← Fame through time1900-1999
The 20th century
Whose names filled the books of the 20th century - anyone at all, however long dead - counted as mentions per million words printed, so a period that simply published more does not inflate anyone.
Talked about then
Whose names appeared most in Chinese books during the 20th century, whenever they lived.
- 1
Mao Zedong275 - 2
Lu Xun60 - 3
Liu Shaoqi58 - 4
Zhou Enlai55 - 5
Lin Biao40 - 6
Deng Xiaoping34 - 7
Sun Yat-sen31 - 8
Jiang Zemin13 - 9
Confucius12 - 10
Jiang Qing10 - 11
Zhu De9.6 - 12
Cao Xueqin5.9 - 13
Li Peng5.4 - 14
Lee Teng-hui5.2 - 15
Yuan Shikai5.0 - 16
Laozi4.7 - 17
Lin Yutang4.6 - 18
Soong Ching-ling4.4 - 19Gao Ming3.4
- 20
Zhuang Zhou2.8 - 21
Li Bai2.3 - 22
Kang Youwei2.3 - 23
Li Hongzhang2.0 - 24Wang Chong1.9
- 25
Wang Anshi1.7
Lived then
The most notable people whose working lives fell in the 20th century, ranked where coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Vladimir Putin3 decades - 2
Joseph Stalin9 decades - 3
Vladimir Lenin12 decades - 4
Mikhail Gorbachev4 decades - 5
Nikita Khrushchev10 decades - 6
Yuri Gagarin6 decades - 7
Leonid Brezhnev7 decades - 8
Boris Yeltsin4 decades - 9
Grigori Rasputin11 decades - 10
Nicholas II of Russia14 decades - 11
Georgy Zhukov6 decades - 12
Alla Pugacheva5 decades - 13
Garry Kasparov4 decades - 14
Yuri Andropov4 decades - 15
Sergei Yesenin11 decades - 16
Sergey Lavrov2 decades - 17
Vladimir Vysotsky5 decades - 18
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn6 decades - 19
Valentina Tereshkova6 decades - 20
Lavrentiy Beria7 decades - 21
Mikhail Bulgakov8 decades - 22
Yevgeny Prigozhinnot measured- - 23
Viktor Tsoi3 decades - 24
Vyacheslav Molotov7 decades - 25
Lev Yashinnot measured- - 26
Mikhail Kalashnikov4 decades - 27
Vladimir Mayakovsky11 decades - 28
Konstantin Chernenko4 decades - 29
Dmitri Shostakovich8 decades - 30
Sergei Shoigu3 decades - 31
Vladimir Zhirinovsky3 decades - 32
Anatoly Karpov5 decades - 33
Nikita Mikhalkov4 decades - 34
Anna Akhmatova11 decades - 35
Dzhokhar Dudayev3 decades - 36
Georgy Malenkov4 decades - 37
Sergei Korolev6 decades - 38
Felix Dzerzhinsky10 decades - 39
Patriarch Kirill of Moscow5 decades - 40
Marina Tsvetaeva10 decades - 41
Andrei Sakharov5 decades - 42
Boris Nemtsov3 decades - 43
Maxim Gorky13 decades - 44
Alexander Kolchak4 decades - 45
Alexander Kerensky9 decades - 46
Sergei Prokofiev9 decades - 47
Alexander Dugin3 decades - 48
Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia11 decades - 49
Alexander Blok13 decades - 50
Sergei Eisenstein9 decades - 51
Konstantin Rokossovsky5 decades - 52
Mikhail Khodorkovsky3 decades - 53
Alexey Leonov6 decades - 54
Mikhail Sholokhov9 decades - 55
Józef Piłsudski3 decades - 56
Nadezhda Krupskaya11 decades - 57
Mikhail Kalinin10 decades - 58
Lev Landau6 decades - 59
Valentina Matviyenko3 decades - 60
Nikolai Bukharin5 decades - 61
Maximilian Kolbe1 decades - 62
Anna Pavlova12 decades - 63
Boris Pasternak0 decades - 64
Kazimir Malevich4 decades - 65
Nikolai Yezhov5 decades - 66
Lyudmila Pavlichenko5 decades - 67
Yuri Nikulin6 decades - 68
Gennady Zyuganov3 decades - 69
Akhmad Kadyrov2 decades - 70
Mikhail Tukhachevsky7 decades - 71
Anastas Mikoyan7 decades - 72
Victor Pelevin3 decades - 73
Semyon Budyonny9 decades - 74
Andrei Gromyko4 decades - 75
Yevgeny Leonov5 decades - 76
Alexandra Kollontai7 decades - 77
Symon Petliura7 decades - 78
Grigory Zinoviev3 decades - 79
Leonid Gaidai3 decades - 80
Lyudmila Putinanot measured- - 81
Vladimir Komarov7 decades - 82
Valery Gerasimov0 decades - 83
Sergey Mikhalkov0 decades - 84
Lev Vygotsky3 decades - 85
Yury Luzhkov3 decades - 86
Sergei Bondarchuk6 decades - 87
Victor Chernomyrdin3 decades - 88
Boris Berezovsky3 decades - 89
Lev Kamenev4 decades - 90
Alexei Kosygin6 decades - 91
Nicholas Roerich7 decades - 92
Vasily Shukshin6 decades - 93
Alexander Scriabin3 decades - 94
Faina Ranevskaya4 decades - 95
Andrei Chikatilonot measured- - 96
Lazar Kaganovich7 decades - 97
Aram Khachaturian8 decades - 98
George Gurdjieff0 decades - 99
Ivan Konev5 decades - 100
Anton Denikin3 decades
How to read these rankings
- Attention, not reputation. A place on these lists reflects the attention a person still draws in the public record. It is not a judgement on the life.
- Fame in print. The curves show how often a name appeared in the books of each decade from 1800 to 2019, drawn from the Google Books Ngram corpus.
- Gaps are left as gaps. Where the record is too thin to be fair, we would rather show nothing than guess.