Arkadi Maslow

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Arkadi Maslow ( Russian Аркадий Маслов , actually Исаак Ефимович Чемеринский / Isaak Jefimowitsch Tschemerinski ; born March 9, 1891 in Jelisavetgrad / Russian Empire ; †  November 20, 1941 in La Habana / Cuba ) was a communist politician .

Life

Youth and education

Born as Isaak Jefimowitsch Tschemerinski into a Jewish merchant family, he moved to Germany with his mother and siblings in 1899. In Dresden he attended the Kreuzschule grammar school from 1899 and then studied at a conservatory, where he took an exam as a pianist. In 1912 he began studying natural sciences (among others with Albert Einstein and Max Planck ) in Berlin. In 1914, the Russian citizen Tschemerinski was initially interned, but volunteered as an interpreter and worked as such in prisoner-of-war camps for the German army .

In the KPD

Chemerinsky radicalized himself through the war experience and sympathized with the Spartakusbund . After resuming his studies, Paul Levi and Ruth Fischer , with whom he was from now on, won him over for the KPD . In November 1920 he (who now called himself Arkadi Maslow) was elected to the central committee of the party and from 1921 together with Ruth Fischer headed the Berlin KPD and the left wing of the party, in 1921 he became the foreign policy editor of the Red Flag . After he was arrested by the Berlin police in February 1922, he posed as a Soviet agent and confidante of Leon Trotsky and Karl Radek . He was sentenced to eight months in prison for a passport violation, which forced him to go into hiding to avoid eviction. At the same time, rumors circulated within the KPD that Maslow was a police spy ; during a stay in Moscow in September 1923, he was summoned to a Comintern investigative committee to clarify these allegations and exonerated, but was detained in Moscow until early 1924.

In April 1924, Maslow and Fischer took over the leadership of the party and were responsible for tightening the KPD's left-wing course, which they criticized as “right-wingers” August Thalheimer and Heinrich Brandler . Arrested again in May 1924, Maslow was tried together with Paul Schlecht and Anton Grylewicz in September 1925 and sentenced to four years in prison, but released early in July 1926 because of his poor health. Since Maslow and Fischer no longer had the protection of Zinoviev , they were removed from the party leadership at Stalin's instigation in autumn 1925 in favor of Ernst Thalmann and expelled from the KPD on August 20, 1926.

Politically sidelined

Maslow, together with Ruth Fischer and Hugo Urbahns, took part in attempts to collect excluded or resigned members of the left wing of the KPD, which resulted in the establishment of the Lenin League in early 1928. Meanwhile, the KPD slandered Maslow as an "agent of the bourgeoisie" and accused him of not having been expelled from Germany simply because he was doing dissection work against the KPD. In May 1928 Maslow left the Leninbund together with Ruth Fischer because they considered an anti-KPD independent candidate to be wrong and, after the surrender of Zinoviev and Kamenev to Stalin, they had the (futile) hope of being re-accepted into the KPD. Until 1933 Maslow worked primarily as a translator and largely withdrew from direct politics.

In exile

After the transfer of power to the NSDAP , Maslow and Fischer fled to Paris in 1933, where they stayed until 1940. From 1934 to 1936 Maslow worked closely with Trotsky and was part of the movement for a Fourth International . After the break with Trotsky, he and Ruth Fischer founded a group called Gruppe Internationale (Marxist-Leninists) that existed until 1939. During the Moscow Trials from 1936 to 1938, Maslow was again defamed as an agent by the Stalinist press. In 1940, after the defeat of France, Maslow managed to flee to Cuba, but unlike Ruth Fischer, he did not get an entry visa for the USA. On November 20, 1941, Maslow was found dead on the street in Havana. According to the official autopsy findings, Maslow died of a heart attack, but Ruth Fischer and Franz Pfemfert assumed a murder on the part of the NKVD .

Fonts (selection)

  • The two revolutions of 1917. Berlin 1924.
  • Apostate reluctantly. From letters and manuscripts of exile. Munich 1990, ISBN 3486553313 (texts by Maslow and Ruth Fischer, edited by Peter Luebbe, introduced by Hermann Weber )
  • The general's daughter. with an afterword by Berit Balzer ; Berlin 2011

literature

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Maslow, Arkadi
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Tschemerinsky, Isaak; Maslow, Arcadi
BRIEF DESCRIPTION communist politician
DATE OF BIRTH March 9, 1891
PLACE OF BIRTH Jelisavetgrad
DATE OF DEATH November 20, 1941
Place of death Havana