Stalin's massacre of foreign communists

A photograph from the Second Congress of the Comintern

In the latter half of the 1930s, the Soviet bureaucracy under Joseph Stalin's leadership executed a significant portion of the prominent figures of the October Revolution. This wave of counter-revolutionary violence, which lasted from 1936 to 1939, claimed the lives of nearly one million people. Among the victims of Stalinist terror, were numerous foreign communists as well.

So far, Tarih-Siyaset-Ekonomi [History-Politics-Economics] has published two texts concerning foreign communists who fell victim to Stalinist terror in the Soviet Union: An interview with Nathan Steinberger (1997) and The other three comrades. This article, however, aims to present a broader perspective on the subject.

During those years, nearly half of the regimes in Europe were fascist or semi-fascist totalitarian states. Many communists, socialists, and individuals with democratic leanings fled these oppressive regimes and sought refuge in the Soviet Union. Additionally, there were numerous internasyonalistı who had served in the Red Army and the War Commissariat and chose to remain in the Soviet Union after the civil war instead of returning to their home countries.

Therefore, in the 1930s leading up to the Great Terror, tens of thousands of foreign communists and communist sympathizers were living in the Soviet Union. However, many of them faced severe repression and lost their lives during the purges of 1936-39 and the subsequent waves of Stalinist terror, both large and small.

Unfortunately, there are no available sources in Turkish on the terror faced by foreign communists in the Soviet Union. Among the English-language sources I have examined, the most comprehensive work on this subject is Branko Lazitch’s article titled Stalin's Massacre of the Foreign Communist Leaders. [(Ed.) M. Drachkovitch and B. Lazitch, The Comintern: Historical Highlights, Essays, Recollections, Documents, New York: Praeger, 1966, pp. 139–183.]

Below is a "condensed" summary based on this article. Who knows, perhaps one day it will be my fortune to translate Lazitch’s article, which examines this issue in far greater detail, into Turkish.

Among the foreign communists subjected to Stalinist terror from the second half of the 1930s onwards, those from certain countries -particularly Scandinavians, the British, and the French- had a higher chance of survival compared to others. The primary reason for this was that the prosecution or disappearance of communists from these countries would have sparked international protests.

Many foreign communists who were members of the Zimmerwald Left -the precursor to the Third International and a movement that left a significant historical legacy for the international socialist workers' movement- fell victim to Stalinist terror. Among them were Bronski, Warszawski, Horwitz, Fürstenberg, Stein-Krajewski, Lewinson, Platten, Peluso, Koritshener, Münzenberg, and Berzin.

All top leaders of the Yugoslav Communist Party, with the exception of Tito, were branded as “enemies and spies” and executed.

As Nathan Steinberger noted in the aforementioned interview, the entire leadership of the Polish Communist Party was wiped out: Leszczyhinski, Prochniak, Stein, Heryng, Bortnowski, Lauer, Amsterdam, Krolikowski, Dabal, Lancucki, Ciszewski, Wroblewski, Bobinski, and Sochacki-Czeszejko.

After long and gruelling years in forced labour camps, only two of the leaders of the Hungarian Revolution -comprising Béla Kun and his 11 comrades- survived.

Four members and two candidate members of the Politburo of the German Communist Party (KPD) fell victim to Stalinist terror: Hugo Eberlein, Leo Flieg, Hermann Remele, Hermann Schubert, Fritz Schulte, and Heinz Neumann. Grete Wilde, the leader of the Communist Youth League, lost her life in a forced labour camp. Heinrich Sübkind, Max Hölz, and Max Levien were three other prominent German communists among the victims.

In the years following Stalin's death, only a handful of foreign communists -Béla Kun [*] and a few Polish and Yugoslav communists- were rehabilitated. The Stalinist bureaucracy desired the names of the others to be forgotten in the dark pages of history.

Béla Kun's mugshot taken by the NKVD following his arrest in 1937

[*] When Kun was politically rehabilitated in 1956, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union misinformed its ally, the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party, claiming that Kun had died of natural causes in prison on 30 November 1939. In 1989, the Soviet government revealed that Kun had in fact been executed in the Gulag on 29 August 1938 -more than a year earlier than the date they had provided in 1956.