Ludwig Christian Karl Alexander Martens

Ludwig Martens ( Russian Людвиг Карлович Мартенс * Dec. 20, 1874 ^{. Jul} / 1. January  1875 ^greg. In Bachmut ; † 19th October 1948 in Moscow ) was a German-Russian revolutionary and mechanical engineer.

Life

His father, of German descent, owned the steelworks in Kursk . He had four brothers and two sisters. His sister Olga also became a revolutionary. Martens graduated from high school in Kursk in 1893 . He studied in Saint Petersburg at the State Technological Institute ( государственный технологический институт ). There he met Julius Martow and Lenin in Marxist circles . In 1895 he became a member of the Kampfbund for the Liberation of the Working Class . In 1896 he was arrested and sentenced to three years in prison. After serving his sentence, he was deported to the German Reich, where he was recruited into the army for two years. In 1902 Martens joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany and began studying at the Technical University of Charlottenburg . In 1906 he went to England and in 1916 to the USA, where he found a job in an engineering office in New York. Martens wrote articles for Novy Mir (New World), a newspaper for the Russian Social Democrats in New York City , in 1916 . In early 1917 he was a representative of the Demidoff Count San Lonato Company in Perm , one of the largest steel and mining groups in Tsarist Russia. After the February Revolution in 1917 Martens, Leon Trotsky and other Social Democrats returned to Russia on the Norwegian steamship Kristianiafjord .

In 1919 he returned to the United States as the official representative of the Bolshevik government. There he organized the Society for Technical Assistance of the Soviet Union and in March 1919 opened the Советское Бюро (Soviet Office) in the World's Tower Building, 110 West 40th Street, built in 1913. In 1917 the Bolsheviks in Russia nationalized the means of industrial production . The property of global corporations , in which US citizens were involved, was expropriated without compensation. After this unprecedented loss of investment protection, the US government did not recognize the Bolshevik government and tried to destabilize it by sending the Polar Bear Expedition (intervention troops) into the Russian civil war . Martens had business relationships with more than a thousand US companies, including the Morgan Guaranty Trust Company . He negotiated a loan agreement with Harry Boland, the Irish ambassador to the USA, on which the tsar's crown was deposited as security.

In 1919 Woodrow Wilson appointed Alexander Mitchell Palmer attorney general. In one of the Palmer raids on June 12, 1919, the Soviet office was searched by the Lusk Committee . After a hearing before a committee of the United States Senate, the United States Department of Labor ordered deportation on December 17, 1920 , and Martens was forced to leave for the Soviet Union in January 1921.

Научно-Исследовательский Институт Дизелестроения diesel engine from Leningrad . Under Martens' direction the N-2 diesel engine was developed, which was intended as an aircraft engine.

In 1921 he became a member of the Presidium of the Supreme Economic Council and from 1924 to 1926 he headed the Committee on Inventions. He investigated the Kursk Magnetic Anomaly . In 1926 Martens became head of the Leningrad Research Institute for Diesel Engines. From 1927 to 1941 he was the editor of a technical encyclopedia.

In 1933 Martens wrote a letter to the Gossudarstvennoje polititscheskoje uprawlenije (secret police of the USSR), in which he stood up for the arrested Pavel Florensky , and took care of his sons Vasily and Kirill.

In 1941 he retired, but continued to be involved in scientific activities. When Martens died in 1948, he was buried in the Novodevichy Cemetery. His son, William Lyudwigowitsch Martens, became one of the organizers of the National Committee for Free Germany .

See also

• Armand Hammer

Web links

• Article Ludwig Christian Karl Alexander Martens in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia (BSE) , 3rd edition 1969–1978 (Russian)http: //vorlage_gse.test/1%3D073958~2a%3D~2b%3DLudwig%20Christian%20Karl%20Alexander%20Martens

Individual evidence

1. ^ Time , Nov. 01, 1948, Milestones
2. ^ The New York Times , Nov. 17, 1919, State Department Will Not Recognize Soviet Representative . pdf
3. ^ The New York Times , January 10, 1920, Soviet Envoy, His Secretary, and Weinstein Will Have Hearing at Washington . pdf
4. ^ The New York Times , January 20, 1920, MARTENS INSISTS HE IS A RUSSIAN; Tells Senate Investigating Committee His German Citizenship Was Only Technical.LVOFF NATURALIZED HIM Soviet Credentials Confirm His Citizenship, He Says, Though Naturalization Papers Were Lost. What Imprisoned Two Years. pdf
5. ^ The New York Times , September 3, 1920, SOVIET SPOKESMEN DENOUNCE AMERICA . pdf

predecessor	Office	successor
Boris Alexandrowitsch Bachmetjew	Soviet plenipotentiary in the USA 1919-January 1921	Serge Ughet