Ralph Winston Fox (30 March 1900 – 28 December 1936) was a British revolutionary, journalist, novelist, and historian, best remembered as a biographer of Lenin and Genghis Khan. Fox was one of the best-known members of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) to be killed in Spain fighting against the Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War. Biography Early years Fox was born 30 March 1900 in Halifax, Yorkshire, England to a middle-class family. He knew James Crowther in his youth and helped stimulate Crowther's interest in marxism. Fox studied modern languages at Oxford University's Magdalen College, where he was drafted into Oxford University Officers’ Training Corps. Although commissioned as a lieutenant, the war ended before Fox was sent to the front lines of World War I. During his time in Oxford, Fox joined the Oxford University Labour Club, where he met activist fellow activist Tom Wintringham. In 1919 Fox became active in the effort to halt British blockade and military intervention to overthrow the Bolshevik government which had assumed power in the Russian Revolution of 1917. He was active in the Oxford Hands Off Russia Committee and was instrumental in helping to organise the local CPGB unit. 1920s and Soviet experiences In 1920 as the dust was settling from the Russian Civil War, Fox travelled to Soviet Russia, an experience which further moved him towards lifelong identification with the communist political movement. Fox returned to Oxford, where in 1922 he graduated with a first class honours in modern languages. In the summer following graduation, Fox returned to Soviet Russia, this time as a worker with the Friends Relief Mission in Samara. Back in Great Britain, he went to work as a functionary for the CPGB in its propaganda department. He also studied in at the School of Foreign Languages and wrote his first major book, People of the Steppes, which was published in 1925. In 1925 Fox returned once again to Moscow, this time to work in the apparatus of the Communist International. He met his wife in the Soviet Union and married in the spring of 1926. In 1928 Fox went to work for the Sunday Worker, the high-profile weekly predecessor of the Daily Worker, launched in 1930. Fox and his wife returned once again to the Soviet Union in 1929, where he took a position as a librarian at the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow. 1930s and Spanish