Communists on coins

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Cuba, 3 pesos, 1992.  Che Guevara.

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Cuba, 1 peso, 1997.  30th anniversary of the death of Che Guevara.

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Cuba, 5 pesos, 1999.  Che Guevara.

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Cuba, 1 peso, 1999.  Camilo Cienfuegos, Che Guevara and Fidel Castro.

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Cuba, 1 peso, 2007.  40th anniversary of the death of Che Guevara.

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Cuba, 10 pesos, 1992.

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Cuba, 1 peso, 1998.  Pope John Paul II  and Fidel Castro.

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Liberia, 20 dollars, 2001.  The Cuban Missile Crisis: Fidel Castro, Nikita Khrushchev and John F Kennedy.

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Notable communists who are not portrayed on any coins are Leon Trotsky and Pol Pot. Stalin first exiled Trotsky and then had him murdered. Trotskyists maintain that a Trotskyite revolution would have been more democratic and less brutal than the Stalinist one, but this is hard to believe. Ultimately Trotsky is regarded as a loser, so no coins for him!

Pol Pot seems to have believed that Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution failed because it didn't go far enough. His own revolution in Cambodia abolished money, city life, and industrialisation. It is clear that, whatever the brand of communism, it always involved considerable human suffering.

Though Stalin was only commemorated on one set of coins (from Czechoslovakia, issued during his lifetime), he was probably the most successful communist, in that he gained most from the Second World War, setting up satellite states in much of Central and Eastern Europe after 1945. In 1956 Khrushchev denounced Stalin for his brutality, but Khrushchev had enthusiastically carried out his orders in the 1930s. In 1936 he was given a quota of 25,000 Leningraders to arrest as "enemies of the people". He asked Stalin for permission to increase the quota to 30,000. Stalin granted it. Guilt didn't come into it - Stalin wanted cheap labour for his industrial revolution, while simultaneously reinforcing his terror.

The Second World War saw what has been described as a European civil war between fascism and communism. Hitler had copied many aspects of the Leninist one-party state, hence the term "totalitarian" that is often applied to Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. However, Nazi Germany also maintained what is known as a "parallel state": the SS, Gestapo, Stormtroopers, Gauleiters, etc., in addition to the normal state agencies of police and army, so the analogy is not an exact one. Hitler and Stalin were great opponents, who between them decided the fate of Europe, yet they admired each other too and learned "tricks" from one another. Stalin ended his life by persecuting Jewish doctors whom he held responsible for the "Jewish Doctors' Plot" - a totally fictitious plot, in which Jewish doctors were accused of poisoning Russian children.

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See also: Dictators on Coins

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The communist world had its own pantheon of heroes.

Political murder victims Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht on an East German commemorative.

Peter

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The two certainly had different political views. Luxemburg emphasized many times that she was against the Leninist type of communism. In the GDR referring to Luxemburg in certain ways (e.g. with her famous words "Freiheit ist immer die Freiheit des Andersdenkenden") could actually result in trouble ...

The Federal Republic of Germany (back then "West Germany") issued, in 1974, a postal stamp that honored Luxemburg. Don't think they would have done that for Liebknecht.

Christian

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Ho Ch Minh

Ho Chi Minh, real name Nguyen Tat Thanh (1890-1969), was a Vietnamese Communist leader and the principal force behind the Vietnamese struggle against French colonial rule. Ho was born on May 19 1890, in the village of Kimlien, Annam (central Vietnam), the son of an official who had resigned in protest against French domination of his country. Ho attended school in Hue and then briefly taught at a private school in Phan Thiet. In 1911 he was employed as a cook on a French steamship liner and thereafter worked in London and Paris. After World War I, using the pseudonym Nguyen Ai Quoc (Nguyen the Patriot), Ho engaged in radical activities and was in the founding group of the French Communist party.

Ho was summoned to Moscow for training and, in late 1924, he was sent to Canton, China, where he organized a revolutionary movement among Vietnamese exiles. He was forced to leave China when local authorities cracked down on Communist activities, but he returned in 1930 to found the Indochinese Communist party (ICP). He stayed in Hong Kong as representative of the Communist International. In June 1931 Ho was arrested there by British police and remained in prison until his release in 1933. He then made his way back to the Soviet Union, where he reportedly spent several years recovering from tuberculosis. In 1938 he returned to China and served as an adviser with Chinese Communist armed forces.

When Japan occupied Vietnam in 1941, Ho resumed contact with ICP leaders and helped to found a new Communist-dominated independence movement, popularly known as the Vietminh, that fought the Japanese. In August 1945, when Japan surrendered, the Vietminh seized power and proclaimed the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) in Hanoi. Ho Chi Minh, now known by his final and best-known pseudonym (which means the "Enlightener"), became president. The French were unwilling to grant independence to their colonial subjects, and in late 1946 war broke out. For eight years Vietminh guerrillas fought French troops in the mountains and rice paddies of Vietnam, finally defeating them in the decisive Battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954.

Ho, however, was deprived of his victory. Subsequent negotiations at Geneva divided the country, with only the North assigned to the Vietminh. The DRV, with Ho still president, now devoted its efforts to constructing a Communist society in North Vietnam. In the early 1960s, however, conflict resumed in the South, where Communist-led guerrillas mounted an insurgency against the U.S.-supported regime in Saigon. Ho, now in poor health, was reduced to a largely ceremonial role, while policy was shaped by others. On September 3, 1969, he died in Hanoi of heart failure. In his honor, after the Communist conquest of the South in 1975, Saigon was renamed Ho Chi Minh City.

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Democratic Republic of Vietnam, 1 dong, 1946.  Ho Ch Minh.

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Democratic Republic of Vietnam, 2 dong, 1946.  Ho Chi Minh.