Samuel Klatschko

Samuel Lwowitsch Kljatschko 1870

Samuel (Semjon) Lwowitsch Klatschko ( Russian Самуил (Семён) Львович Клячко ; born June 2, 1851 in Vilnius , Russian Empire , today Lithuania , † April 17, 1914 in Vienna ) was a Russian revolutionary . As an unofficial liaison between the Russian revolutionaries of all political tendencies in Europe, he supported the revolutionary movement in Russia.

Life

Parents and youth

In 19th century Vilnius the Klatschkos, also spelled Klatchko, Klaczko, Kljatschko or Klatzko, represented a widely ramified and respected family. There was a Klatschko Street and Klatschkos were merchants and respected rabbis. Since 1830 a state rabbi was appointed by the Russian administration in Vilnius and among them was a Sheftel Klaczko. The Haskala , the Jewish enlightenment movement, developed in Vilnius since the beginning of the 19th century. The city became one of the most important centers of this movement in Eastern Europe. The city's merchant families, the Klatschkos, Blochs and others, supported this movement by funding modern schools. In this atmosphere of awakening modernity, which was looking for its place in Orthodox Judaism, Samuel Klatschko was born as the son of Rabbi Lewin Smulowitsch Klatschko and his wife Serl Gdaljowa, née. Rosenzweig, born. The boy attended one of the modern schools, learned Russian and German, and intensively studied Russian literature. At the age of 16 he left his family and went to Moscow.

Studies and political activity in Russia

Samuel Klatschko enrolled at Moscow University, attended the Faculty of Medicine from 1867 to 1870 and then switched to the Faculty of Law from 1870 to 1872.

There was a strong intellectual activity at the universities of Saint Petersburg and Moscow. The Historical Letters of Pyotr Lavrovich Lavrov , the works of Ferdinand Lassalle and John Stuart Mill, translated into Russian, and other economic and social treatises circulated in universities and were eagerly discussed. Secret student associations were formed, especially the Tchaikovsky Association or the “Tchaikovsky” founded in 1869 by Natanson and Nikolai Tchaikovsky at the University of Saint Petersburg. Klatschko joined this association and was head of the Tchaikovskie branch at Moscow University in 1871/72. As such, he maintained contacts with Tchaikovsky and his group in Saint Petersburg. He participated in the development of craft businesses, in the printing and distribution of socialist and national economic works and in the establishment of popular educational associations. One of his tasks was also liaising with revolutionaries in exile such as Valerian Smirnov, Aleksandr Elsnits and others.

In the fall of 1871, Samuel Klatschko went to Zurich on behalf of Tchaikovsky and negotiated there about the publication of revolutionary literature and its distribution in Russia. It was most likely at this time that he translated the book "The Civil War in Russia" by Karl Marx into Russian. He did not use the original English text as a basis, but rather the German version, which Friedrich Engels published for the first time in the magazine “Volksstaat” from April 28th to 29th. July 1871. In April 1872, Samuel Klatschko, back in Moscow, was arrested and interrogated on charges of belonging to a revolutionary association in Moscow and of having relations with convicted members of the Nechaev group (Warlaam Cherkesov, Uspensky and others). His apartment and that of his colleagues Tsakni, Bika and Nikolaijewa were searched, which caused unrest among the fourth-year students. They then decided to form a delegation to petition the government. This called for students not to be intimidated by arrests, to be able to run their own cash register and to allow the printing of the course texts and the cheap sale of approved books to poor young people. Klatschko was released before his trial and was able to emigrate to Switzerland in the spring of 1873. There he worked in Zurich as an employee of the magazine Vorwärts ( Вперед ) under the direction of Pyotr Lavrov .

The utopian colony in America

At the beginning of 1874 there was a split in the Tchaikovsky Association: the majority of the members wanted to continue and expand the revolutionary activities and closeness to the people. Nikolai Tchaikovsky himself, followed by some friends, had come to the conclusion that these activities would fail because the gap between the intelligentsia and the people was too great. He looked for another way to change the regime and found it in Bogochelovechestevo , God-Humanity. The developer and promoter of this term was Alexander Malikow, an investigating judge in the Zhidrin district. It was a mystical theory of passive resistance: man should first improve his soul in order to eradicate evil in society by example. It was hardly possible to put this theory into practice in Russia.

After some hesitation, Tchaikovsky and Malikov decided to emigrate to America and found an ideal colony there. Samuel Klatschko joined this company. In the spring of 1875, 12 young men and women and three children set out and traveled in three groups to the ports of Western Europe. Klatschko, his wife Jane and his friend Tchaikovsky boarded the RMS Abyssinia in Liverpool and reached New York on the tween deck on July 7, 1875. The new immigrants gathered in an apartment in New York, and at the end of October they set off to found one Colony in Kansas, although some had named California as their destination on the passenger list. Another mystical utopian, the Russian William Frey (real name Vladimir Konstantinovitch Heins) had already founded a small colony there in 1871 in Chautauqua County, Kansas, near the small town of Cedar Vale. Malikov and Tchaikovsky bought 160 acres (65 hectares) of land four miles from Frey's settlement, with a small farm, two horses and a cow. The small troop settled in the two rooms of the farmhouse, and in winter the men built new living quarters. A new Cedarvale colony had emerged. In the spring they bought two more cows and began to plow and sow corn and wheat. Everything seemed to be going well.

But it soon turned out that the young intellectuals and theorists understood little about field work and the practical management of a colony with all the problems of living together. So they turned to their neighbor Frey, who had more experience in this area. He took over the management of Cedarvale and brought his people with him. Samuel Klatschko played no special role in the colony; he worked in the fields and from time to time did the shopping in town. However, the influence of Frey, who was of a mystical and rigid character, made the colony's condition worse instead of improving it. He introduced sessions of criticism and self-criticism, which often degenerated into mutual accusations over trivialities. The meals were meager and there was no meat, coffee, tea, alcohol or sugar. Living together in a confined space created personal problems, marriages broke up, new couples formed, and homesickness set in.

The dissolution of the colony began in the summer of 1877 and its members dispersed. Malikov returned to Russia that same year, while Tchaikovsky spent a year in a Shaker colony . He did not return to Europe until February 1878, and after a stay in Paris he settled in Harrow (England) in 1880. Samuel Klatschko earned his boat ticket on the "Cattle Trail", which took cattle from Texas to the terminal stations in Kansas and from there to the Chicago slaughterhouses. He crossed the Atlantic in 1878 and reached Paris via England, where he made contact with the numerous Russian revolutionaries who had sought refuge there. Among these were old acquaintances like Smirnov, Cherkesov and Pyotr Lavrov , with whom he had worked in Zurich and who now lived on Rue Saint Jacques. For his living, Klatschko first worked as a photographer and later worked for Russian magazines and as a translator for patent attorneys. The police monitored the Russian revolutionaries very closely, according to a later report from the prefecture, and on July 14, 1880 Klatschko was expelled to Vienna.

As an immigrant in Vienna

The arrival of Russian revolutionaries was not undesirable in the Austro-Hungarian Danube Monarchy and in its capital Vienna, as long as their activities were limited to an overthrow in tsarist Russia. The megacity of Vienna in the 1870s and 1880s was in full swing. Citizens from all corners of the monarchy moved to Vienna: Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Italians, Jews and Hungarians. It was a real “melting pot”, a heyday of art and culture, of new ideas, of technology and science. Samuel Klatschko found it easy to settle in this city.

family

On November 4, 1880, Samuel Klatschko married a twenty-year-old music student, Anna Konstantinowa Lwoff, in the city ​​temple . Anna, the daughter of a rich businessman from Simferopol , was sent to Vienna to study with her friend Cecile Wohl in 1879. The young couple moved from Landstrasse to Belvederegasse in the “noble” 4th district of Wieden , first to number 10 and as the family grew, to number 3. Klatschko, who had stated his profession as a writer in his marriage certificate, took a job worked as a translator at H. Palm, Michalecki & Co, patent attorneys, and later became the company's authorized signatory.

The Klatschkos' home soon filled with children, Aline (1883), Alexander Theodor (1889) and Ella Vera (1890). Samuel's income enabled the family to live in a middle-class family. The family enjoyed the artistic and intellectual life of Vienna, music was played, four languages ​​were spoken, and friends and acquaintances met in the Belvederegasse, in the summer resort on Semmering and in the spa town of Baden. But Samuel Klatschko did not forget his revolutionary commitment and he combined a bourgeois way of life with the moral integrity of a committed socialist.

Only the two daughters followed in their father's footsteps. Aline Furtmüller (1883–1941) was a teacher, took part in the Vienna school reform from 1919–1920 and was a social democratic member of the Vienna City Council and Parliament . Ella Vera Paresce (1890–1966), pianist, wife of the physicist-painter Renato Paresce, was friends with Frida Kahlo , the wife of the painter and communist Diego Rivera , and had contacts with Leon Trotsky in Mexico. The son, Alexander Theodor (1889–1919), electrical engineer, succumbed to typhus in Zurich at the age of thirty .

Circle of Friends and the Young Socialists

During the 36 years of his life in Vienna, Samuel Klatschko was not a politician in the true sense of the word. In 1886 he was given his homeland rights in Vienna, and it was not until the Russian Revolution in 1905 that he became a member of the Austrian Social Democratic Workers' Party , the forerunner of the Austrian Social Democratic Party . In the same year he appeared for the first and only time before the public with a lecture in the scientific association "Future": On the history of the development of the revolution in Russia . This lecture was published without his name but with the subtitle "by an old Russian revolutionary". Klatschko's influence on the revolutionary movement in Russia and the Danube Monarchy came about indirectly through exchanging ideas, establishing contacts and helping with the dissemination of literature. This usually happened in the Belvederegasse, with the family, in the living room or at the Last Supper, where friends and acquaintances, representatives of all currents of Russian and Austro-Hungarian socialism met and discussed. Above all, Samuel Klatschko supported the Russian social democrats he knew, such as Pawel Borissowitsch Axelrod , Georgi Walentinowitsch Plechanow and Leo Deutsch. But he never refused to help other branches of the revolutionary movement, even when he rejected their programs. He was friends with Victor Adler , the founder of the Social Democratic Workers 'Party in Austria, Karl Radek was a guest in his house, as was Pawel Fedorowitsch Teplow (Sibiriaka), one of the editors of the magazine Rabocheie Dielo (The Workers' Cause) and a member of the "Economist" - Russian Social Democrats Group. Klatschko was acquainted with Otto Bauer , the representative of Austromarxism , and had an exchange of letters with Karl Kautsky .

The Polanyi family, and later the Trotsky family, were among Klatschko's best friends. Cecile Wohl, Anna Klatschko's (Lwoff) friend's childhood friend, married the wealthy engineer Mihaly Pollacsek, changed to Polanyi, in 1881, and the two families remained closely connected. This friendship continued even after the Polanyi had moved to Budapest and was strengthened by frequent visits, intensive correspondence and holidays together. The eldest daughter, Laura Polanyi, a pioneer of feminism in Hungary, received her political upbringing from the Klatschko family. Samuel Klatschko encouraged Karl Polanyi , who later became an economist and social scientist , to found the Galileo Circle of Progressive Students in Budapest. The social scientist Erwin Szabo, a cousin of the Polanyis, studied at the University of Vienna from 1888 to 1889 and found a second home with the Klatschko family. The personality of Samuel Klatschko and the Russian revolutionaries of all tendencies he met there, in particular Pavel Fedorowitsch Teplow, were decisive for his political orientation. The political philosophy of Georg Lukács , literary scholar and Marxist politician, also began in the meeting with Samuel Klatschko and Pawel Teplow.

Leon Trotsky lived in exile in Vienna from 1907 to 1914, and a close friendship developed between his family and the Klatschko family. Trotsky wrote in his autobiography: The whole chapter of my Vienna life would not be complete if I did not mention that the family of the old émigré SL Klatschko was one of our closest friends. (Our children) loved to visit the Klatschko's family, where everyone, the head of the family, the housewife and the adult children, were very attentive to them, showed them all kinds of interesting things and entertained them with wonderful things. We always found help and friendship in the Klatschko family, and we often needed one as well as the other. The friendship also had political aspects. Although Samuel Klatschko did not share Trotsky's ideas, he helped introduce him to the circle of Austrian socialists at Café Central .

Theodor Herzl

Theodor Herzl published his work " Der Judenstaat " on February 14, 1896 and had given the Russian translation to Samuel Klatschko. The Russian version of the book was published that same year. The massacres of the Armenians in 1894–1896 and the resistance by Zeytun in 1895–1896 shook public opinion in Western Europe during these years. In Herzl, the idea arose to mediate in this conflict between Armenians and Turks and thus to persuade Sultan Abdülhamid II to agree to a handover of Palestine to the Jews (the renovation of the Ottoman household with Jewish money was also planned). Thanks to his connections among the revolutionaries, Klatschko played a role, albeit a small one, in this mediation attempt. He knew the leader of the Armenians in Tbilisi by the name of Alawerdoff and through his friend Nikolai Tchaikovsky, who lived in Harrow near London, he had contact with the Armenian representative in London, Avetis Nazarbekian, the founder of the revolutionary Huntschak party .

Alawerdoff traveled to Vienna and spoke to Herzl on July 2, 1896, with Klatschko acting as interpreter. The only result of this meeting was a message to London that Herzl would come as a friend of the Armenians. Tchaikovsky, approached by Klatschko, helped to bring about a meeting between Nazarbekian and Herzl in London. However, Herzl was unable to convince the Armenians of the Turks' willingness to compromise and to bring them to a ceasefire. His attempt at mediation failed.

death

Samuel Klatschko, called Semjon Lwowitsch by his Russian friends, died of kidney cancer on April 17, 1914 in Vienna after a long illness. His professional colleagues published the obituary notice on April 18 in the Neue Freie Presse . The funeral speech on April 19 was given by Victor Adler , the founder of the Austrian Social Democratic Workers' Party. As a special feature of the character of Samuel Klatschko he emphasized his gentleness and his compelling moral authority. In his necrology, Leon Trotsky wrote that he was “a citizen of the civilized world” and that he had “everything to be an excellent politician, except for the necessary small mistakes.” His grave is in the Vienna Central Cemetery, 1st Gate, Group 52 , Row 9, grave 3.

Publications

• On the history of the development of the revolution in Russia. Verlag der Wiener Volksbuchhandlung Ignaz Brand, Vienna 1905.

literature

• Сост. А. А. Шиловым, М. Г. Карнауховой: Деятели революционного движения в России. Государственная публичная историческая библиотека России, Moscow 1931. (AA Schilowym, MG Karnauchowoi: The personalities of the revolutionary movement in Russia. )
• Charles Nordhoff: The Communistic Societies of the United States. From Personal Visit and Observation. Dover Publications Inc., New York 1966.
• Paul Kutos: Russian Revolutionaries in Vienna 1900–1917. A case study on the history of political emigration. Passagen Verlag, Vienna 1993.
• Abbott Gleason: Young Russia. The Genesis of Russian Radicalism in the 1860s. Viking Press, New York 1980.
• Kuropiatnik, GP: Russians in the United States. Social, Cultural, and Scientific Contacts in the 1870s. In: Norman E. Saul, Richard D. McKenzie (eds.): Russian-American Dialogue on Cultural Relations, 1776–1914. University of Missouri Press, Columbia (Missouri) 1997.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Vilnius . In: The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. P. 3, accessed April 8, 2014.
2. ↑ ЦГАОР, Ф. 109, 1872 г., д. 198, лл. 1-3об. Государственный архив Российской Федерации (State Archives of the Russian Federation).
3. ↑ Valerian Smirnov
4. ↑ Aleksandr Leontevitch Elsnits, The Free Dictionary
5. ↑ Сост. А. А. Шиловым, М. Г. Карнауховой: Деятели революционного движения в России. Государственная публичная историческая библиотека России, Moscow 1931. (AA Schilowym, MG Karnauchowoi: The personalities of the revolutionary movement in Russia. Pp. 585-586.)
6. ↑ ЦГАЛИ, Ф, 1158, оп. 1, д. 528, л. 43. TsGALI (Центральный государственный архив литературы и искусства, Tsentral'nyi gosudarstsvennyi arkhiv literaturyi i isskusstva , Central State Archives of Literature and Art).
7. ^ Heinrich Riggenbach: Tscherkesow, Warlaam Nikolajewitsch. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .
8. ↑ ЦГАОР, Ф. 109, 1872 г., д. 198, лл. 1 - 3об.
9. ↑ V. Ya. Bogucharsky: "Active Populists of the 70's", Moscow, 1912, p. 185.
10. ↑ Rosamund Bartlett: Tolstoy: A Russian Life. Haughton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, New York 2011, p. 259.
11. ↑ Andrey Fatuschenko: Communes of Russian Intellectuals in the United States in the late 19th Century. Faculty of Foreign Languages ​​and Area Studies, Lomonosov Moscow State University 2012.
12. ↑ Passenger List , Castle Garden Immigration.
13. ^ Avraham Yarmolinsky: A Russian's American Dream. A memoir of William Frey. University of Kansas Press, 1965.
14. ↑ Vasily Alexeyev: Recollections. Chronicles of the Government Literatur Museum, Issue 12, V. 2, Mokau 1948, p. 134.
15. ↑ A. Faresov: Odin iz 'semidesyatnikov' ("Один из Семидесятников", "One of the Seventies"). VE, XXXIV / V, May 1904, p. 146 f.
16. ↑ VG Korolenko: Istoria moego sovremennika. Saint Petersburg, 1906_22 (Translation by Neil Pardon: History of my Contemporary. Oxford University Press, London 1972, pp. 642–656).
17. ↑ Family memories
18. ^ Les Refugiés Russes à Paris, Rapport d'un Préfet de Police au President du Conseil, on December 16, 1907
19. ↑ Judith Szapor: The Hungarian Pocahontas: The Life and Times of Laura Polanyi Stricker, 1882-1959. Eastern European Monograph, 2005, p. 50.
20. ↑ Written communication from Municipal Department 61 of November 14, 1991 to Paul Kutos: Russian Revolutionaries in Vienna 1900–1917. Passagen Verlag, Vienna 1993, p. 132.
21. ^ LD Trotsky: SL Klatschko . In: The fight (Борьба). No. 4, April 28, 1914 (Russian).
22. ^ Soviet Trade Unions: Their Place in Soviet Labor Policy. Isaac Deutsch, 1950
23. ↑ Autzky archive. D. Letters to Karl Kautsky, XIV-159_160, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam.
24. ↑ Judith Szapor: The Hungarian Pocahontas: The Life and Times of Laura Polanyi Stricker, 1882-1959. Eastern European Monograph, 2005, pp. 12, 22.
25. ^ Peter Szegedi: The Galilei Cercle and the Polany's. In: Peter Weibel (ed.): Beyond Art: A Third Culture. A Comparative Study in Cultures, Art and Science in 20th Century Austria and Hungary. Springer, 2005, pp. 442-443.
26. ^ Oscar Jaszi: Erwin Szabo and his Life's Work "(From a word of Reminiscence). In: Liberty and Socialism: Writings of Libertarian Socialists in Hungary, 1884-1919. Published and translated by Janos M. Bak. Roman and Littlefield Publishers Inc ., Savage, Maryland, p. 212.
27. ^ György Lukacs: Writings on Ideology and Politics. Leuchterhand, 1973, p. XXVIII.
28. ^ [1] Leon Trotsky: My Life . Attempt an autobiography. S. Fischer Verlag, Berlin 1929. Translation by Alexander Raum, HTML tag: O'Callaghan
29. ^ Theodor Herzl. Diaries, 1895–1904. Jüdischer Verlag, 1922, p. 400.
30. ^ Theodor Herzl. Diaries, 1895–1904. Jüdischer Verlag, 1922, p. 465.
31. ^ LD Trotsky: SL Klatschko . In: The fight (Борьба). No. 4, April 28, 1914 (Russian).