor of "Arts Magazine", art critic for "The Nation", and from 1965 to 1982, as an art critic for "The New York Times". - Albert Goldman
Albert Goldman (1897 - 1960) was an American Trotskyist and lawyer to the labor movement. Born Albert Verblen in Chicago, he studied at Medhill High School and then the University of Cincinnati. He also studied to be a rabbi with the Hebrew Union College. In 1919, working as a tailor, he joined the Industrial Workers of the World, then the newly formed Communist Party of America the following year. - Franz Borkenau
Franz Borkenau (December 15, 1900-May 22, 1957) was an Austrian writer. Borkenau was born in Vienna, Austria, the son of a civil servant. As a university student in Leipzig, his main interests were Marxism and psychoanalysis. In 1921, Borkenau joined the Communist Party of Germany and was active as a Comintern agent until 1929. After graduating from the University of Leipzig in 1924, Borkenau moved to Berlin. - Andrei Sinyavsky
Andrei Donatovich Sinyavsky (Russian language: was a Russian writer, dissident, gulag survivor, emigrant, Professor of Sorbonne University, magazine founder and publisher. He frequently wrote under the pseudonym (Abram Tertz"'). During a time of extreme censorship, Sinyavsky published both under his real name and (through samizdat, and Western publications, or tamizdat) his pseudonym. - Armando Hart
Armando Hart Dávalos is a Cuban politician and a Communist leader. His grandfather was born in Georgia, USA and emigrated to Cuba as a child. Before the revolution which ousted President Fulgencio Batista, Hart studied to be a lawyer at the University of Havana. While there, he became politically active and would soon join Fidel Castro and Che Guevara in their fight against Batista. - Ernst May
Ernst May (July 27, 1886, Frankfurt am Main-September 11, 1970, Hamburg) was a German architect and city planner. May successfully applied urban design techniques to the city of Frankfurt am Main during Germany's Weimar period, and who in 1930 less successfully exported those ideas to Soviet Union cities, newly created under Stalinist rule. It is said May's "brigade" of German architects and planners established twenty cities in three years, including Magnitogorsk. - Henri Barbusse
Henri Barbusse was a French novelist, journalist and communist. He came to fame with the publication of his novel "Le Feu" (translated as "Under Fire") in 1916, which was based on his experiences during World War I. It shows his growing hatred of militarism and drew criticism at the time for its harsh naturalism. His book won the Prix Goncourt. - Jacques Duclos
Jacques Duclos (October 2, 1896 in Louey, Hautes-Pyrénées-April 25, 1975 in Montreuil) was a French Communist politician who played a key role in French politics from 1926, when he entered the French National Assembly after defeating Paul Reynaud, until 1969, when he achieved a substantial proportion of the vote in the Presidential Elections. During World War I, Duclos fought in the Battle of Verdun, where he was wounded. - Harpal Brar
Harpal Brar (born 1939) is an anti-revisionist political activist and Stalinist commentator. Born in Muktsar, Punjab, India, Brar has lived and worked in Britain since 1962, first as a student and then as a lecturer in law at Harrow College of Higher Education (later renamed the University of Westminster). He is noted for his defence of Stalinism. - Miron Constantinescu
Miron Constantinescu was a Romanian communist politician, a leading member of the Romanian Communist Party (PCR, known as PMR for a period of his lifetime), as well as a Marxist sociologist, historian, academic, and journalist. Initially close to Communist Romania's leader Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, he became increasingly critical of the latter's Stalinist policies during the 1950s, and was sidelined together with Iosif Chişinevschi. - Maurice Spector
Maurice Spector (1898 - August 1, 1968) was the Chairman of the Communist Party of Canada for much of the 1920s and an early follower of Leon Trotsky after his split from the Communist International. Spector was influenced by Trotsky's work 'The Bolsheviki and World Peace' which was published in the Toronto Mail and Empire in January 1918, … - Bolesław Bierut
Bolesław Bierut was a Polish-born Communist leader, a Stalinist who became President of Poland after the Soviet occupation of the country in the aftermath of World War II. Bierut was born near Lublin, the son of a village teacher and his wife (nee Rutkowska — hence his later adopted name "Bie(r)-rut"). In 1925 he went to Moscow to be trained at the school of the Communist International. When the Communist Party of Poland was dissolved by Joseph Stalin in 1938, … - Lucreţiu Pătrăşcanu
Lucreţiu Pătrăşcanu was a Romanian communist politician and leading member of the Communist Party of Romania (PCR), also noted for his activities as a lawyer, sociologist and economist. For a while, he was a professor at Bucharest University. The author of ample studies of social history, which expressed Marxist views, he was at the center of several controversies concerning his attitudes towards nationalism. - Nils Flyg
Nils Flyg was a Swedish Communist politician who turned pro-Nazi during World War II. Nils Flyg was born and raised in Södermalm, a working-class area of Stockholm. Early on he joined the Swedish Social Democratic Party’s youth organization. In 1917 Flyg took part in the founding of a new leftist party, a group headed by Zeth Höglund and Karl Kilbom, which would soon become the Communist Party of Sweden. Flyg became an important leader of the Communist Party, … - John Pepper
John Pepper, real name József Pogány, also known as Joseph was a Hungarian-born Communist active in the United States. Pogány participated in the Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919 with Béla Kun, and, after its failure, he fled to Austria and later to Soviet Russia. He was accused in taking part on October 31, 1918 in the murder of former Hungarian Prime Minister Count István Tisza. In the trial of 1921 he was convicted of murder, … - Vittorio Vidali
Vittorio Vidali (1900 - 1983), also known as "Vittorio Vidale", "Enea Sormenti", "Jacobo Hurwitz Zender", "Carlos Contreras", "Comandante Carlos") was an Italian-born Stalinist assassin and what is commonly called a "communist agent". He was born in Trieste. Outside of Spain (where Vidali is said to have killed 400 people), … - Jacob Talmon
Jacob Leib Talmon (1916-1980) was Professor of Modern History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has been categorised as a 'Cold War liberal' because of his devout anti-Marxism which permeates his main works. He notably studied the genealogy of totalitarianism arguing that such political Messianism stemmed from the French Revolution, and stressed the similarities between Jacobinism and Stalinism. - Ernő Gerő
Ernő Gerő (July 8, 1898 - March 12, 1980) was a Hungarian Communist leader in the period after World War II and briefly leader of Hungary in 1956. Gerő was born in Terbegec, Hungary (now Trebušovce, Slovakia) to Jewish parents, though he later totally repudiated religion. An early Hungarian communist, Gerő fled from Hungary to the Soviet Union after Béla Kun's brief communist government was overthrown. During his two decades living in the USSR, … - Otto Grimlund
Otto Bernhard Grimlund was a Swedish Communist politician. Originally a member of the Swedish Social Democratic Party he joined the revolutionary left-wing in the party split of 1917 and represented the "Swedish Social Democratic Left Party" at the founding of the Communist International in Moscow in 1919. Together with the Swiss Socialist Fritz Platten, Otto Grimlund had been the main organizer of Lenin’s 1917 trip from the exile in Switzerland, … - Guido Knopp
Guido Knopp (born January 29, 1948, in Treysa, Hesse) is a German historian, author and journalist. He is perhaps the currently best known and most popular historian in Germany, mainly because he has produced a lot of TV-Documentations, predominantly about the "Third Reich" and National Socialism, but also about others, like Stalinism. - Fredrik Ström
Fredrik Ström was a Swedish Socialist politician and a prolific writer. He held a seat in the Riksdag 1916 - 1921, and 1930 - 1938. He joined the Swedish Social Democratic Party and in 1916 was elected to the Riksdag. But in 1917 Ström broke with Hjalmar Branting and sided with the far left wing of the party, headed by the communists Zeth Höglund and Ture Nerman. This group supported the Russian Bolsheviks and would soon become the (original) Swedish Communist Party. - Helen Darville
Helen Dale, formerly Helen Darville (born 24 January 1972) is an Australian columnist and writer. In 1993, Darville was awarded The Australian/Vogel Literary Award for her book "The Hand That Signed the Paper". Darville wrote the novel under the pseudonym Helen Demidenko while studying English literature at the University of Queensland in Brisbane. - Clifton Deberry
Clifton DeBerry (1924 - March 24, 2006) was an American Communist and two-time candidate for President of the United States of the Socialist Workers Party. DeBerry spoke out in defense of the Cuban Revolution, in support of African liberation struggles, and demanded withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam. He was active in the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-56 and a supporter of Malcolm X in the 1960s. - Witold Lutosławski
Witold Lutosławski was one of the major European composers of the 20th century. He was possibly the most significant Polish composer after Chopin, and was one of the pre-eminent musicians of his country during the last three decades of the century. During his lifetime he earned a large number of international awards and prizes, including the Order of the White Eagle, Poland's highest honour. - Stewart Smith
Stewart Smith was a long-time leading member of the Communist Party of Canada. He also served on Toronto City Council for a period in the 1940s. Smith was the son of Reverend A. E. Smith, a social gospel minister who became a leading figure in the Communist Party. Stewart Smith was one of the leaders of the Stalinist faction, led by Tim Buck, that took over the party in 1929. - Liston Oak
Liston Oak was an American left-wing journalist. As a friend of the Soviet Union, Oak originally supported the policies of Joseph Stalin. But the Moscow Trials of the mid 1930s made him brake with Stalinism and Oak breifly became a supporter of Leon Trotsky before eventually shifting to Social Democracy. - Aleksander Ford
Aleksander Ford (born November 24, 1908, Kiev, the Russian Empire, now Ukraine; died April 4, 1980, Florida, U.S.A.) was a Polish film director. Polish filmmaker Aleksander Ford played a key role in establishing Poland's international reputation for excellent cinema. One of Ford's protégés was perhaps the world's best-known Polish director, Andrzej Wajda. After a year of making short silent films, Ford made his first feature-length film, "Mascot", in 1930. - Arkady Raikin
Arkady Isaakovich Raikin was a Soviet stand up comedian of Jewish descent who led the school of Soviet and Russian humorists for about half a century. Raikin was born in Riga (today's Latvia), then part of Russian Empire. He graduated from the Leningrad Theatrical Technicum in 1935 and worked in both state theatres and variety shows. - Bolesław Piasecki
Bolesław Bogdan Piasecki was a Polish politician and writer. In interwar Poland he was one of the more prominent nationalist politicians, playing an important role in the leadership of Obóz Narodowo-Radykalny. In 1934 he was interned in Bereza Kartuska. After his release, he became the leader of the illegal, extreme right faction ONR-Falanga. This organisation advocated "Catholic totalitarianism" and is considered by many to have been a fascist movement.
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