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Karl Radek

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Karl Radek

Karl Bernhardovich Radek (31 October 1885 - 19 May 1939) was a socialist active in the Polish and German movements before World War I and an international Communist leader after the Russian Revolution.

Life

He was born in Lwów, Austria-Hungary (now in Ukraine), as Karol Sobelsohn, to a Jewish family. He took the name "Radek" from a favourite character in a book (perhaps Syzyfowe prace by Stefan Żeromski). He joined the Polish Social Democratic movement in 1904 and participated in the 1905 Revolution in Warsaw where he was responsible for the party's newspaper Czerwony Sztandar.[1]

Germany

In 1907 he moved to Germany, joined the SPD and worked on various party newspapers until he was expelled in 1913 under unclear circumstances.[2] After the outbreak of World War I he moved to Switzerland where he worked as a liaison between Vladimir Lenin and the Bremen Left, with which he had close links from his time in Germany, introducing him to Paul Levi at this time.[3]

In 1917 after the October Revolution he traveled to Petrograd and became an active Bolshevik functionary. He was one of the passengers on the "sealed train" that carried Lenin and other Russian revolutionaries through Germany after the February Revolution in Russia.[3]. He then went on to Stockholm and produced the journals Russische Korrespondez-Pravda and Bote der Russischen Revolution to publish Bolshevik documents and russian information in German.[3] He was in Germany in 1918-20 organising the German Communist movement.

Comintern and after

Radek, together with the Comintern member Dmitry Manuilsky, made an unsuccessful attempt to launch a second German revolution in October 1923, before Lenin died.[4]

In 1920 Radek returned to Russia and became a secretary of the Comintern but his influence decreased and he lost his place on the Central Committee in 1924, being expelled from the Party in 1927. However, he was re-admitted in 1930 and helped to write the 1936 Soviet Constitution, but during the Great Purge of the 1930s, he was accused of treason and confessed at the Trial of the Seventeen (1937, also called the Second Moscow Trial). He was sentenced to 10 years of penal labor.

He was reportedly killed in a labour camp in a fight with another inmate. However, during the investigations during the Khrushchev Thaw it was established that he was killed by an NKVD operative under direct orders from Lavrentiy Beria.[4][5] Radek is also credited with originating a number of political jokes about Joseph Stalin.[6] He was exonerated in 1988.[4]

Notes

  1. ^ Broue, P. (2006) The German Revolution: 1917-1923, Chicago: Haymarket Books, pg.635
  2. ^ Schorske, Carl: German Social Democracy, 1905-1917, Harvard University Press, Cambridge (Mass.) & London 1983, pp. 254-255; Nettl, Peter: Rosa Luxemburg (Abridged edition), Oxford University Press, London, Oxford & New York 1969, pp.315-317, 353-356.
  3. ^ a b c Broue, P. (2006) The German Revolution: 1917-1923, Chicago: Haymarket Books, pg.87
  4. ^ a b c Template:Ru icon Karl Radek's biography article on hronos.ru
  5. ^ Template:Ru icon Document describing the murder of Radek and another political immate, Sokolnikov
  6. ^ "In spite of his [Radek's] confession and reinstatement, he was bitterly critical of the government, and was credited with inventing most of the anti-government jokes then circulating in Moscow." Poretsky, Elisabeth (1969). Our Own People. University of Michigan Press. p. 185.
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