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Rühle’s anti-party current. But the KAPD lost contact with their delegates, and, not knowing whether or not they
had arrived safely in Moscow, sent a second delegation, comprising Otto Rühle and August Merges.
In fact, Merges 475 , and still more Rühle – whose status as a party member was uncertain 476 – represented the
federalist minority, which wanted to dissolve the party, and in general all the communist parties, into a system of
Unionen. Out of hostility to any international centralisation, they consequently rejected implicitly the
International’s existence. Rühle travelled extensively in Russia, and came back to Germany convinced that the
revolution was degenerating, and that the dictatorship of the bolshevik party was “the springboard for the
appearance of a new soviet bourgeoisie”. And yet the two delegates – without referring to the KAPD – refused to
take part in the next Congress, despite the urging of Lenin, Zinoviev, Radek and Bukharin, who accorded them
advisory status in the proceedings. On their way home, in Petrograd, the Executive granted them a voting status,
not just advisory status, without even requiring them to accept unconditionally the decisions of the Congress, and
the KAPD’s entry into the KPD: “While we were already in Petrograd on the road home, the Executive sent after
us a new invitation to the Congress, with the statement that the KAPD had been allowed the right to the voting
status at the congress, even though it fulfilled none of the draconian conditions of the Open Letter [to the
KAPD], and had not promised to do so.”
Rühle and Merges refused, shocked by the reality of the ‘new Russia’, which Rühle had gone over before, with
an “abundance of impressions more unpleasant than pleasant”: “Russia was suffering in all of its limbs, from
every disease”. They had discussed with Radek, Zinoviev, Bukharin and Lenin. Radek said them that “they must
in the name of (their) party at the beginning of the Congress give the declaration that the KAPD will abide all
decision”. Both delegates would not fall in an ambush. According to Rühle, the (Komintern’s Congress) would
pronounce the death sentence upon the KAPD”, by “dissolving itself into the KPD”. But Rühle and Merges, by
declining all participation to the Komintern Congress, have lost also any hope to discuss with other left
communist opponents.
There followed a crisis in the KAPD, which ended with Rühle’s expulsion from the party. All the conditions
demanded by the Komintern – except the merger with the KPD, which itself had joined with the Independents –
were fulfilled. The ‘national-bolshevik’ and anti-party currents were expelled.
With the support of the KAPD leadership in Berlin, Gorter pushed with all his strength for joining the 3 rd
International. It was necessary, not to fight against the International but to fight within it for the triumph of the
KAPD’s viewpoint. There was little difference between this position and that – later it is true – of the Italian
Left. 477 But the idea of forming only an ‘opposition’ and not an international fraction within the Komintern made
resolutions, the dispatch of delegates to Moscow for the Congress, and the formation of a provisional joint organisation
bureau between the KPD and KAPD.
475 August Merges (1870-1945) was a leader of the ‘Revolutionsclub’ and the Spartakusbund in Braunschweig during the
war. Arrested for anti-militarism in 1916, in November 1918 he became president of the Braunschweig councils’ republic.
In February 1919, he was elected USPD deputy to both the Landstag and the Reichstag, but ostentatiously resigned his
mandate to become an anti-parliamentarian. Unlike Rühle, he remained a member of the KAPD at least until 1921, with
Pfemfert. A member of the AAU-E Union, in 1926 he joined Pfemfert’s Spartakus No. 2, which published the periodical
Spartakus until 1933. Under the Nazis he led a clandestine group, known as the ‘Merges-Gruppe’ until he was arrested in
1935, and condemned to the fortress. He only came out of prison at the end of the war, seriously tortured by the Gestapo, to
die shortly afterwards in March 1945. It is thus incorrect to say that he returned to the KPD and was killed by the SS in
1933, which is the version put forward by Pierre Broué [See, for a biography of Merges: P. Berger, Brunonia mit rotem
Halstuch. Novemberrevolution in Braunschweig 1918/19 (SOAK-Verlag, 1979), pp. 109-110].
476 No. 146 of KAZ (Oct. 1920), Berlin, maintained that Rühle had never been a member of the KAPD, and therefore could
not be expelled from it. After Rühle’s return, the KAPD declared its solidarity with him: its first Congress did not
“recognise the right of the Komintern’s Executive Committee to interfere with the KAPD’s affairs”. Rühle’s report on his
journey to Russia was published in Die Aktion, ‘Bericht über Moskau’, No. 39/40, 2 nd October 1920. Web (English
translation): “Report from Moscow”, .
477 It was only in 1925 that Onorato Damen (1893-1979) – rather than Bordiga – envisaged the formation of a fraction within
the PCI (the Comitato d’Intesa). The idea of an ‘international fraction’ was developed by the Italian Left in exile, following
its exclusion from the Komintern in 1926.
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