A Political Biography of Arkadij Maslow, 1891-1941

Dissident Against His Will

Mario Kessler

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783030432577
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book is a political biography of Arkadij Maksimovich Maslow (1891-1941), a German Communist politician and later a dissident and opponent to Stalin. Together with his political and common-law marriage partner, Ruth Fischer, Maslow briefly led the Communist Party of Germany, the KPD, and brought about its submission to Moscow. Afterwards Fischer and Maslow were removed from the KPD leadership in the fall of 1925 and expelled from the party a year later. Henceforth they both lived as communist outsiders—persecuted by both Hitler and Stalin. Maslow escaped to Cuba via France and Portugal and was murdered under dubious circumstances in Havana in November 1941. He died as a communist dissident committed to the cause of a radical-socialist labor movement that lay in ruins. Kessler considers Maslow's role in pivotal events such as the Bolshevik Revolution, in Sovietrevolutionary parties and organizations, through to the rise of Stalinism and Cold War anti-communism. What results isa deep dive into the life of a key yet understudied figure in dissident communism.

Afterword

Arkadij Maslow’s biography was shaped by the contradictions of the twentieth century, a century of extremes and catastrophes. It was a political life in the name of the Russian Revolution, in the shadow of the failed German Revolution, of the Fascist counter-revolution and of flight and exile.

Since the beginning of their political life Arkadij Maslow and his partner Ruth Fischer were among those looking for an alternative to the history of the recent past; a past marked by war, mass killings in the trenches and colonial oppression. For Maslow and Fischer, as for countless others, the communist movement was the only alternative. Two turning points in history, 1917, the year of the October Revolution, and 1933, the year the Nazi regime took power, determined their relationship to this movement. In between lay the Bolshevization of the communist parties, a process of consolidation and stagnation of this once lively movement to which they both contributed significantly.

Arkadij Maslow’s vita reflects all of the fractures of the communist movement between hopeful beginning, stagnation, and Stalinist terror. Maslow’s ultra radicalism was typical of many Communists in the early years of the Communist Party and the Comintern.

Their optimism was based on the view that the proletarian revolution was forthcoming, as reflected in the “Offensive Theory” as well as the March Action of 1921. However, KPD officials and journalists were able to adopt a completely different policy as circumstances changed. Heinrich Brandler soon became an advocate ofrealpolitik while Ernst Friesland alias Ernst Reuter went so far as to leave the KPD and turn to Social Democracy.

Two competing principles were consistently at odds inside the KPD: The desire to make the SPD superfluous while simultaneously realizing that a successful struggle for workers’ rights was impossible without cooperation with the Social Democrats. The KPD’s claim that it constituted the vanguard of the proletariat clashed with its reluctant insight that the Communists would gain political strength only through a united front with the Social Democrats. In the end the tendency toward self-isolation dominated, however.

It was the fatal mistake of the KPD that, almost from the beginning, it looked for scapegoats to blame for its failed policies instead of conducting an honest evaluation of its own mistakes. The actionist, ultra-left wing, viewing itself as the sole revolutionary vanguard in accordance with the laws of history, was particularly guilty of ever accusing intra-party opponents of abandoning or even betraying communist principles. Even the moderate wing defined itself largely in opposition to bourgeois society, no doubt also in reaction to the exclusion of Communists from this society with full support of the SPD. It was only in a few moments of crisis such as the Kapp Putsch or the aftermath of the murder of Walter Rathenau that the desire for self-preservation led the workers’ parties to transcend their mutual antagonisms and to carry out joint actions.

The division of the German workers’ movement between forces of revolution and reform was inevitable but went deeper than necessary. The majority of both Communists and Social Democrats were responsible for making the split irreversible. The USPD sought to overcome this division but failed politically. Therein lays an important part of the tragedy of the German workers’ movement.

This tragedy was the result of a double failure: The failure of Social Democracy between 1914 and 1918 as well as the Communist failure to build a movement linking democracy to socialism.

The political fallacies of the KPD did not start with the rise of Maslow and Fischer to the party leadership; however, their rise made these fallacies irreversible. They helped to destroy possible cooperation between the left parties by campaigning against the workers’ governments in Saxony and Thuringia.

Maslow and Fischer were Zinoviev’s main agents in the Bolshevization campaign that curtailed freedom of discussion in favor of creating a centralized KPD. The party accomplished what the historian Hermann Weber called the transformation of German communism under their leadership. Not only did they change the internal structures of the party, but Fischer and Maslow also replaced and dismissed large segments of the personnel apparatus.

They were nevertheless unable to resist the party’s subordination to Stalin , victor of the Soviet power struggles. Fischer and Maslow rejected Moscow’s attempts to bring the German party under total control, but nevertheless created precisely those conditions that made it possible. Thälmann’s success marked the end of the KPD as an autonomous political force.

The core problem was that Ruth Fischer and Arkadij Maslow were responsible for eliminating inner-party democracy before they themselves were forced to succumb to the new centralism. Had they succeeded in the KPD, an independent German communism might have arisen that would not have adhered to every change in Moscow. But perhaps the centralization and de-democratization of the party would have continued, the campaign for the expropriation of the German princes, which made a merger with the SPD necessary, would never have taken place, and the KPD would have fallen into mere self-isolation and remained there.

Instead, the Comintern and the KPD became instruments of Soviet policy. Above all, this prevented a united front against Fascism and led to the ultimate defeat of the German workers’ movement.

The KPD and SPD each share part of the blame for this tragic defeat. At first The Social Democrats marked the way to the abyss by entering into a pact with the military and the Free Corps. After that the Communists consistently continued along this path by pursuing their adventurous policies. All paid a heavy pric...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• A Young Revolutionary Between Russia and Germany
• The Decisive Moment: The German November Revolution
• On the Ultra-Left in the Early KPD
• The March Action and Its Aftermath
• Controversies Over Workers’ Government
• 1923 (I): The Ruhr Crisis
• 1923 (II): A Missed Revolution?
• Maslow and Fischer: Toward the Party Leadership
• Politics from Prison: The Bolshevization of the KPD
• Disagreements: The Divided Left
• Disempowerment and Fall
• The Leninbund: A New Beginning?
• Flight and Exile: Paris-Marseille-Lisbon-Havana
• Maslow’s Death
• Avenging Maslow? Ruth Fischer’s Crusade and Final Change of Mind
• Back Matter