Table Of Content

STthaen foHrodo veUrni vIenrsstiittyu tiionn 19o1n9 Wbayr, theR elvaotleu tPiroens ideanntd HPeerabceer,t fHo a center for advanced study and research on public and inte aarfef aiersn tiinr etlhye ttwhoesnet ieotfh tcheen tuaruyt.h oTrhse avnide wsd oe xnporte ssneecde sisna riitlsy purbe _ VInisetwist utoifo n,t he staff, officers, or Board of Overseers of the f:q ii PREFACE For more than ten years, ex privata diligentia, 1 have been assembling bits and pieces of information with the idea of some day producing a biographical dictionary of the Comintern. The concrete possibility of transforming these collecting efforts into a publishable manuscript came about when the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University became interested in my project. First of all, its Director, Dr. W. Glenn Campbell, offered me a research grant which permitted me to finalize my investigations both at Stanford and in Europe. Furthermore, the entire technical work of producing the manuscript was done at the Hoover Institution, where several persons helped with the translation of the manuscript from French into English. Mrs. Olga Stael and Miss Ludmila Sidoroff assumed diversified tasks which included the checking and rechecking of dictionary items, and Mr. Gene Tanke and Mrs. Barbara Law provided competent editorial help. Finally, the definitive redaction of each individual biography was accomplished in close cooperation with my friend Milorad M. Drachkovitch, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institu- tion. May all the above-mentioned persons find here expression of my gratitude for assistance which made the publication of this work possible. Also, I would like to refer the users of this Dictionary to another study, Lenin and the Comintern, which | wrote in cooperation with Milorad M. Drachkovitch and which the Hoover Institution Press has published. This Diction- ary is conceived as an indispensable supplement to that two-volume history of the Comintern under Lenin. B.L. Paris, January 1972 —er CONTENTS Introduction : Guide to Abbreviations List of Biographies . Individual Biographies . eeSre:e ne eet nn ans INTRODUCTION There is no need to document the fact that as a political organization the Comintern was unique in modern history. One can find no counterpart among its forebears in the international socialist movement or among its would-be successors in the international communist movement. There has never been another organization able to mobilize the masses in the same way and, without serious competition, to monopolize political and social revolution on a world-wide scale. No other central authority has emerged to direct an international movement with unques- tioned and ever-growing power for nearly a quarter of a century. True, a conflu- ence of exceptional historical circumstances favored the birth and development of the Comintern: in 1917 social and political revolution triumphed in a large country—and for the first time it was victorious in the name of a doctrine (Bolshevik-Communist) claiming universal relevance (Marxism of the Second International had confined itself to industrial societies); subsequently, a political apparatus based on that revolution and that doctrine spread its tentacles around the globe; and finally, Stalin was there to play a capital role after the mid-1920s. However, in the face of these truths we are in danger of forgetting another factor—the character of the men who sustained that exceptional historic effort for those 25 years. If the Communist International is unique for its history, it is no less unique for the curious way in which historians have treated it. In history books it emerges as the most depersonalized phenomenon of our era, or perhaps any era, for the humans of flesh and blood who created and steered it have largely been relegated to the status of a band of Orwellian ‘‘unpersons.’’ There are some important reasons for this wholesale anonymity. First of all, the Comintern’s clandestine methods and general secretiveness had the purpose and effect of keeping “‘the class enemy’’ (the bourgeois world with its police, press, and prying scholars) in the dark, if not about its existence then at least as to the identity of its numerous agents. Then Stalin finished depersonalizing the organization, as well as heavily depopulating it, by politically or physically liquidating many of its members and leaders and erasing their names from its annals. In the nearly twenty years since Stalin's death there has been some improvement in this regard in the Eastern countries but very Vv vi Biographical Dictionary little in Moscow, where published writings on the Comintern and the who shaped and ran it remain to this day as scarce as the proverbial } teeth—and this in the city and country where the main treasure of releyg historic information is stored. With this second, latter-day liquidation 9 former communist leaders—their eradication from the pages of history—§ communism has continued to violate not only ‘formal’? elementary objectiy ; but also the tenets of Marx and Engels, its teachers. On the role of man in history, Marx wrote: ‘History [itself] does nothing, possesses no immen wealth, fights no battles. It is rather man, real living man, who does everythi who possesses and fights.”"! Agreeing, Engels wrote: ‘Men make their history, whatever turn it may take, by each pursuing his own goals in his own chosen direction, and it is the sum of these numberless separate ac will under numberless differing conditions, plus their numberless varied impa on the outer world, that we call history.’*2 ag While it existed, the Comintern always had a secret side, removed fr the public eye. With the passage of time, however—contrary to the ge rule that archives tend eventually to shed their secrecy—the files of the Comintern have receded deeper and deeper into darkness. While today, more than fifty years after its founding, we do have ready access to the bulk of the o literature published by the organization during its lifetime (for which we n only obtain a reprint of the Feltrinelli collection*), and while now there ai historical accounts dealing with the Comintern in general and with its behavi and policies at specific times and places and its different national sections, we find no work devoted to the leaders of the Comintern—nothing comparabl for instance, to the coverage of Bolshevik party leaders in such compend ; as the Soviet encyclopaedia Granat,* or even to such handy manuals as Who's— Who in the U.S.S.R., compiled by the Institute for the Study of the U.S.S in Munich,® or Who's Who in Communist China, published in Hong Kong.* THE CRITERIA To attempt to fill that gap with a work like this Dictionary, we had to decide upon the criteria that would determine whose biographies should included. First priority went, of course, to those approximately three hund individuals who comprised the Comintern’s overall directorate—its Executive : ra Marx - Friedrich Engels, Historisch-Kritische Gesamtausgabe (Moscow, 1929) pt. ’ I, p. 625. TKharel CMoamrmxu ni- sFtr ieIdnrtiecrhn atEinognealls,, 1E9t]u d9e-s1 9P3h9i,l oFseolptrhiinqeulleis R(ePparriisn,t (1M96i1l)a,n , p.1 94697.) . -B e * PDueibaltieslhie dS SbSyR Init eOrkctoinatbirn’esnktoail BReovookl iuatnsdi i Pu(bMloisschionwg, Co1.9,2 7-M2o9n)t.r eal, 1962. Union Research Institute, Hong Kong, 1966. Introduction Vii Committee, Executive Committee Presidium, Executive Committee Secretariat, and Control Commission. The original intention was to stop there, this simple criterion being an easy one to follow. One had only to consult the membership lists of the Comintern’s executive agencies from 1919 te 1943. But as we proceeded, it soon became apparent that there were several other categories of Comintern participants deserving consideration. Consequently, the selected group was broadened to include the following: 1. Individuals who spoke at the Comintern congresses from 1919 to 1935 or were delegates to the enlarged plenary meetings of the Executive Committee from 1922 to 1933 and who also played important roles either in the communist movements of their respective countries or in the Comintern (this last criterion automatically excluded a number of speakers and delegates who figured merely as supernumeraries). 2. Members of the Comintern ‘‘apparatus’’: secret emissaries sent abroad, apparatchiki in the central administration in Moscow, section and division heads, persons sent to Moscow by various national communist parties to serve as their representatives at Comintern headquarters, observers and spokesmen for the different national parties in the Comintern Secretariat, chiefs of the secret services of certain major Comintern sections (such as the German and French sections), and general secretaries of the important Comintern sections. The mere fact, for example, that the names of the Comintern’s emissaries never appeared on membership lists of its executive agencies does not mean that those individuals did not play major roles, for they often participated in the deliberations of the Comintern Executive Committee; this was true of Y. S. Reich (‘‘Thomas’’), Guralsky, Borodin, Stasova, and others between 1920 and 1922. Similarly, at a lower level, the fact that certain heads of the different communist parties’ secret services (like Hans Kippenberger in Germany and Auguste Havez in France) never held official positions in the Comintern hierarchy, or perhaps belonged only briefly to the central committees of their respective parties, does not indicate that they did not perform vastly more important functions behind the scenes. 3. Leaders of the international organizations, especially the Red Trade Union International (Profintern) and the Communist Youth International (KIM)—mainly those appointed by the Comintern to head these movements or those who progressed through them to positions of power in the Comintern hierarchy. 4. Graduates of the four principal Comintern schools—The Communist University for Eastern Workers (Kommunisticheskii universitet trudiashchikhsia Vostoka or KUTV), the Communist University for Western National Minorities (Kommunisticheskii universitet natsional’nykh men’shinstv Zapada or KUNMZ), Sun Yat-sen University, and the Leninist School—who later played significant national or international roles in the communist movement. It was through the operation and influence of these schools that the Comintern acquired viii Biographical Dictionary an extra dimension that enabled it to project itself into the future and transcend the confines of its official existence. sah Inclusion of these four additional categories increased the number of biographies to more than 700 (718 to be exact). However, having defined and included these new categories, we found it necessary to omit certain others, Thus, for example, we did not include the leading figures in Europe’s Zim- merwald Left and the Spartacus League in Germany unless they subsequently became prominent in the Comintern; nor did we include the communist militants who twenty years later fought in the International Brigades in Spain and played important political roles in their own countries afterward (such as Auguste Lecoeur in France and Laszl6 Rajk in Hungary) because they held no positions in the Comintern setup. Also excluded are those persons who headed Eastern Europe’s communist parties and governments during the 1968-1969 period (such as Todor Zhivkov, Enver Hoxha, Nicolae Ceaugescu, Janos Kadar, Alexander Dubtek, and Gustav Husak) but who had no connection with the Comintern. The included biographies are more or less current up to April 1969 (there are some additions of later date) and were written, insofar as possible, to conform to a single standard format comprising the following elements: (a) a basic bio- AaaaNaIaaaaa nte graphical résumé (date of birth, nationality or national origin, social and family background, schooling, occupation or profession, and date of death, if deceased); (b) a political biography of the subject as a member of the communist party (date of joining the party, successive jobs or functions in the party hierarchy, SeIIerr a and termination of party career, if terminated); (c) a political biography within the Comintern (nature of participation in Comintern congresses and in the enlarged Executive Committee plenums, jobs or functions in other Comintern executive agencies, missions for the Comintern, and date and circumstances of any break with the Comintern). THE SOURCES aaSSDI3aF FETE Se D. e Having adopted this standard format, we proceeded to acquire information on more than 700 persons. That proved a formidable task. For the overwhelming majority of individuals there were no available ‘‘file cards”’ or established ‘*dos- siers,’” however sketchy, upon which to build a biography worthy of inclusion. In most cases there was a Staggering discrepancy between the length of time neededt o acquire even the most rudimentary information (which often took two or three years) and the paltry amount of time needed to write the biography once the information was at hand (which usually took less than an hour). The data forming the basis of the biographies came from two sources. The first,w hich yielded information not contained in any of the communist or non-communist writings published during the more than half a century since 1919, con- sisted of our own far-reaching research and investigations, various personal z2 ~ag PAMnaeeRE eaESnRT, eeea t Introduction ix contacts, and endless careful compiling and cross-checking of the multitude of scraps and tidbits collected. Without this effort many of the biographies could not have been written at all, and essential parts would have been missing from others. Since the sources of these unpublished data were privately consulted, we are not at liberty to disclose them (some of the Comintern’s quondam high officials expressly requested anonymity). It would not be feasible to cite individual references in any case, for the fragments of a given biography often came from many different places. The second source, obviously, was the literature (biographies, memoirs, pamphlets, and articles) published over the years in communist and non-communist countries. While information obtained in this way was clearly inadequate to permit the writing of this volume, it was at least relatively accessible. Concerning the publicly available communist sources, the press of the era and historical writings, it was necessary to discard material from the Stalin period as totally unreliable, which limited us to the pre-Stalin and post-Stalin years. Foremost among usable sources in this category was Lenin’s own Complete Works, specifically the fifth edition, which carries short biographies of the personalities mentioned.” Since some of those persons were active in the Comin- tern, these biographies proved helpful in supplying an occasional odd detail about an individual’s personal life or party career but seldom gave an account of his activities in the Comintern. Moreover, because they are based on information then available from old Comintern files, these biographies naturally reflect the deficiencies of the files. It was not until the Comintern’s Third Congress was convened in 1921 that the delegates were requested by its administration to fill out biographical questionnaires; as a result, those who attended the Second Congress in 1920 and whose biographies are included in Lenin’s Complete Works (Toman and Souchy are two examples) are left without birth dates. Inaccuracies in the biographies of persons who ultimately broke with communism proved to be another weakness of this particular source. To this day, for example, Boris Souvarine is labeled a Trotskyite though he broke with that movement in 1929, and H. Guilbeaux is still called a Trotskyite though in fact he never was one. When not blighted by factual errors, the communist sources are riddled with lacunae concerning the roles of the various players on the Comintern stage; this was for our purposes a disqualifying flaw, and it is to be found in even the most serious of communist writings on the lives of communist leaders. The encyclopedic dictionary Granat, for instance, in its biographies and autobio- graphies of such leading Bolshevik figures as Piatakov and Raskolnikov, makes no mention of their activities in the Comintern and hurries over the roles of others (such as Manuilsky, Stasova and Sokolnikov) with a single fleeting sen- tence. A similar situation occurs in the biographical dictionary of the Czecho- 7 V.1. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 5th, ed. (Moscow, 1959-64).