John Pepper

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

John Pepper, real name József Pogány, also known as Joseph, (1886 - 1937) was a Hungarian-born Communist active in the United States.

Pogány participated in the Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919 with Béla Kun, and, after its failure, he fled to Austria and later to Soviet Russia.

He was accused in taking part on October 31, 1918 in the murder of former Hungarian Prime Minister Count István Tisza. In the trial of 1921 he was convicted of murder, but being then in Vienna, the Social-Democratic Austrian government refused his extradition, thus the sentence was never enforced.

As Ferenc Göndör (Nathan Kraus) a former comrade of Pogány wrote in his book "Confessions" (printed in Vienna in 1923), Pogány was repudiated by even his father (Vilmos Schwarz), who later committed suicide after being dismissed from his function as hazzan.

In the Soviet Union, Pogány became active in the Comintern. Using his new name John Pepper, he went illegally to the United States in 1922 to assist with the Hungarian language Federation of the American Communist movement, learned English quickly and soon became one of the Workers Party's most authoritative voices. Pepper was a member of the editorial board of the The Liberator in the early 1920s, writing articles on international affairs.

It is also known that John Pepper in the 1920s spent some time in Stockholm, Sweden and worked with the Communist Party there.

Pepper returned to the US as Joseph Stalin's agent to oversee the expulsion of Trotskyists in the Communist Party, USA, and especially assisting the Stalinists in their struggle with James P. Cannon. However, later back in the Soviet Union, Pepper would himself become a victim of the Great Purges in 1937.

[edit] Works in English

• For a Labor Party: Recent Revolutionary Changes in American Politics: A Statement by the Workers Party. 1922.
• "Underground Radicalism": An Open Letter to Eugene V. Debs and to All Honest Workers Within the Socialist Party. 1923.
• The General Strike and the General Betrayal. 1926.