The other three comrades

You may have come across this photograph before in various printed sources or on the internet.

This image, taken at the First Congress of the Third International (Communist International, or Comintern for short) held in Moscow between 2nd and 6th March 1919, shows the members of the Presidium. Standing third from the left is, of course, Vladimir Lenin. However, the other three members of the Presidium are generally less well-known. Let us list their names from left to right: Gustav Klinger, Hugo Eberlein, and Fritz Platten. In this article, we will briefly discuss these three figures, who played a leading role in the establishment and activities of the Comintern.

These two photographs feature the same four-member Presidium.

In this final shot, taken from the rear of the hall, we can see some of the delegates, the Presidium, and Leon Trotsky speaking at the podium. [*]

These three communists, who alongside Lenin served on the Presidium of the First Congress of the Comintern, were later branded as ‘counter-revolutionaries’ and ‘traitors’ by the Stalinist regime and subsequently executed. Let us take a closer look at their brief biographies:

• Gustav Klinger (1876–1937 or 1943) was a Bolshevik politician of German descent. He joined the Bolshevik Party in 1917 and served as the president of the Volga German Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic in 1918. In 1919, he became actively involved in the work of the Comintern and was elected to its Executive Committee in 1920. He was executed in either 1937 or 1943, though the exact date of his execution remains uncertain.

• Hugo Eberlein (4 May 1887–16 October 1941) was a German communist politician. He joined the Social Democratic Party (SPD) in 1906 and, during the First World War, was part of the party’s left wing alongside Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. In 1916, he became one of the founding members of the Spartacus League, and in 1918, he was among the founders of the German Communist Party (KPD). Between 1921 and 1933, he served in the Prussian Parliament. Following the Nazis’ rise to power in Germany in 1933, he fled to the Soviet Union and settled in Moscow. However, in 1937, during the Stalinist terror, he was arrested, subjected to severe torture, and executed by firing squad in 1941.

• Fritz Platten (8 July 1883–22 April 1942) was a Swiss communist politician. [**] He participated in the First Russian Revolution, which broke out in Riga in 1906, but fled in 1908 and returned to Switzerland. In 1917, he joined the Swiss Social Democratic Party, and in 1919, he became one of the founding members of the Communist International (Comintern). Platten was the organiser of Lenin’s return journey from Switzerland to Russia. During the years of Stalinist terror, he was arrested and shot dead in a prison in 1942.

Oh, poor Lenin! While leading the establishment of the Communist International to rebuild the international revolutionary vanguard after the October Revolution, he was entirely unaware that he was surrounded by ‘counter-revolutionaries’ and ‘traitors’. Little did he know what a great danger he had unwittingly escaped!

[*] It is striking that the number of delegates in this photograph is relatively small. In 1919, with the civil war raging and the imperialist blockade in place, reaching Moscow was no easy task. The congress included 35 delegates with full voting rights, representing 17 organisations, and 16 delegates with consultative voting rights, representing 16 other organisations (51 in total).

[**] In an interview conducted with Nathan Steinberger in 1997, which we translated and published on this blog on 4 February 2025, he recounts the following anecdote about Fritz Platten:

“(…) before collectivization there were currents among the peasants which supported cooperatives or agricultural communes and community-based cultivation. One such was the Swiss commune, which, under Lenin’s instigation, was organized by Fritz Platten, a friend of mine. It consisted of a number of Swiss comrades, for the most part not themselves peasants, but people who were convinced of the idea of a socialist utopia. Lenin had told them: bring your tractors and show how it can be properly organized. There were many other examples of communes, for example, that of Christen.

“Stalinist collectivization stood in the most vulgar contradiction to Lenin’s conception. The first step of the forced collectivization was the immediate dissolution of the communes and the handing over of their property to the state. The comrade in charge of the Swiss commune at that time went straight to Moscow to protest.”