Karl Radek
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Karl Berngardovich Radek (October 31, 1885 - May 19, 1939) was a socialist active in the Polish and German movements before World War I and an international Communist leader after the Russian Revolution.
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[edit] Life
He was born in Lemberg, Austria-Hungary (now L'viv 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.
[edit] Germany
In 1907 he moved to Germany, joined the SPD and worked on various party newspapers until he was expelled in 1913 under rather murky circumstances.[1] After the outbreak of World War I he moved to Switzerland and liaised between Lenin and the Bremen Left, with which he had close links from his time in Germany. 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.
During World War I Karl Radek, together with Alexander Parvus and Yakov Ganetsky, was involved in secret negotiations with the German General Staff regarding funding of the Bolsheviks (Copenhagen operation).[citation needed] And he was mediator between Lenin and the Germans.[citation needed]
He took an anti-war stand during World War I while living in Switzerland and Sweden. In 1917 after the October Revolution he went to Petrograd and became an active Bolshevik functionary. He was in Germany in 1918-20 organising the German Communist movement.
[edit] Comintern and after
Radek, with Comintern member Dmitry Manuilsky, made an unsuccessful attempt to launch a second German revolution in October 1923, before Lenin died.[citation needed]
In 1920 Radek returned to Russia and became secretary of 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 Purges 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 for 10 years of incarceration.
He was reportedly killed in a labor camp in a fight with another prisoner. However during the investigations during the Khrushchev Thaw it was established that he was killed by NKVD.[citation needed]
He is also reported as having created a large number of political jokes about Joseph Stalin.[2]
He was exonerated in 1988.[citation needed]
[edit] Notes
- ^ 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.
- ^ "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.
