Hermann Weber and Bernhard H. Bayerlein (eds), Der Thälmann Skandal: Geheime Korrespondenz mit Stalin, (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag), pp386. ISBN: 3-351-02549-1. €22.50 (hbk).
Between 1925 and 1933 Ernst Thälmann was the chairman of the German Communist Party (KPD) and its uniformed paramilitary organisation, the League of Red Front Fighters. A former Hamburg dockyard worker and union official, his proletarian appearance, predilection for ultra-radicalism and infamously mixed metaphors shouted from the podium at mass rallies resonated with the party’s working-class activists among whom he was popular. Yet, had it not been for Moscow’s intervention, Thälmann would have been ousted from the party leadership by his comrades in the Central Committee. The incident formally precipitating this ‘palace coup’, which took place in September 1928, was the discovery of Thälmann’s role in covering up an embezzlement scandal in his own party organisation in Hamburg. Under the local leader, John Wittorf, a sum of 3,000 Marks had been misappropriated from party funds. As we have long known, however, the stakes were higher. Thälmann’s removal was part of a last ditch effort by those KPD leaders hostile to another ‘ultra-left turn’ in Comintern strategy. Its imminent arrival had already been signalled in the secret agreement with the German leadership in February 1928 and at the Sixth Congress of the Communist International (Comintern) the following summer.
The extent of the KPD’s rebellion caught Stalin off guard, as he wrote to Thälmann in a letter dated 25 October 1928:
At first it was very difficult for us to understand in what way 90 per cent of the members of the Central Committee, who could not be counted as members of the Right and Conciliators, could adopt a resolution, and then publish it, which, in reality, meant the discrediting of the leadership of the KPD and above all comrade Thälmann. [ 1 ]
The letter goes on to indicate that, although Thälmann had Stalin’s full support in the factional struggle, he was reproached for his style of leadership. From now on, Thälmann was to adopt a more collegial approach toward the party’s ‘Left’ and to participate in the work of the Secretariat and the Politburo lest events repeat themselves.
The contribution of this volume, in which 90 documents from previously closed archives in Berlin and Moscow are published, is the empirical reconstruction of how the Stalin faction dominated the decision-making process in the communist movement and acted to eliminate its opponents. The most important new insight is a detailed depiction of how Stalin used a previously unknown secret network of personal contacts to circumvent the official channels within the Comintern and the KPD. In the first of two introductory essays, Hermann Weber places the ‘Thälmann Scandal’ in the context of the KPD’s ‘Stalinisation’ – a highly influential conceptual framework he pioneered in the later 1960s.[ 2 ] Thälmann was part of the influx of former members of the Independent Socialist Party (USPD) in 1920, which turned the KPD into a mass party of some 350,000 members. Like many of this new cohort, he stood on the party’s hard left, joining Ruth Fischer’s ‘Left Opposition’ to the moderate ‘united front’ policy pursued during 1922-1923. His rise into the national party leadership was on the left-wing tide that carried with it the majority of party members after the revolutionary hopes of 1923 turned to disappointment. ‘Teddy’, as Thälmann was known in party circles, was one of a number of proletarian figures who joined the new party leadership headed by communist intellectuals, around Ruth Fischer, Arkadi Maslow and Arthur Rosenberg, in order to lend them working class credibility. Crucially, however, Thälmann had already nailed his flag to the ‘Stalin faction’, and was regarded in Moscow as what Zinoviev termed ‘the gold of the working class’. When Stalin intervened in the autumn of 1925 to end the independent left-wing policy pursued by the former ‘Left Opposition’ in Germany, Thälmann was appointed party chairman as a trusted member of the so-called ‘Comintern-loyal left’. This was, as Weber details, a decisive early stage in the party’s stalinisation.
During the mid-1920s, Thälmann’s leadership was responsible for returning the KPD to a ‘united front’ policy, purging his former comrades in the ‘Left Opposition’ who resisted this and completing the party’s reorganisation on the basis of ‘democratic centralism’. Never comfortable with any policy of limited, tactical co-operation with social democracy, by late 1927 Thälmann was now an enthusiastic advocate of another ‘left turn’. The opponents of ‘ultra-leftism’ were now the so-called ‘Conciliators’, who sat on the Politburo and Central Committee, and the ‘Right’, whose leaders Heinrich Brandler and August Thalheimer retained positions in the Comintern. Using more recently available documentation,[ 3 ] Weber details the degree of opposition to Moscow’s ‘Third Period’ policy and the extent to which Thälmann had lost the confidence of Moscow’s normally loyal German supporters. Wilhelm Pieck went as far as openly stating: ‘I do not believe that he [Thälmann] is suited to stand at the head of our party’. After Stalin’s intervention to rehabilitate Thälmann, however, the KPD’s leading organs voted unanimously to reinstate him. It was this act of submission, according to Weber, that marked the completion of the stalinisation process and made possible the KPD’s fateful treatment of social democracy as the ‘main enemy’ during Hitler’s rise to power.
The main purpose of the second introductory essay is to provide narrative shape to the new archival evidence published in the volume. Bayerlein identifies three ‘cycles’ in which Stalin rehabilitates Thälmann in the KPD and then uses the issue to eliminate opposition to the policies of the ‘Third Period’ throughout the communist movement. The first cycle (29 September – 6 October 1928) details how Stalin used his inner circle of loyal lieutenants to rehabilitate Thälmann in the KPD, circumventing the official channels of the Comintern and its chairman, Bukharin. It was at this moment that Bukharin’s sun set in the Soviet solar system. (pp50-53). The principal actors in Moscow were Molotov, who Stalin charged with the day-to-day running of business until his return from holiday in the Crimea, and Pyatnitsky, the Secretary of the Comintern, who dealt with a delegation from the KPD which arrived at the end of September. A key early role was also played by Stalin’s supporters in the KPD, including Heinz Neumann and Hermann Remmele, who, together with Thälmann, formed the Political Secretariat of the German party after 1929. Importantly, Bayerlein identifies Walter Ulbricht as the ‘central link’ in the Stalinist chain of command, denouncing any member of the German leadership who questioned Moscow’s wisdom (pp37, 41). Using these back-channels, it was possible to have the German Central Committee’s resolution to depose Thälmann reversed in less than two weeks.
The second cycle (6 October – 18 December 1928) reconstructs the Stalin faction’s strategy of ‘roll back’: the decision to rehabilitate Thälmann was put into practice and the ground was prepared to force the ‘left turn’ in the Comintern. Crucially, the agenda set by Stalin and Molotov was taken into the Comintern after a closed meeting between the Soviet Politburo and the Russian delegation to the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI). Yet, resistance in the Comintern apparatus and the KPD leadership continued to slow down this process. Petrovsky, Stalin’s emissary who had been sent to Berlin at the end of September, still identified considerable resistance in the KPD in a report dated 17 October. Manuilsky, the head of the Western Bureau of the Comintern, warned that relations between Thälmann and the party leadership had been greatly ‘disrupted’, and stressed that he personally did not rate Thälmann as a suitable leader. Astonishingly, he further cautioned against a general purge of the ‘Conciliators’, drawing particular attention to Hugo Eberlien, and advised against the arch-stalinist Heinz Neumann’s return to Germany. But his advice was ignored: the purge of party dissidents was prepared apace and the ‘left turn’ was forced on the wider party. Neumann, Ulbricht and Thälmann send Stalin wildly unrealistic political reports, which presented the lockout in the Ruhr iron and steel industry as a revolutionary situation in the making.[ 4 ]
The third cycle (19 December 1928 – March 1929) concluded the ‘Thälmann Affair’, which had become a test of loyalty to Stalin’s policies throughout the international communist movement. The meeting of the ECCI Presidium on 19 December marked the last open debate in the Comintern; although any prospect of overturning Stalin’s agenda was already unthinkable. Nevertheless, Stalin walked around the assembled delegates, shouting at and insulting his three remaining opponents: the KPD’s Clara Zetkin, the Swiss Jules Humbert-Droz and the Italian Angelo Tasca. The meeting removed the last obstacle to forcing the ‘Third Period’ throughout the member parties of the Comintern, which culminated in the ‘purge’ of tens of thousands of leading party members, officials in the Comintern apparat and rank-and-file activist. Yet Stalin had little regard for the local consequences of these actions. In a letter written to Manuilsky in the spring of 1929, he stressed that at last the entire leadership of the KPD was in his hands. Symbolically, the welcome accorded to Thälmann at the KPD’s twelfth and final congress in July 1929 was ‘Heil Moscow!’ The KPD’s press now stylised Thälmann as the ‘German Stalin’ – a model communist to be emulated.
Bayerlein’s essay also extends beyond the immediate boundaries of the ‘Thälmann Scandal’, assessing, most notably, the German party leader’s relationship with Stalin. Before Thälmann’s arrest by the Nazis in 1933, Stalin cultivated a personal¬-seeming ‘friendship between men’ (Männerfreundschaft). In 1928, Thälmann had five meetings with Stalin, including one private meeting, making him the general secretary’s most frequent visitor in Moscow.[ 5 ] In Thälmann Stalin had identified an ultra-loyal German follower. Yet, after Thälmann’s arrest Stalin did nothing to assist his release, as was done for the Hungarian Comintern official Rakosi and was possible on a significant scale after the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939. Here Bayerlein draws on his role as one of the editors of the German edition of the Dimitrov Diaries to make the convincing case that Stalin believed Thälmann had been ‘turned’ by the Nazis. During a discussion in 1941, as the Comintern was being evacuated in the face of the Wehrmacht’s advance into Soviet Russia, Dimitrov recalled how Stalin casually informed him:
Obviously Thälmann is being worked on there in various ways. He is not loyal to the principles of Marxism, and his letters are witness to the influence of fascist ideology […The Nazis] will not kill him because they obviously hope to be able to make use of him on demand as a “reasonable” Communist (pp62-63).
As the editors point out, the personal relationship between Thälmann and his Soviet patron was a ‘parable’ of stalinism as an arbitrary and brutal political system; an international movement in which all foreign influences were regarded as a virus likely only to weaken the Soviet body politic.
This volume is an important contribution to the understanding of the decision-making processes in the KPD, the Comintern and the wider communist movement. A compelling case is made for identifying the ‘Wittorf Affair’ as the key turning point in the stalinisation of the KPD, the removal of Bukharin as head of the Comintern and the point at which the policies of the ‘Third Period’ were uniformly forced on the world communist movement. However, these erudite and interesting introductions never substantially depart from ‘history from above’. Scholars are left no wiser about the impact of these events among ‘ordinary’ party members – although the documentation published could have facilitated this. For example, there is no discussion of how the ‘palace coup’ precipitated something close to a revolution among those local activists who did not want to risk the potentially devastating effects of another ‘left turn’, especially in trade union work.[ 6 ] The editors also emphasise the connection between Stalin’s policy in Germany and the Nazis’ ‘seizure of power’. But to assume that a united workers’ movement could have prevented the collapse of the Weimar Republic is ‘what-if’ history, and fails to account for why the KPD and its supporters wanted bring down Germany’s first, failing democracy. In the post-Cold War world, it reads like a return to the rationale of a bygone era. The editors could also have stressed that almost no German communist leader ever wanted to leave the Comintern – on the ‘Right’ or ‘Left’ of the party. Emphasising Clara Zetkin’s hostility to the Third Period and the Comintern’s degeneration ‘from a living, political organism into a dead mechanism’ of Soviet domination fails to engage with why she, too, stayed in the KPD. But another omission is more important than any of these considerations, and it is pointed out by editors themselves: the continued lack a critical biography of Thälmann. It can only be hoped that the subject will soon finds its historian, who will unravel the myths constructed by East Germany’s official historians of Thälmann as the emblem of the ‘antifascist tradition’ and epitome the communist virtues.
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Communist History Network Newsletter, Issue 19, Spring 2006 |
