Fritz Sturm (publicist)

Fritz Sturm (* 1884 in Russian Empire ; † 1937 in Moscow ), actually Samuel M. Sachs , pseudonym Gladnew , was a German publicist and politician .

Life

Fritz Sturm lived temporarily in Germany and joined the SPD there in 1904 . In the course of the Russian Revolution of 1905 he returned to Russia and became a member of the RSDLP , first in the faction of the Mensheviks to join the Bolsheviks in 1906 . He was active in the St. Petersburg section.

From 1911 he worked on the magazine Zvezda (Stern), since 1912 also on Pravda (truth) and in the publishing house Priboi (surf).

After the October Revolution in 1917, he worked for the party in Ukraine and Belarus. Sturm was the editor of various German-language Bolshevik newspapers that addressed German soldiers.

He then traveled to Germany as a representative of the Bolsheviks and worked in Hamburg. He had close ties to Karl Radek and Heinrich Laufenberg . On December 31, 1918, together with Paul Frölich, he was Hamburg's delegate at the founding convention of the Communist Party of Germany and a member of the KPD (S) program commission. Until early 1920 he translated and published the Bolsheviks in Hamburg; u. a. Karl Radek: Anarchism and Council Government. Translated and with a foreword by Fritz Sturm (Verlag Willaschek & Co., Hamburg 1919), Nikolai Bukharin : Anarchism and scientific communism with a foreword by Fritz Sturm (Verlag Willaschek & Co., Hamburg 1919) as well as his own book Das Bolschewistische Russland ( Verlag Willaschek & Co., Hamburg 1919).

In March 1920 Fritz Sturm was arrested and expelled from Germany.

Subsequently, he was a member of the “People's Commissariat for Finance” and developed a journalistic activity in Leningrad as editor-in-chief of “Leningradskaya Pravda”. At the instigation of Stalin , Kalinin , Molotow , Dzierzynski and others. a. he was removed from office at the XIV Party Congress of the CPSU (B) in December 1925.

Afterwards, Sturm was a consultant for the “Council of People's Commissars for Culture” in Moscow. From 1928 he was head of the foreign department of the TASS news agency . In 1930/31 he worked for the “Small Soviet Encyclopedia”. In 1932 he began to work for the Comintern and in various economic committees of the CPSU (B). In 1935 he was expelled from the CPSU (B) as an alleged participant in the alleged Trotskyist Zinoviev center. Fritz Sturm was last mentioned in January 1937 under the name Sachs-Gladnew in the second of the “ Moscow Trials ” against Pjatakow , Sokolnikow , Radek and others. Fritz Sturm was probably shot by the NKVD in 1937 .

literature

• Sturm, Fritz . In: Hermann Weber , Andreas Herbst : German Communists. Biographisches Handbuch 1918 to 1945. 2nd, revised and greatly expanded edition. Dietz, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-320-02130-6 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Fritz Sturm in the catalog of the German National Library
• Samuil Saks on alexanderyakovlev.org (Russian)
• Samuil Saks on nlr.ru (Russian)