5.

Karl Radek and the Murders of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg

The murders of the celebrated German revolutionaries Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg on January 15, 1919, have been the subject of dozens of books and formal investigations by the German government. It would appear that in this case the facts are clear. But let us place this event in the context of German-Bolshevik relations during the first months of the Revolution and the picture changes completely.

The elimination of the leaders of the German Communist Party was useful to Lenin. Lenin’s Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, however it may be assessed from the point of view of the interests of Soviet Russia, was undoubtedly a stab in the back for Liebknecht and the German revolution. A peace treaty with the Kaiser’s government on the Eastern Front in March 1918 reduced the chances—such as they were—of a successful Communist uprising in Germany. Clearly, Liebknecht and Luxemburg stood for the defeat of their government in the world war, just as Lenin stood for the defeat of his government. At least since 1915, Luxemburg believed that the working class of other European countries lacked the strength to start a revolution and therefore that Germany’s defeat increased the chances of a revolutionary explosion across Europe. A victory for German imperialism, with its enormous appetite and reactionary regime, Luxemburg argued, would set mankind back and lead to the demoralization of the international workers’ movement. “Any military victory” by the German army, Luxemburg wrote, “means a new political and social triumph for reactionary forces within the government.”

It was over the issue of the peace treaty that Rosa Luxemburg and the Lenin-led Soviet government had their first serious disagreements. “Her hopes that the Russian Revolution would bring the international proletariat to arms quickly faded,” wrote Paul Frolich. “Rosa’s greatest fear was that the Bolsheviks might play the German diplomatic game and accept a dangerous peace treaty, such as a ‘democratic peace treaty’ without annexations or reparations, in order to win over the German generals.”1

However, neither Luxemburg nor Liebknecht could guess that Lenin’s peace treaty would turn out to be far worse: he would sign an anti-democratic peace treaty with the German imperialists, which would include annexations, reparations, and additional agreements useful to the German government.

Naturally, Liebknecht and Luxemburg subjected Lenin’s Brest-Litovsk policies to severe criticism, since they went against the interests of the German revolution. In the fall of 1918, this criticism became explicit and strident. “The old Bolshevism with its outdated objectives...no longer exists. Having abandoned the hope of an immediate revolution in Europe, it sets itself the goal of rebuilding the Russian economy on the basis of a combination of state capitalism and private capitalist and cooperative economic formations,” Luxemburg wrote in September 1918 in the pamphlet, “The Russian Revolution.”² Lenin’s Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was described by Luxemburg as a “betrayal of the international proletariat.”

However, Luxemburg did not confine her criticism of Lenin to the issue of Brest-Litovsk. She attacked the Sovnarkom’s agrarian policy from the left: “What the Bolsheviks are doing must have exactly the opposite effect, since the division of land among the peasants seals off the path to socialist reforms.” The terror unleashed by the Bolsheviks and the breakup of the Constitutive Assembly were characterized by Luxemburg as going against all democratic norms, freedom of speech, and freedom of the press: “Terrorism is only a proof of weakness, but it is aimed at domestic enemies.... When the European revolution comes, the Russian revolutionaries will lose not only their support, but, what is even more important, also their courage. Therefore, the terror in Russia merely expresses the weakness of the European proletariat.”³

In other words, Rosa Luxemburg embraced a socialism that oppressed a minority of the population (as she imagined it, in “developed” Germany), while Lenin and Trotsky were building a socialism of the minority that oppressed the absolute majority and granted freedom—and even then, within limits—to only one party, the Bolsheviks.

It goes without saying that the Soviet government banned Luxemburg’s pamphlet, while Luxemburg herself was subjected to harsh criticism by the Spartacist League—the pro-Bolshevik wing of the German Communist Party.4 Only in 1922, after breaking with Moscow, did Paul Levi, the head of the German Communist Party, publish the articles which Luxemburg had written in September 1918⁵—which, as he wrote, the party had ordered burned.⁶

A victory for the revolution in industrialized Germany was not in Lenin’s interest, since agricultural Russia would then become secondary in importance, and Liebknecht and Luxemburg would become the leaders of the nascent Third International. What Lenin’s role would have been in this scenario—since he had just signed a peace treaty with the German imperial government, and had previously accepted financial subsidies from the Germans, as was generally well known in Germany—one can only speculate. But it is obvious than neither the Left Communists in Russia nor the Communists in Germany could forgive Lenin for the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.

Lenin’s political career could be saved only by the defeat of the German revolution. It was for this reason that Lenin signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918 and why he insisted on upholding it until the very last minute. Not by accident was the Brest-Litovsk agreement dissolved by a VTsIK resolution signed by Sverdlov and not by a Sovnarkom decree signed by Lenin: he was not prepared to dissolve the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk even in November 1918, when Germany had already lost the world war.

In order to hold on to power in Russia, Lenin sabotaged the German revolution. In his well-known letter to party and Soviet activists, published on October 4, 1918, in Pravda and Izvestiya, Lenin focused on two practical issues: the Soviet government had no intention of abolishing the Brest-Litovsk agreement, but it could raise a three million man army to provide support for the German revolution “by the spring” of 1919.⁷ In other words, Lenin was openly telling the Kaiser’s government and the German Communists that at least until the spring of 1919, the Red Army had no intention of interfering in the German revolution already underway.

Paragraphs 15 and 19 of the peace terms read to the German delegation on November 8, 1918, in Compiègne, provided for the “repeal of the Bucharest and Brest-Litovsk agreements, as well as supplementary agreements... The return of Russian and Romanian money, confiscated and paid to the Germans.” On November 13, Sverdlov announced the repeal of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. On December 14, the commander-in-chief of the Soviet army, Jukums Vacietis, sent a telegram to Lenin, Trotsky, and Krasin requesting support for units that were advancing westward into previously German-occupied regions of the former Russian empire:

The units that are advancing westward lack sufficient food provisions, especially bread. We advise you to assume personal responsibility and promptly arrange this matter so that the troops will not lack for anything. Report on what you undertake.

But Lenin was interested in exactly the opposite. His message to Trotsky’s secretary, Sklyansky, read as follows: “Again and again: nothing to the west, a little to the east, everything (almost) to the south. Lenin.”8

Only Lenin’s lack of interest in seeing the German revolution succeed can explain his contradictory approach to foreign policy: extremely left-wing before coming to power, and then very right-wing immediately after capturing it. This did not mean that Lenin was against “world revolution.” Only that was more important that the revolution should take place under his leadership. Not just the Russian Revolution, but the world revolution as well. Lenin had no use for independent revolutions, just as Stalin would have no use for them later on. Nothing illustrates this better than the history of the beginnings of the Comintern.

In theory, the Communist International was envisioned as a fraternal alliance among equal parties. In practice, Lenin intended to turn it into a foreign policy tool for the Soviet government. But it was difficult to hide these plans. And the main leaders of the world Communist movement came out against the hasty organization of the new Third International. “The memoirs of Paul Levi and other leaders of the Spartacist League show that Rosa Luxemburg was particularly insistent on this point: she did not want to allow the Comintern to become an appendage of Lenin’s Central Committee,” wrote to the well-known Social-Democrat and historian Boris Nicolaevsky.⁹ Rosa Luxemburg hoped to revive the pre-war International, which had existed prior to 1914. Lenin was trying to split up the Second International in order to organize a new, Third International, under his own leadership. He therefore called for an international Communist congress. This was opposed by an influential wing of the German Communist Party headed by Rosa Luxemburg. She was a passionate defender of her views, wrote former Communist and historian Bertram Wolfe, but she did not resort to instigating splits. Lenin’s method never varied: he fought for his view, splitting up those whom he could not control.¹⁰ It was to this end that Karl Radek—Luxemburg’s personal enemy from pre-Revolutionary times—was covertly sent to Berlin at the end of December 1918. How did this enmity begin?

Radek was personally an extremely unpleasant and totally unscrupulous man. The semi-conspiratorial conditions under which the Social Democrats operated in Europe led to constant wrangling, mutual suspicion, and endless intrigues. From 1911 on, Radek was plagued by constant problems. He was suspected of stealing things from his comrades, of engaging in financial improprieties, and even of acting as a provocateur and collaborating with the Austro-Hungarian government. As an Austrian subject, Radek belonged to the Social Democratic Party of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania. In 1912, Radek was expelled from the party on formal charges of theft. His case became famous because he claimed that he had been expelled from the party for political reasons. Radek was one of the most extreme leftists in the Polish-Lithuanian party, and his extremism created serious difficulties for the Social Democrats in Europe. Radek’s case was discussed at the congresses of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) in 1912 and 1913. In 1913 the SPD passed a special resolution, as a result of his case, that persons who had been expelled from one Social Democratic party could not become members of other Social Democratic parties that belonged to the International Socialist Bureau. The German Social Democrats therefore tried to block Radek from entering the Russian or the German Social Democratic Party. However, the resolution was of little consequence for Radek’s work and career. Radical newspapers continued to publish his writing. And Lenin had demonstratively taken Radek’s side in this issue, writing an article in Radek’s defense for the German Social Democratic newspaper Vorwärts (although the article was not published),11 and admitting Radek into the Bolshevik Party. Radek remained a Bolshevik until 1936, when he was arrested by Stalin and killed in a labor camp in 1939. Joining the Leninist wing of the Social Democratic Party of Russia, he became Lenin’s representative, particularly on issues relating to Germany, which Radek, according to his own admission, was an expert on.

It is not impossible, of course, that Rosa Luxemburg already suspected Radek of collaborating with Austrian or German intelligence, and therefore that the leaders of the Polish, the Russian, and later on the German Social Democratic parties fought for Radek’s expulsion because of an insignificant theft. But having expelled Radek from the party, she had also become his personal enemy.

Luxemburg was not alone in her demands. The commission that clandestinely investigated Radek’s activities was headed by Felix Dzerzhinsky, a Russian-Polish revolutionary and future head of the Cheka. Like Luxemburg, he insisted on holding Radek accountable for spending large sums of party and trade union money. But Dzerzhinsky did not speak out against Radek in public as Luxemburg had done.

At the end of 1914, in order to avoid being drafted into the army as an Austrian citizen, Radek moved to Switzerland. In Bern, he became friendly with Lenin and his group and embraced the Bolshevik party line on all fundamental issues. True, he did differ with Lenin on the topic of national self-determination and disagreed with his views on the transition from imperialist war to civil war. But at the socialist conferences in Zimmerwald (1915) and Kienthal (1916), Radek openly joined Lenin and Zinoviev as a leader of the radical group known as the Zimmerwald Left.

In 1916, in an article entitled “In the Grip of Contradictions,” Radek polemicized against a certain Social Democrat who wrote under the pen-name “Junius,” arguing that it was absurd to expect “spontaneous mass radical action” after two years of war. According to Radek, the Social Democrats could rely only on a rigid and ideologically monolithic party structure. Moving away from the conceptions of Rosa Luxemburg, which were based on the notion of a “revolutionary party of the masses,” Radek had clearly shifted toward Lenin’s idea of a “cadre party”—an organization of revolutionaries, with a mafia-like structure. It later emerged that “Junius” was the pen-name of Rosa Luxemburg. The enmity between Radek and Luxemburg thus came full circle, now also on a theoretical level: they were enemies both personally and ideologically.

When in April 1917, Lenin’s group returned to Russia—passing through Germany and other European countries—Radek got off half way through. In Stockholm, he took charge of the Bolsheviks’ international headquarters—the organization that was supposed to become the link between the upcoming proletarian revolution in Russia and its “most loyal and reliable ally,” the German proletariat. In addition to Radek and his wife, the organization also included such well-known Bolsheviks of the Leninist wing as Ganetsky and Borovsky. Parvus (Alexander Gelfand), who rightly saw himself as a fourth member of the organization, paid frequent visits. Through Parvus, Professor Gustav Mayer, and the Swiss socialist Karl Moor—with whom Radek had been acquainted since 1904 (when he wrote for the newspaper Berner Tagwacht, which Moor edited)—the group remained in contact with the German government. It published two German newspapers in Stockholm: Korrespondenz-Pravda and Bote der Russischen Revolution. Most of the articles in both newspapers were written by Radek.

On Lenin’s request, Radek sent articles on foreign policy to Pravda, trying to suppress anti-Leninist tendencies within the Zimmerwald movement and create an independent organization of leftists (he was assisted by the Italian Communist Angelica Balabanova and a number of Scandinavian leftists). Thanks to their efforts, Stockholm became the site of a conference not of the whole socialist international, as the socialist parties of Europe had expected, but only of the Zimmerwald movement. But the Zimmerwald movement’s attempts to publish a manifesto calling for a general international strike were not successful.

After returning to Russia, Radek occupied various posts in the Soviet government. His main work was promoting the idea of a world revolution. After coming into conflict with Lenin for the first time over the issue of the Brest-Litovsk agreement and refusing to support Lenin’s Brest-Litovsk policy, Radek stated in a speech on October 7, 1918, following the start of the revolution in Germany, that only the German working class and the workers of Europe could help Soviet Russia finish what it had begun. “Without them, we will not win, and therefore it is our task to help them win. And therefore, comrades, we are entering the greatest but also the most dangerous period of the Russian Revolution.”12

Radek soon received an invitation from the radically-oriented Berlin Workers’ Council to come to the German capital to take part in the First All-German Congress of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils, scheduled for December 1918. Twice before this, in April and in August, Radek had tried unsuccessfully to cross the German border. Both times he had been sent back to the RSFSR. This time, the Soviet delegation that left for Berlin at the end of December consisted of five people: Bukharin, Rakovsky, Joffe (expelled from Germany on November 4 by Max von Baden’s government for organizing revolutionary activities), Radek, and Ignatyev (the secretary of the delegation). However, German military personnel in Minsk refused to let the delegation cross the demarcation line. Bukharin, Rakovsky, Joffe, and Ignatyev returned home. Radek entered the country illegally, disguised as a returning prisoner of war, under his real name, Sobelsohn, which at that time was completely unknown. He was accompanied by two German Communists, Ernst Reuter and Felix Wolf. They traveled by sled, then by train, through Vilno, Eydtkuhnen, and Königsberg. At the beginning of January 1919, Radek arrived in Berlin and on January 15, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were killed.¹³

Less than two months after the assassination, the participants of the first (constitutive) congress of the Comintern arrived in Moscow. Hugo Eberlein, the delegate from the German Communist Party, in accordance with the mandate from the party’s central committee insisted that the official creation of the Comintern be postponed until the next congress. His demands were rejected. On March 2, the Comintern officially came into being, and the chairmanship of the executive committee went to Zinoviev, a prominent Russian Bolshevik functionary who had not written a single serious theoretical work.14

The Germans found this difficult to accept. In protest, Eberlein even threatened that the German Communist Party would pull out of the Comintern. And yet, the Comintern was formed just as it had been envisioned by Lenin: it became an instrument to keep the German Communists in line, forcing them to submit to their Soviet comrades if only because the revolution had triumphed Russia but not yet in Germany. “Perhaps she would have spent her whole life arguing against the subjugation of German Communism to Russian Bolshevism,” a German author wrote about Luxemburg.¹⁵ But this assumption could no longer be verified.

Preparations for the assassination of Liebknecht and Luxemburg apparently began in November or early December 1918. During an investigation of Liebknecht’s and Luxemburg’s murders conducted in 1920 by the government of the Weimar Republic, Anton Fischer—who had been the deputy of Otto Wels, the military commandant of Berlin—gave written testimony that in November 1918 his agency began “searching and pursuing Liebknecht and Luxemburg to prevent them from engaging in agitation and organizational activities.” On the night of December 9, 1918, soldiers from the second garrison broke into the editorial offices of the Spartacist newspaper Die Rote Fahne, intending to kill Liebknecht and Luxemburg. But they were not present. In the course of the investigation in 1922, several witnesses testified that already at that time Liebknecht and Luxemburg had a 100,000 marks reward on their heads. It had been promised by Philipp Scheidemann, one of the leaders of the right-wing Social Democrats, who from February to June 1919 was the head of the German government, and by his close friend Georg Sklarz, a businessman who had grown rich during the war as an army supplier in Germany.¹⁶ Since the Kaiser’s government only allowed its agents to grow rich on government orders, and since government orders were the simplest way of creating unregistered, secret funds to finance all illegal activities that the government might consider necessary, it was obvious that Georg Sklarz had been a German government agent since the time of the Kaiser.

Sklarz was also a collaborator of the famous political activist, revolutionary, and German government agent Alexander Parvus (aka Alexander Helfand or Gelfand). Thus, the plot to assassinate Liebknecht and Luxemburg was organized by three people: Scheidemann, the future head of the German government; Parvus, the German-Russian Social Democrat and agent of the German imperial government; and his collaborator Georg Sklarz, a revolutionary and a businessman. It was Sklarz who was supposed to pay a reward of 50,000 marks for each victim.¹⁷

It turned out that a “certain Russian baron” had provided funds to establish the Anti-Bolshevik League headed by von Tyzka. It was this league that had unsuccessfully attempted to assassinate Liebknecht and Luxemburg in early December 1918. With the permission of the city workers’ council, in January 1919, the Guards Cavalry Division, which participated in the arrest and murder of Liebknecht and Luxemburg, occupied the Hotel Eden and established the Social Democrats’ help service, the so-called Section 14.

In 1922, during an examination of the von Tyzka case, it was established that Section 14 had been headed by Scheidemann and Georg Sklarz, and that a reward of 100,000 marks had indeed been offered by them. According to the sworn testimony of Section 14 employee Hassel, its accountant Sonnenfeld, and officer Krasnik: “Fritz Henk—Scheidemann’s nephew—confidently told us that there was a price on their heads and that the entire reward was in his possession.” This was also confirmed by a group of Reichstag workers during the trial.

The order to kill Liebknecht and Luxemburg was given orally. It was stipulated that Liebknecht and Luxemburg were to be delivered to the hotel alive or dead and that those who would deliver them would receive 100,000 marks. Detectives searched for both revolutionaries, competing with one another. Prosecutor Weissman, who coordinated their actions sat in the commandant’s office; he was appointed state secretary by Ebert in January.

These were the conclusions—rather unpleasant for the Germany’s Social Democrats—reached during the investigation. It was obvious to everyone that the people involved in the assassination attempt of December 9-10, 1918, were most likely responsible for the murder that occurred on January 15, 1919. But there was, apparently, another person involved in organizing the murder of Liebknecht and Luxemburg on January 15: the Bolshevik Karl Radek. This conclusion was reached by the brother of Karl Liebknecht, Theodor, a well-known German lawyer and Social Democrat, who spent many years investigating the murder in an unofficial capacity.

The materials about his brother’s murder that Theodor collected were destroyed during the bombing of Germany in November 1943.18 Theodor evidently had no intention of returning to this subject. But in 1947, Boris Nicolaevsky, the well-known Russian historian and collector of archives, wrote Theodor Liebknecht a letter. Nicolaevsky was interested in a completely different issue, which was unpopular and dangerous at the time. He was unsuccessfully trying to prove that the revolutionary Social Democrat Karl Moor had been an agent of the German government, working under the code name “Baier”:

The name of Karl Moor is well known to me. He was a German military intelligence agent and during his last years was associated with Colonel Nicolai. I have heard that he played some kind of role in the Swiss labor movement, but what interests me is the following: I have information from absolutely reliable people that this Karl Moor at one time (in 1917) had connected Lenin to the Germans and arranged the Bolsheviks’ passage through Germany. On the other hand, he was also connected to Karl Radek and to Colonel Max Bauer when he [Radek] was arrested in Berlin in February 1919. I have every reason to suppose that your brother Karl met with Radek and Karl Moor in person shortly before his final arrest and had a very serious quarrel with Moor.”19

In response to this, Theodor Liebknecht provided Nicolaevsky with information that must be characterized as sensational, which even Nicolaevsky refused to believe. The information concerned Radek’s role in the murders of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. It has not been possible to locate the letters from Liebknecht to Nicolaevsky that deal with this topic in the Nicolaevsky archive at the Hoover Institution; the correspondence between them is quite large, but it is mainly about Karl Marx. Nor are these letters in the Theodor Liebknecht archive at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. Nicolaevsky tried to find Theodor Liebknecht’s letters in his own archives, but without success. “I can’t locate my old letters from Theodor Liebknecht, who wrote to me about the role of Moor (and Radek) in his brother’s murder,” Nicolaevsky wrote on March 24, 1962, to M. N. Pavolvsky, a contemporary and student of the dark pages of Bolshevik history, who at that time was working on German-Bolshevik ties during the First World War.²⁰ However, Nicolaevsky mentions this correspondence in letters to third parties. Since this is the only legal evidence against Radek—although it, too, must be considered indirect—we will provide a number of extended excerpts from Nicolaevsky’s correspondence that deal with this far from trivial subject.

We should add that Nicolaevsky did not by any means immediately believe Theodor Liebknecht’s stories. Radek’s personal antipathy toward Rosa Luxemburg, who had insisted on expelling Radek from the Polish and German Social Democratic Parties, was known to Nicolaevsky. But this could have been precisely the reason for the rumors. The year 1947 was not the best time for sensational revelations of this kind. Radek, who had died in the purges, was considered a victim of Stalin’s regime. Theodor Liebknecht had no proof—only the story that his brother had told him while fleeing from his pursuers. In the final analysis, Karl Liebknecht could have simply been mistaken: he might have imagined Radek’s betrayal. Nicolaevsky said no more about the matter for ten years. Only after the death of Theodor Liebknecht himself, after the death of Stalin, after the revelations of the Twentieth Party Congress, and finally, after the publication in 1956, 1957, and 1958 of documents that revealed the connections that existed during World War I between the Bolsheviks (including Radek), on the one hand, and the Kaiser’s government and its agents (above all, Parvus), on the other, did Nicolaevsky begin discussing to Theodor Liebknecht’s conclusions in his letters.

The first such reference, apparently, dates from 1957. Here is what Nicolaevsky wrote to the former head of the French Communist Party, Boris Souvarine:

I talked a lot about these topics with Theodor Liebknecht, who believed that both Radek and especially Karl Moor were agents of the German military. He assured me that Karl Liebknecht had come to the same conclusion about Radek. Theodor talked to him about it the last time they met. According to Theodor, Karl had been absolutely overwhelmed by information that he had received from someone at some point—Theodor did not know from whom. Theodor considered Moor to be the more dangerous of the two.21

Three years later, Nicolaevsky wrote about the same issue to Ryszard Wraga (Jerzy Niezbrzycki), who had spent the years 1934–1935 working for Polish intelligence:

Radek must be dealt with separately. Theodor Liebknecht told me that Karl Liebknecht told him during their last meeting (a day before Karl’s arrest) that he had learned “monstrous things” about Radek, who had just arrived illegally from Moscow, about which he promised to tell him the next time he saw him. They never saw each other again, and Theodor believed that Radek had betrayed Karl. In general, Theodor collected materials about the secrets of the German military. I should have his letters (if they were not destroyed...).... Do you know anything about the role of Karl Moor? Theodor Liebknecht thought that he was the German army’s main agent among the socialists.²²

On November 16, 1961, Nicolaevsky discussed Moor and Radek in a letter to Pavlovsky:

Karl Moor was an old German agent (in military intelligence, I believe) about whom I heard a great deal from Theodor Liebknecht (brother of Karl). The transcripts of the Bolsheviks’ Central Committee meetings contain an item to the effect that the Central Committee had refused to accept money from him, considering it to be of dubious origin. Moor introduced himself as a rich man and gave money (in small amounts) to emigrants who were in need, but he conducted himself poorly in every respect, and was treated with considerable distrust. In 1921–1922, he really did come to Moscow, requested that the money which he had given earlier to various Bolsheviks personally be returned to him, and, I believe, got some of it back. But the reaction toward him was extremely negative (he was charged with seducing young girls from the Komsomol or something of the sort). In Berlin, he had a harsh run-in with the Left Communists, who practically accused him of being an agent of the Reichswehr. You must know that the Bolsheviks’ old connections with the German military secret service were inherited by the Reichswehr. Theodor Liebknecht believed that Radek was responsible for the death of Karl Liebknecht. Theodor told me about his last conversation with Karl Liebknecht, who told him that he had become certain of the links between Radek and the Reichswehr, but could not give any details, since the conversation took place while they were walking outside. The connections between the Reichswehr and the Bolsheviks in general, and the connections of the period 1928–1933 in particular, are basically the old connection from the First World War. I consider 1909–1910 to be the beginning of all this, since it was at this time that the first links appeared between Polish Social Democrats from the opposition (Ganetsky, Unschlicht, and others) and the followers of Pilsudski, who were building the “Polish legions.” The years 1910–1911 saw Lenin’s break with the official leadership (Tysko [Jogiches], Rosa Luxemburg), which was opposed to deals with the military. Aas early as 1904, Luxemburg had warned the council of the RSDLP that the Japanese were giving money to the Finns. Tysko and Luxemburg were organizing the so-called Paris conference of revolutionary and oppositional parties (it was precisely for this reason that the RSDLP was not in Paris at that time), and the friendship between the opposition and Ganetsky and others. Ganetsky was the main macher behind Lenin’s move to Cracow and all that followed.23

In a letter to the Italian socialist Angelica Balabanova from April 20, 1962, Nicolaevsky decoded what exactly it was that Karl Liebknecht knew concerning Radek:

I now often recall my conversations with Theodor Liebknecht, who tried to prove to me that Radek had betrayed Karl. The day before Karl Liebknecht was arrested, he had met Theodor on the street and told him that he had information about Radek’s ties with military circles and that he considered him a traitor. They agreed to meet on the following day, when Karl was supposed to tell him the details, but that night Karl Liebknecht was arrested and killed. For years, Theodor collected materials and told me that he was convinced of the accuracy of his brother’s suspicions.... Moor also appeared in Theodor’s stories as a person who, practically since the late 1880s, had been an agent of German military intelligence in Switzerland. Moor exerted influence on Radek, but the latter also had direct ties to Nicolai²⁴ and other leaders of German military intelligence.²⁵

In 1962, Nicolaevsky began to write about Radek and Moor with considerable frequency:

Regarding the fact that Karl Moor was a paid agent of German military intelligence over a period of many years, there can, I think, no longer be any doubt. I first learned about this forty years ago from Theodor Liebknecht. I think that Liebknecht also reported it in the press, in the weekly that he was publishing in Berlin at the time (under the title Volkswille, I believe), where he campaigned for an investigation into the murder of his brother, Karl. I should have Theodor’s letters on this subject, but can’t manage to find them at the moment. In any case, “Baier” is indeed Karl Moor. But here you come to the most critical question of the history of that period, namely, the question of how the Germans bribed the Bolsheviks.26

Nicolaevsky wrote several letters to M. N. Pavlovsky, who was then studying German-Bolshevik ties during the First World War:

Theodor Liebknecht’s stories are not about links with the foreign ministry, but about links with military intelligence, whose archives did not reach British and American secret services. And of course, Radek did not directly participate in the killing [of Karl Liebknecht]. The gist was that Radek had given them [German intelligence] Liebknecht’s address and that, in return for this assistance, they saved Radek himself from arrest.... I must say that I’m not convinced that everything in Theodor Liebknecht’s stories is wrong. He was undoubtedly an honest man, knew a great deal, was entirely correct with regard to Karl Moor, uncovered a lot about his brother’s murder, with some good sources. That Radek had ties to highly placed people in German intelligence, I have no doubt whatsoever (Stalin did not shoot him in 1937 undoubtedly because he was planning on using those old connections), and therefore we may still discover much that is unexpected in this matter.²⁷

With regard to the newly discovered documents in the German archives, many issues must be reconsidered. In particular, there is a lot to be said about Lenin himself, who had to know where the money that Ganetsky was sending him—hundreds of thousands and even millions—came from; and who knew even more about Radek. I often now recall my old conversations with Theodor Liebknecht, who tried to prove to me that Radek had betrayed Karl [Liebknecht]. For years afterward, Theodor collected materials and told me that he was convinced of the accuracy of his brother’s suspicions. I admit, with regret, that at the time I did not take Theodor’s stories seriously enough and did not write them down; but I must have some from his last letters from Switzerland. These stories also involved Moor, a person who since the end of the 1880s had been an agent of German military intelligence, that was seeking an alliance with the Bolsheviks for a campaign against France (there was another part which sought an alliance with France for a fight against the Bolsheviks, it was headed by General Hoffmann and later Ludendorff).28

For the contemporaries of those events therefore—the Social Democrats Theodor Liebknecht, Bertram Wolfe, and Boris Nicolaevsky—the Soviet government’s interest in eliminating Luxemburg and Liebknecht was obvious, and indeed was not exhausted by the agenda of the day (1918–1919). Let us quote two long passages. Wolfe writes:

On January I6, a little over two months after she had been released from prison, Rosa Luxemburg was seized, along with Karl Liebknecht and Wilhelm Pieck. Reactionary officers murdered Liebknecht and Luxemburg while “taking them to prison.” Pieck was spared, to become, as the reader knows, one of the puppet rulers of Moscow-controlled East Germany today.

Leo Jogiches spent the next few days exposing the murder, until his arrest. He was taken to the Moabit Prison, along with Radek, Lenin’s emissary to the Spartacists and to any German forces which the Russian ruler “might do business with.” On March 10, Jogiches was dragged out and murdered, but Radek, having something of Lenin’s governmental power, was permitted to sit in his cell, holding court for German officers and German heavy industrialists as well as German Communists, and begin the negotiations which led to the Reichswehr-Red Army secret military agreement, foreshadowing the future Stalin-Hitler Pact. In its way, the fate of the Russian emissary Radek and the “Russified” Pieck on the one hand, and that of Rosa Luxemburg on the other, are fitting symbols of the differences between Luxemburg’s and Lenin’s conceptions of the relationship between socialist principles and power.²⁹

In other words, Wolfe saw the elimination of Liebknecht, Luxemburg, and Jogiches (and the fact that Wilhelm Pieck was allowed to live) not as an accident, but as an entirely deliberate act, organized by the German and Soviet governments through German military intelligence, on the one hand, and Radek, on the other. This rather fantastic theory unexpectedly found confirmation in Wilhelm Pieck’s own recollections of the last days and hours of Luxemburg’s life. Pieck relates that Liebknecht and Luxemburg initially used an apartment in Neukölln. But their work was too conspicuous, and in a day or two they had to move. The move took place on the evening of January 14 and was extremely risky, since soldiers were stopping all vehicles to search for weapons (this was the reason why Luxemburg and Liebknecht could not leave Berlin). However, Pieck writes, “because of a betrayal that has still not been solved, the White Guards had by the very next day already occupied Rosa Luxemburg’s and Karl Liebknecht’s new hideout. When on the evening of January 15, around 9 p.m., I wanted to stop by their apartment and bring the necessary identification papers for both comrades in case the house was searched, their apartment had already been occupied by soldiers, and Karl Liebknecht had already been arrested and taken away. Rosa Luxemburg was still in the apartment, guarded by many soldiers. At the door of their apartment, I was arrested by the soldiers.... After some time, Rosa Luxemburg and I were taken to the Hotel Eden.”30

When he was arrested, Pieck gave a false name. He was taken at first to the depot of the Guards Cavalry Division, and on the following day to a depot near the zoo, and finally to police headquarters, from where, on Friday, January 17, Pieck mysteriously managed to escape to neutral Switzerland.

But we will not accuse Pieck of cowardice, or of betrayal, without sufficient cause. It appears that he was allowed to escape. And if Wolfe is to be believed, this was by no means an accident. What is important for us is to establish that in Pieck’s opinion, too, Liebknecht and Luxemburg were arrested and killed as the result of an “unsolved betrayal.” An allusion to Radek’s betrayal.

Moor was becoming a political traveling salesman who was trying to gain the trust of the Soviet government by diligently working on cementing an alliance, as Radek defined it, between German revanchist generals and Soviet militant Communists to collaborate against the West. This was an important period in Karl Moor’s biography that begins when, on March 7, 1919, he showed up in Stockholm with instructions from Lenin. It was he who arranged the meetings between Radek and German military and intelligence officers, which Radek describes in his recollections about “November” in Germany.³¹

From his arrest in Berlin at the beginning of February 1919, Radek stopped concealing his ties to the German government. With the end of the German government’s official legal proceedings against him on charges of engaging in subversive activities, Radek’s isolation in a German prison cell ended as well. He still remained at Moabit prison, but he was allowed to receive a virtually unlimited number of visitors in the old apartment of the prison guard. Radek’s “salon” was frequented by top-level German officers, on the one hand, and liaisons of the German Communist Party, on the other. Among the highly-placed guests of Radek’s salon was Walther Rathenau, the future foreign minister of Germany, who signed the Treaty of Rapallo with the Soviet government in 1922 and was killed for doing so by right-wing extremists that same year.³² Rathenau came to see Radek to discuss the terms for renewing diplomatic relations between Germany and Soviet Russia.³³

Moor also brought Baron Eugen von Reibnitz to see Radek. The baron was a friend of Ludendorff’s from the cadet corps. Having later lived for some time with Reibnitz, Radek called Reibnitz the first representative of “National Bolshevism.” (The actual term “National Bolshevism” seems to have originated with Radek.) Reibnitz did indeed subsequently advocate an alliance with Soviet Russia aimed at liberating Germany from the Treaty of Versailles. However, National Bolshevist ideas resonated not only with officers and academics, but also with the German Communist Party, above all in Hamburg.

Radek’s meetings were organized and false passports for his visitors were procured by his old acquaintance—Swiss Social Democrat and German government agent—Karl Moor, who had traveled to Russia shortly after the Bolshevik coup and with brief interruptions remained there for almost one-and-a-half years. In March 1919, he came to Berlin and tried to get the German government to agree to joint Soviet-German action against the Allied Powers and simultaneously became the main messenger between Radek and the outside world. Moor obtained the German authorities’ permission to talk to Radek one-on-one and became his courier and go-between. A description of how meetings with Radek were arranged has been given by Ruth Fischer (Elfriede Friedländer, née Eisler), a prominent leader of the Austrian and subsequently the German Communist Party, who had moved from Vienna to Berlin in August 1919:

Radek wanted to meet me and sent Moor to bring me to the Moabit prison. To my great surprise, Moor took me to the general headquarters of the army in Bendlerstrasse, where all doors automatically opened before us. An officer gave me a passport with an obviously false name and biographical information, and with this passport I had the right to visit Radek in his cell three times a week.34

In Ruth Fischer’s opinion, Radek was beginning to lean toward National Bolshevism by October 1919. At that time, still in prison, he was preparing for the worst news from Russia—the collapse of the Soviet government—and hoping to reach an understanding with certain circles in the German army to secure protection for himself from Allied forces that might have demanded—and indeed did demand—his extradition as an enemy of the Allied Powers. It was at this time that he began receiving two prominent representatives of German (Hamburg) National Bolshevism, Heinrich Laufenberg and Fritz Wolffheim. Two months later, at the home of Baron von Reibnitz and in the apartment of Schönberg police commissioner Schmidt, waiting to leave for Russia, he discussed the idea of National Bolshevism with a German military intelligence officer Colonel Bauer and Rear Admiral Hintze, arguing, as he did in his “salon,” that “Lenin wants an alliance with Germany against the victorious nations in the West.”35

This was a continuation of Lenin’s Brest-Litovsk policy. Its foundation lay in the clandestine German-Bolshevik ties formed before the Revolution. Its future became the Treaty of Rapallo, the secret Soviet-German military collaboration that successfully undermined the system of Versailles. Its apogee was the Soviet-German pact to divide Europe, signed in 1939 by Molotov and Ribbentrop. “The line of political relations between Germany and Russia, leading from Brest-Litovsk to August 23, 1939 and June 22, 1941... outwardly so capricious, is in reality perfectly straight—it is the line of a secret agreement, of a criminal pact!”³⁶ Thus ends the diary of Theodor Liebknecht, who had spent his life investigating his brother’s murder.