Karl Radek

Karl Berngardovich Radek (Russian: Карл Бернгардович Радек; 31 October 1885 – 19 May 1939) was a revolutionary and writer active in the Polish and German social democratic movements before World War I and a Communist International leader in the Soviet Union after the Russian Revolution.

Radek was born to a Jewish family in Lemberg, Austria-Hungary. He joined the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania and took part in the 1905 Russian Revolution in Congress Poland. Two years later he was forced to flee to Germany, where he worked as a journalist for the Social Democratic Party of Germany. After the outbreak of World War I, Radek relocated to Switzerland and became an associate of Vladimir Lenin. Following the February Revolution, Radek helped organize the return of Lenin and other Russian revolutionaries to Russia, though he himself was denied entry until after the October Revolution. As Vice-Commissar for Foreign Affairs, he took part in the negotiations of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. He helped establish the Communist Party of Germany after the revolution began, and spent a year in prison for his role in the Spartacist uprising.

After returning to Russia, Radek became a member of the Comintern Executive Committee. The failure of the revolution in Germany, as well as his support for Leon Trotsky against Joseph Stalin, ultimately led to his fall from power and expulsion from the Party. He later recanted his views and was re-admitted to the Party. Nevertheless, during the Great Purge Radek was accused of treason and arrested. He was found guilty as a chief defendant at the Second Moscow Trial [ru] in 1937 and sentenced to 10 years of penal labour. He died in Verkhneuralsk Political Isolator [ru] labour camp in the Urals two years later.

Radek was born in Lemberg, Austria-Hungary (now Lviv in Ukraine), as Karol Sobelsohn, to a Litvak (Lithuanian Jewish) family; his father, Bernhard, worked in the post office and died whilst Karl was young. He took the name Radek from a favourite character, Andrzej Radek, in Syzyfowe prace ('The Labors of Sisyphus', 1897) by Stefan Żeromski.

Radek joined the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL) in 1904. When the 1905 Russian Revolution broke out (including uprisings across the Kingdom of Poland), Radek participated as a revolutionary organiser in Warsaw, where he had responsibility for the party's newspaper Czerwony Sztandar.

In 1907, after his arrest in Poland and his escape from custody, Radek moved to Leipzig in Germany and joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), working on the Party's Leipziger Volkszeitung. He re-located to Bremen, where he worked for Bremer Bürgerzeitung, in 1911, and was one of several who attacked Karl Kautsky's analysis of imperialism in Die Neue Zeit in May 1912.

In September 1910, Radek was accused by members of the Polish Socialist Party of stealing books, clothes and money from party comrades, as part of an anti-semitic campaign against the SDKPiL^{[citation needed]}. On this occasion, he was vigorously defended by the SDKPiL leaders, Rosa Luxemburg and Leo Jogiches. The following year, however, the SDKPiL changed its course, partly because of a personality clash between Jogiches and Vladimir Lenin, during which younger members of the party, led by Yakov Hanecki, and including Radek, had sided with Lenin. Wanting to make an example of Radek, Jogiches revived the charges of theft, and convened a party commission in December 1911 to investigate. He dissolved the commission in July 1912, after it had failed to come to any conclusion, and in August pushed a decision through the party court expelling Radek. In their written finding, they revealed his alias, making it — he claimed — dangerous for him to stay in Russian occupied Poland.

In 1912 August Thalheimer invited Radek to go to Göppingen (near Stuttgart) to temporarily replace him in control of the local SPD party newspaper Freie Volkszeitung, which had financial difficulties. Radek accused the local party leadership in Württemberg of assisting revisionists to strangle the newspaper due to the paper's hostility to them. The 1913 SPD Congress noted Radek's expulsion and then went on to decide in principle that no-one who had been expelled from a sister-party could join another party within the Second International and retrospectively applied this rule to Radek. Within the SPD Anton Pannekoek and Karl Liebknecht opposed this move, as did others in the International such as Leon Trotsky and Vladimir Lenin, some of whom participated in the "Paris Commission" set up by the International.