Karl Radek

Karl Radek , 1885-1939?, international Communist leader and journalist, b. Lviv (then in Austrian Poland); his original name was Sobelsohn. Radek participated in the 1905 revolution in Warsaw as a member of the Social Democratic party of Poland and Lithuania. He was a leading contributor (1906-17) to the social democratic press of central and Eastern Europe. During World War I he lived in Switzerland and was a staunch supporter of the Bolshevik proposal to turn the war into a revolutionary civil war. After the October Revolution in Russia (1917), Radek joined the Russian Communist party and participated in the Brest-Litovsk peace negotiations with Germany. In 1918 he was sent to Germany as a representative of the central committee of the Russian Communist party to help reorganize the German Communist movement. Jailed for a time in Berlin, he returned to Russia and became (1920) a leading official of the Comintern . The failure of the Comintern to effect a Communist takeover in Germany contributed to the decline of Radek's influence, and in 1924 he lost his seat on the central committee of the Communist party. Expelled from the party (1927), he recanted and was readmitted (1930). A brilliant writer for the government newspaper Izvestia, Radek was also coauthor of the 1936 Stalin constitution. In the party purges of the 1930s he was accused of treason; he confessed (as did his codefendants) in the so-called Trial of the Seventeen (1937). He is believed to have died in a prison camp.

Bibliography: See W. Lerner, Karl Radek (1970); J. Tuck, Engine of Mischief (1988).

Radek, Karl (b. 1885, d. 1939?). Russian Communist Born Karl Sobelsohn, he was an active Social Democrat in Germany and Poland in 1901, and became a Bolshevik follower of Lenin after meeting him and other Russian Communist leaders in 1904. He worked as a journalist for the German Social Democrats from 1907, until he went to Russia to become a member of the central committee of the Petrograd Soviet in 1917. He subsequently became responsible for the development of the German Communist Party and frequently travelled to Germany, where his propaganda helped fuel the revolution of 1918. In 1924 he was released from his duty as a follower of Trotsky. Expelled from the Soviet Communist Party in 1927, he was readmitted in 1929, when he became active as a journalist. He was imprisoned in 1936 and sentenced to ten years' imprisonment early in the following year, which he did not survive.