August Kleine

August Kleine (born April 10, 1890 in Riga , † 1960 in Moscow ), also known under the name Samuel Guralski and numerous other aliases, was a communist politician and high-ranking functionary of the Comintern .

Birth and origin

August Kleine was born on April 10, 1890 as Abram Jakowlewitsch Heifetz in Riga. His father was a teacher at the Jewish school there. He attended the business school in Riga until 1910.

Political beginnings

Kleine began his career in the Jewish workers' organization Bund and became an official under the name "Samuel Guralski" in a cultural center of the Latvian Social Democrats.

In 1912 he emigrated from Russia and in the same year took part in the 9th Federal Conference in Vienna. A year later he was arrested and deported to Russia, but escaped and traveled to Vienna again. Kleine-Guralski attended university there until he moved to the University of Lausanne in 1914 , where he met Leon Trotsky and Grigory Zinoviev in 1916 . In May 1917 he traveled with the two Russian socialists to Russia in a "sealed train". In a similar way, Lenin had already been brought to the Russian Empire with the support of the German authorities in order to accelerate the destabilization of the German enemy.

Russian revolution and career in the KPD

In October 1917, Samuel Guralski was a member of the Revolutionary Committee as a representative of the Federation in Odessa and was arrested for this. After the October Revolution he took on various state functions in Ukraine. In 1919 the newly founded Communist International (Comintern) sent him as a delegate to Germany, where he took the name August Kleine . Kleine-Guralski was initially deported, but returned with another delegation in 1921. He was a delegate at the III. World Congress of the Communist International and shortly afterwards became a member of the headquarters of the KPD .

German October 1923

At the Leipzig party congress of the KPD in January 1923 he was officially elected as August Kleine to the headquarters of the KPD and took part in the preparations for the uprising in October 1923. The revolutionary attempt of the KPD, which went down in history as the German October or Hamburg uprising, failed, however. As a reaction to this, Kleine switched from the left wing of the KPD to the so-called “middle group”, which assumed a mediating position between left and pragmatic currents. When the middle group was defeated at the Frankfurt party congress in April 1924, however, against the left around Ernst Thalmann , Ruth Fischer , Arkadij Maslow and Werner Scholem , Kleine-Guralski returned to the Soviet Union. There he took part in the Fifth World Congress of the Comintern in the summer of 1924 and appeared as a fierce critic of the "withdrawal policy" of the then KPD chairman Heinrich Brandler .

Moscow's man in the French Communist Party

In the summer of 1924, August Kleine became a Comintern representative to the French Communist Party under the code name Auguste Lepetit . Together with Maurice Thorez , he implemented the course of Bolshevization of the party, which was about centralizing the party and strengthening ties with Moscow. However, Lepetit was arrested by the French authorities in July 1925, deported and returned to Moscow.

Opposition and Orthodoxy in Moscow

After his return to the Soviet Union, Kleine-Guralski worked actively for the "New Opposition" under Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev and was one of the critics of Stalin, who increasingly monopolized power in the party after Lenin's death. Because of this opposition, Kleine-Guralski was soon removed from his post in the Comintern and temporarily worked as a department head at the Marx-Engels Institute. In December 1927 he was finally expelled from the CPSU and exiled to Frunze ( Kyrgyz SSR ) the following year . In May 1928 he distanced himself from the opposition and was allowed to move to Tashkent , where he worked at the Communist University for the workers of the east . From August 1929 he worked again in the Comintern apparatus and served from 1930 to 1934 under the code name "Rustico" as a representative of the Comintern in South America. In August 1936 Guralski was expelled from the party for a second time, arrested and taken to a Gulag penal camp the following year . Despite the sentence of eight years in the camp, he was released in 1938 and assigned to the NKVD secret service , where he is said to have denounced other leading party members.

After he was re-admitted to the CPSU , Kleine-Guralski worked until 1948 under the name of Professor Arnold as a propaganda worker among German prisoners of war and became an employee of the Soviet Academy of Sciences . In November 1950, however, he was released and arrested there, and anti-Semitic motives are said to have played a role. He was sentenced to ten years in a camp in March 1952. Kleine-Guralski served six of them and was only released early in 1958 because of invalidity. August Kleine-Guralski is said to have died in Moscow in the summer of 1960, the exact date of his death is not known.

Sources and literature

• Harald Jentsch , The KPD and the "German October" 1923 , Ingo Koch Verlag, Rostock 2005.
• Hermann Weber , Andreas Herbst : German communists. Biographical Handbook 1918 to 1945 . 2nd, revised and greatly expanded edition. Dietz, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-320-02130-6 ( online ).
• Hermann Weber: The change in German communism. Frankfurt am Main 1969.