Iron Revolutionaries and Salon Socialists: Bolsheviks and German Communists in the 1920s and 1930s

When Osip Piatnitskii met German worker representatives for the first time in Berlin before World War I, the Bolshevik underground fighter experienced a veritable culture shock. In his memoirs published in 1927, the future Comintern functionary described his astonishment at what he confronted in Germany: “When I first came to a meeting and saw the well-dressed gentlemen sitting at the table with beer steins, I thought I had come to a meeting of the bourgeois, since I had never met such workers in Russia. But it was, in fact, a party meeting.”¹

A comparable feeling of estrangement was reciprocated by the Germans. Several years after Piatnitskii published his memoirs, Willy Leow—chairman of the Federation of Fighters for the Red Front (RFB)—had a discussion on the train from Khar´kov to Moscow with a diplomat from the German embassy in Moscow. After discussing Leow’s recent visit to a Soviet industrial complex built during the First Five-Year Plan, the diplomat reported to Berlin on the German Communist’s “impression of the construction of socialism in the Soviet Union.” This he summed up in Leow’s laconic words: “The Russians should first learn how to shit before they build industry.” When the diplomat asked Leow if he was not afraid that a communist Germany would be dominated by the Soviet Union, the Red Front fighter assured him it would surely be the other way around, due to “higher German intelligence and culture.”²

Both of these quotations help deconstruct a dated view of the relationship between German Communists and Soviet Bolsheviks. According to the received wisdom, the German Communist Party (KPD) had been transformed into a mere pawn of the Bolshevik leadership, at least by 1925; the KPD was an organization that bowed to the thoughts and demands of Moscow.³ Consequently, KPD politics were viewed from the outset in terms of what function they assumed in Soviet foreign policy.⁴ It has remained widely unacknowledged that, although German and Soviet Communists were connected by a common ideology, they were nevertheless separated by a vastly differing socialization. Hence relations between the Bolshevik Party and the KPD did not revolve solely around the unequivocal power slope between these “sections” of the Comintern. Rather, for both sides, fascination and repulsion, admiration and mistrust were closely intertwined.

For a long time, research on the Comintern could hardly be expected to examine such issues. Since access to Soviet archives was firmly restricted, historians had to limit themselves to analyses of published documents—resolutions, articles of the party press, and printed reports. This influenced the way communist politics were perceived: actors remained mute; and when they did speak, one detected from their words only ideological divergences.⁵ The opening of the archives has enabled us to break this silence, but it is still necessary to trace the cultural dimensions of encounters between German Communists and Soviet Bolsheviks. In this context, one must also examine perceptions the two groups had of each other and how divergent political cultures concretely affected their relations. New documents available since the fall of communism in Eastern Europe should be used not only to fill in “blank spots” in the literature. By looking at the functionaries in their political work, it becomes possible to write a cultural history of the political everyday.⁶

Focusing on the political daily life of the Comintern serves to describe not only the atmosphere between German and Soviet officials or to raise the human interest factor of material generally considered to be dry. Through analysis of models of perception and environments of association, we can gain greater insight into power relations within the communist world movement. We can draw conclusions about the practical influence of the Comintern leadership over the German Communists, as well as Moscow’s techniques of discipline and rule. These conclusions will bring us back to larger questions of “classical” political history.

To be sure, historians have been immersed in the cultural history of the KPD at the national and local levels for some time...