10 most difficult com­mu­nism riddles

Siqueiros was one of the most important muralists of his time. Although Siqueiros and Trótskiy were initially friends, soon they grew apart due to Siqueiros' loyalty to Stalin. The painter banded with an extremist communist group and tried to assassinate Trótskiy in his own house in Mexico City.

Albania was a communist country and one of the Warsaw Pact founding countries. However, their relations with the Soviet Union deteriorated after Albania defended the "purity" of Marxism by attacking both "US imperialism" as well as "Soviet and Yugoslav revisionism". After the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, Albania felt they may be next.

Ernesto Guevara was born in Rosario, Argentina, the eldest of five children in an Argentine family of Spanish, Basque and Irish descent. His father, a staunch supporter of Republicans from the Spanish Civil War, often hosted many veterans from the conflict in the Guevara home.

In 1944 Picasso joined the French Communist Party (he lived in France), attended an international peace conference in Poland, and in 1950 received the Stalin Peace Prize from the Soviet government. But party criticism of a portrait of Stalin as insufficiently realistic cooled Picasso’s interest in Soviet politics, though he remained a loyal member of the Communist Party until his death.

Immediately after the communist takeover of South Vietnam in 1975, a provisional government renamed the city after Ho Chi Minh. Even today, however, the informal name of Sai Gon remains in daily speech both domestically and internationally.

In 1966, all regions across China were ordered to build hundreds of new printing houses to publish the "Quotations of Chairman Mao Tse-Tung". The most popular versions were printed in small sizes that could be easily carried and were bound in bright red covers, becoming commonly known in the West as the Little Red Book. The book was printed in about 1 billion copies, which makes its second only to the Holy Bible.

Ceaușescu’s regime collapsed after he ordered his security forces to fire on antigovernment demonstrators in the city of Timișoara on December 17, 1989. The demonstrations spread to Bucharest. Ceaușescu fled the capital in a helicopter but was captured by the armed forces. Three days later he got executed after a brief trial.

Kim Il-sung gained military and political education in the USSR. During World War II, he served in the Red Army, commanding a division of Koreans. He was undoubtedly the weakest educated leader in the entire Eastern bloc.

Jaime Ramón Mercader del Río (1913-1978), more commonly known as Ramón Mercader, was a Spanish communist and NKVD agent who assassinated Leon Trotsky, the renowned Russian Bolshevik revolutionary, in Mexico City in August 1940. He served 20 years in a Mexican prison for the murder.

Lake Chagan, Kazakhstan, is a lake created by the Chagan nuclear test fired on January 15, 1965, part of the Nuclear Explosions for the National Economy. A 140 kiloton device was placed in a 178-metre (584 ft) deep hole in the dry bed of the Chagan River. The blast created a crater 400 m (1,300 ft) across and 100 m (330 ft) deep with a lip height of 20 to 38 m (66 to 125 ft).; it is often referred to as "Atomic Lake".