[3] Florin left Germany with his parents in 1933, when Adolf Hitler came to power and began persecuting Communists,[2] moving first to France and then to the Soviet Union, where he attended the Karl Liebknecht School.

[4] Following the war, Florin entered politics in the German Democratic Republic and served as vice-president of the regional parliament of Wittenberg, while working as chief editor of the daily newspaper Freiheit.

In 1953, he was promoted to the head of the Department for International Relations of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany's central committee.

[1] His wife Edel was, in the late 1980s, a professor of Russian literature at Humboldt University in East Berlin.

During his presidency of the United Nations General Assembly, he was, according to the New York Times, "nicknamed 'Comrade Glasnost' by delegates, who s[aw] him as him a symbol of the modern Communist of the Gorbachev era.