Leo Jogiches

Leo Jogiches
Born	(1867-06-17)17 June 1867 Vilnius, Vilna Governorate, Northwestern Krai, Russian Empire
Died	10 March 1919(1919-03-10) (aged 51) Berlin, Germany
Nationality	Russian
Known for	Marxist revolutionary

Lev "Leo" Jogiches (Russian: Лев "Лео" Йогихес; "yū-gē-khōs"; 1867 – 1919), also commonly known by the party name Jan Tyszka, was a Marxist revolutionary active in Lithuania, Poland, and Germany. He was a founder of the political party known as The Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania and a key figure in the underground Spartacus League in Germany during the years of World War I.

For many years the personal companion and a close political ally of internationally famous revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, Jogiches was assassinated in Berlin by right wing paramilitary forces in March 1919 while investigating Luxemburg's murder earlier that year.

Biography

Early life

Lev Jogiches was born to an ethnic Jewish family in Vilnius, Lithuania, then part of the Russian Empire, on June 17, 1867. Little is known of his childhood years.

Jogiches joined a revolutionary circle and became a leader by 1885, political activity which led to arrests in 1888 and 1889. Exile soon followed, with Jogiches finding himself in Zurich, Switzerland, where in 1890 the 23-year old Jogiches met a fellow 20-year old ethnic Jewish political émigré from Tsarism, Rosa Luxemburg. The pair fell in love and became both close political allies and personal companions.

The Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania

Leo Jogiches as he appeared in 1910.

In 1893, Jogiches and Luxemburg founded a new Marxist political party, the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland (SDKP), later known as the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL).

Although an intelligent person and dedicated revolutionary socialist thinker, Jogiches was virtually incapable of converting his ideas into written words — "the mere thought of putting his ideas on paper paralyzes him," Luxemburg later recalled. Consequently, the chief contribution of Jogiches was that of literary stimulant to the skilled publicist Luxemburg, as well as behind the scenes organizer of the fledgling underground political party which he had helped to establish.

As Luxemburg grew in fame as a Marxist theoretician, Jogiches became gradually more embittered about his life, until by his middle 30s he had come — as one Luxemburg biographer phrased it — to have "fully realized the gap between his youthful aspirations and the disillusionments of reality."

Historian Bertram D. Wolfe summarized the differences in personalities and abilities of the two revolutionary exiles:

"Leo Jogiches, three years older than Rosa, was, when he fled to Zurich in 1890, already a fully formed conspirator and revolutionary.... Jogiches was taciturn, stern, gloomy, secretive about his past and his private life, with none of her eloquence or outgoing capacity for friendship. Moreover, he was, as she was not, a consummate conspirator, an able organizer, a natural born faction fighter. Under the conditions of underground life in Poland and Russia, it is doubtful if she could have built a movement without him. In Germany, however, where life was lived more publicly, he became a leader only by following in her wake."

Interpersonal conflict followed, exacerbated by the different trajectories of personal achievement, with the pair permanently separating in 1907.

Spartakusbund

Jogiches was a founding member of militantly anti-war Spartacus League (Spartakusbund), a revolutionary organization formed in 1915 together with Karl Liebknecht, Luxemburg, Franz Mehring and others. Following the jailing for their anti-war efforts of Liebknecht in May 1916 and Luxemburg that same July, Jogiches took over as the leader of the organization's underground activity. He would remain in this role until his own arrest in March 1918.

Assassination

The Spartacus League led the failed German Revolution of 1918/1919 after which Luxemburg and Liebknecht were killed by the right wing paramilitary Freikorps troops. Jogiches was killed in Berlin while he was trying to investigate the assassination of Luxemburg and Liebknecht.

See also

• Luxemburgism

Further reading

• George Adler, Peter Hudis, and Annelies Laschitza (eds.), The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg. London: Verso, 2011.
• Elzbieta Ettinger, "Comrade and Lover: Rosa Luxemberg's Letters to Leo Jogiches," New German Critique, whole no. 17, (Spring 1979), pp. 129-142. In JSTOR
• Elzbieta Ettinger (ed.), Comrade and Lover: Rosa Luxemburg's Letters to Leo Jogiches. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1979.
• Elzbieta Ettinger, Rosa Luxemburg: A Life. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1986.
• J.P. Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg. In Two Volumes. London: Oxford University Press, 1966.
• Grigory Zinoviev, "New Crime of the German 'Social-Democratic Government," The Communist International, vol. 1, no. 1 (April 1919). —Radio address following the 1919 murder of Jogiches.

External links

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