Political actors have used pseudonyms since at least the sixteenth century. Thomas More’s rebuke to Martin Luther, Vindicatio Hencrici VIII (1523), was written under the name Gulielmus Rosseus, a play on the French word ‘rosser’ (to batter). The author of the notorious Vindiciae contra Tyrannos (1579), which argued that subjects could lawfully resist an unjust ruler, adopted the name Stephen Junius Brutus, a reference to both Lucius Junius Brutus, who overthrew the Roman king Tarquin, and Brutus the assassin of Julius Caesar.
No political movement, however, has used false names more frequently than the twentieth-century Communists. Almost all of the world’s most famous Communists are known by their aliases. Few know the original names of Stalin (‘Iosif Dzhugashvili), Lenin (Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov), Trotsky (Lev Bronstein), Ho Chi Minh (Nguyen Sinh Cung), Tito (Josip Broz) or Pol Pot (Saloth Sar).
Why did so many Communists take up pseudonyms? The primary reason was to avoid detection by the police. Most Communists operated in highly restrictive political environments, where opposition to the regime could result in arrest, exile or execution. The Okhrana, Sûreté and Special Branch actively pursued Communists, initiating a game of cat and mouse between would-be revolutionaries and police agents, where misdirection and false identities were means of eluding the authorities while on the run.
Yet the aliases chosen by Communists were not random. Some were clearly selected to overcome racial bias by obscuring one’s ethnic origin. Thus, the Bolshevik Hirsch Apfelbaum selected the less Jewish name Gregory Zinoviev, while the American Communist Arvo Kustaa Halberg became plain Gus Hall. Others decided on names which sounded solidly proletarian: the Hungarian Communist Janos Csermanek settled on Janos Kadar (cobbler); Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Skryabin is better known as Molotov (hammer).
Aliases were also an opportunity for wordplay and allusion. Sometimes this was used as an unsubtle means of building oneself up, as with Stalin (‘man of steel’) or Ho Chi Minh’s alias Nguyễn Ái Quo’c (‘Nguyễn the patriot’). Other pseudonyms were more artful. The name Lenin is a nod to the river Lena in Siberia, where Lenin spent his exile. Koba, an alias of Stalin’s, is a reference to a Robin Hood-style bandit in the Georgian novel The Patricide (1882) by Alexander Kazbegi. Karol Sobelsohn took up the name Karl Radek in an allusion to a character in the anti-Tsarist Polish novel Syzfowe prace (1897) by Stefan Zeromski.
Aliases allowed for self-reinvention and wit, but they also point to something more sinister in Communism. Many Communist revolutionaries, hardened by years of police persecution, adopted a conspiratorial mindset where no-one could be trusted and decisions needed to be made in secret among a closed circle of co-conspirators. The Bolsheviks continued to act in this paranoid style after they took power in October 1917, seeing enemies everywhere and conducting the affairs of state behind closed doors. Political pseudonyms are rare today, but this may be a cause for celebration, reflecting the relatively open climate of political debate which now prevails in most of the world.
HERE WE LIVE IN ALL CENTURIES AT ONCE 