Leo Jogiches
Leo Jogiches, also known by his party name Tyska (was born 17 July 1867 in the multi national city of Vilnius and died 10 March 1919 in Berlin). He was Marxist revolutionary active in Lithuania, Poland and Germany. A contemporary in Vilnius of Felix Dzerzhinsky and Arkadi Kremer, little is known of his early years due to his anonymous work habits ingrained through years of conspiratorial work. He early joined a social democratic workers circle before being forced into exile. In 1893 he helped form the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland along with Rosa Luxemburg, with whom he was to remain linked in a partnership closer even than that of Marx and Engels. The work of the two cannot be separated in the least, although a clear division of labour is observable, with Jogiches the organiser and Luxemburg the theorist.
The two were to lead the SDKPiL, as the SDKP became in 1899, with the revolution of 1905 Jogiches returned to Poland, and participated fully in the events being arrested in 1906, right through till the world war in 1914. Even as the party the pair founded became the Communist Workers Party of Poland a copy of it’s new program was sent to Berlin for their opinion.
Based now in Germany Jogiches turned his considerable organisational and conspiratorial skills to developing the Spartacusbund, the revolutionary group Luxemburg animated, as the vanguard of the struggle against imperialist war. With the end of the war the Spartacus League became the core of the newly founded Communist Party of Germany where he backed Luxemburg in her struggle with the leftist moods which characterised much of the membership of the young party. Jogiches was to meet the same fate as Rosa when in March 1919 he was shot "while trying to escape".