Karl Bernhardovic Radek (Russian: Карл Бернга́рдович Ра́дек) (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.
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He was born in Lemberg, Austria-Hungary (now L'vov 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 Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL) in 1904 and participated in the 1905 Revolution in Warsaw where he was responsible for the party's newspaper Czerwony Sztandar.[1]
In 1907, after being arrested in Poland and escaping, he moved to Leipzig, Germany and joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany(SPD) working on the Party's Leipziger Volkszeitung[2]. He moved 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 Nue Zeit in May 1912.[3]
In 1912, he was invited by August Thalheimer to go to Göppingen to temporarily replace him in control of the local party newspaper Freie Volkszeitung which was in financial difficulties. Radek accused the local party leadership in Württemberg of assisting the revisionists to strangle the newspaper due to the papers hostility to them.[4]
At the same time, Radek had supported the Warsaw opposition to the leadership of the SDKPiL (around Rosa Luxemburg and Leo Jogiches), and was expelled on charges of having formerly stolen clothes, books and money from party members.[4] Radek's expulsion was noted at the 1913 SPD Congress, which then went on to decide in principal 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.[4] This move was opposed by Anton Pannekoek and Karl Leibknecht within the SPD and by others in the International such as Leon Trotsky and Vladimir Lenin,[4] some of whom participated in the 'Paris Commission' set up by the International.[5]
After the outbreak of World War I he moved to Switzerland where he worked as a liaison between Lenin and the Bremen Left, with which he had close links from his time in Germany, introducing him to Paul Levi at this time.[6] He took part in the Zimmerwald Conference in 1915, siding with the left.[7]
In 1917 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.[6] However, he was refused entry to Russia[7] and went on to Stockholm and produced the journals Russische Korrespondenz-Pravda and Bote der Russischen Revolution to publish Bolshevik documents and Russian information in German.[6]
After the October Revolution, Radek arrived in Petrograd and became Vice-Commisar for Foreign Affairs, taking part in the Brest-Litovsk treaty negotiations, as well as being responsible for the distribution of Bolshevik propaganda amongst German troops and prisoners of war.[8] During the discussions around signing the treaty, Radek was one of the advocates of a revolutionary war.[9]
After being refused recognition as official representative of the Bolshevik regime,[8] Radek alongside other delegates (Adolph Joffe, Nikolai Bukharin, Christian Rakovsky and Ignatov) to the German Congress of Soviets.[10] After they were turned back at the border, Radek alone crossed the German border illegally in December 1918, where he participated in the discussions and conferences leading to the foundation of the Communist Party of Germany(KPD).[10] Radek was arrested after the Spartacist uprising on 12 February 1919 and held in Moabit prison until his release in January 1920.[10]
On his return to Russia he became the Secretary of the Comintern, taking the main responsibility for German issues, however, he was removed from this position after he supported the KPD in opposing inviting representatives of the Communist Workers' Party of Germany to attend the 2nd Congress of the Comintern, pitting him against the Comintern's executive and the Russian Communist Party.[11] It was Radek who took up the slogan of Stuttgart communists of fighting for a United Front with other working class organisations, that later formed the basis for the strategy developed by the Comintern.[12]
Although Radek was not a Chemnitz, when the decision to cancel the uprising in November 1923 took place at the KPD Zentrale, he subsequently approved the decision and defended it, although at the last minute he gave way and supported the resolution which blamed himself and Brandler for the setbacks of the German communists.[13]
Radek was part of the Left Opposition from 1923 and he lost his place on the Central Committee in 1924. He was expelled from the Party in 1927 after helping organise an independent demonstration on the 10th anniversary of the October Revolution with Grigory Zinoviev in Leningrad.[14]
On 10 July 1929, Radek alongside other oppositionists Ivar Smilga and Yevgeni Preobrazhensky he signed a document capitulating to Stalin.[15], with Radek been held in particular disdain by oppositionist circles for his betrayal of Yakov Blumkin, who had been carrying a secret letter from Trotsky, in exile in Turkey, to Radek.[16] However, he was re-admitted in 1930 and was one of the few former oppositions to retain a prominent place within the party, heading the International Information Bureau of the Russian Communist Party Central Committee.[17] He helped to write the 1936 Soviet Constitution, but during the Great Purge of the 1930s, he was accused of treason and confessed, after two and a half months of interrogation[16], 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.[18][19] Radek has also been credited with originating a number of political jokes about Joseph Stalin.[20] He was exonerated in 1988.[18]