I know for many people it’s obvious picks like Vladimir Lenin, Che Guevara and so on but for me, frankly speaking, it’s Felix Dzerzhinsky as protecting the revolution is just as important (if not more important) as initiating it. Every socialist country throughout history has had class enemies and foreign spies working to dismantle it around the clock, using tactics that didn’t shy away from full fledged terrorism. There’s only one way to deal with that.

If I had lived in the Soviet Union, I would have no doubt been a KGB agent and sworn to use my last breath to do anything to protect my country. I don’t think Gorbachev and Yeltsin would have evaded my radar.

  • cfgaussian@lemmygrad.ml
    26·
    14 天前

    Felix Dzerzhinsky is a good one. Another one is Lazar Kaganovich, who may just be one of the most unfairly maligned and slandered Bolsheviks of all time, maybe second only to Stalin himself. I also really appreciate the work of Krupskaya and Kollontai. Yakov Sverdlov died young and is not remembered that much anymore but he played a pivotal role in the Revolution. Molotov is often underrated and overlooked, naturally overshadowed by Stalin, but he really did do very good work. Same with Zhou Enlai and Liu Shaoqi. Ernst Thälmann and Rosa Luxemburg are sadly tragic figures but both were some of the best European communists outside of Russia at their respective times.

    Of course Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Kim Il Sung, Castro, Guevara, etc. are inevitably at the top of the list, but those are boring answers.

    I can’t say that i have a favorite though. There are just too many to pick from, and i think that some of the best revolutionaries may have been people who history has all but forgotten since they never rose very high but worked tirelessly all their lives and made great sacrifices for the revolution. Any Red Army soldier who fought the Nazis and every PLA soldier who fought the Japanese imperialists is a revolutionary hero in my view, as is every factory, farm or construction worker who contributed to socialist construction in their respective countries, every doctor who brought healthcare to remote villages and every teacher who spread literacy.

    If i am to have a role model, it is them. I am under no illusions that i could ever be anything close to a Lenin, but i can aspire to be like the PLA/Red Army soldier or the Cultural Revolution Barefoot Doctor.

    • Mels@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
      4·
      12 天前

      !!! Lazar Kaganovich mentioned!!! I agree with pretty much everything here you share, the famous or even merely minorly notable revolutionaries were only able to do so because of the Proletariat (Peasantry too because of the alliance with them as a class). Mikhail Suslov is an interesting enough character too, was involved with Stalin’s initiatives but there is sparse info about him on Prolewiki and etc. Wikipedia has much but its very… bourgeois-coded in language (let alone sources)

  • cwtshycwtsh@lemmygrad.ml
    23·
    15 天前

    I’d be lying if I said anything else than Lenin. However, if we’d exclude the figureheads of Marxism-Leninism, it’s gonna be James Connolly, always. 💚🫰

  • Commiejones@lemmygrad.ml
    15·
    14 天前

    I dunno about “favorite” but Fanon’s work of Revolutionary Clinical Psychologist is fucking bad ass. Like Lenin and Stalin and Mao are all great Revolutionary Statesmen which big picture, systemic and world changing stuff. But trying to puzzle out the psychic effects of colonialism, torture, resistance, oppression, war and insurgency and how to fashion mental tools of liberation from inside each person’s head. That’s both individual small scale one person at a time work that also needs to be scaled up to be a systemic nation wide project.

    Honorable mention Mikhail Kalashnikov, not really a “revolutionary” but the son of a Kulak who went on to protect the revolution and designed one of the greatest tools of liberation ever made.

  • Makan@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
    13·
    15 天前

    For me, Lenin.

    But the second bests for me are Stalin, Nikolai Bukharin, Tomski, etc.

    In terms of outside the Soviet Union:

    William Z. Foster (1917 – 1918 general strike in America)

    W.E.B. DuBois (Pan-Africanist scholar-activist)

    Hosea Hudson (Southern labor organizer)

    Norman Bethune (Canadian volunteer in China)

    The International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War (don’t want to focus on any one individual here)

    Liu Shaoqi

    Deng Xiaoping

    Mao Zedong

    Friedrich Engels

    …Dunno who else to put here right now. These folks are just off the top of my head while I am texting this on my tablet on the bus ride to my school in Zaragoza.

    Peace!

  • 小莱卡@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
    7·
    13 天前

    For me it’s between the big three in China Mao/Deng/Zhou. Every communist had a very difficult path to leadership but the chinese communists path was insane.