The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

Sylvia Pankhurst’s Communist Workers’ Party (CWP), formed from sections expelled from the British CP and
attached to the KAI, tried to imitate the KAPD by artificially forming ‘All Workers Unions’. The CWP seems to
have had contacts in India and South Africa. At least, this was what the KAI claimed in Berlin. But the
organisation’s theoretical weakness and localism tinted with anarchism got the better of it in 1924. All that
remained was the Glasgow group ‘The Commune’, led by Guy Aldred, and situated somewhere between
Bakunin and ‘council communism’ (see Chapter 6).
The existence of a Russian KAP, much trumpeted by the Essen tendency, appears to have been a bluff. In fact it
consisted of two Russians, who lived in Berlin and translated documents for the KAI. 646 The Berlin KAPD noted
ironically that the KAI had a strong tendency to building Potemkin villages. 647 Miasnikov’s Workers’ Group was
more real. Strictly clandestine, it nonetheless considered itself as an external fraction of the bolshevik party, “in
order to exercise decisive pressure on the ruling group of the party itself”. 648 It was attached to the KAI, but did
not long survive the attentions of the Cheka.
In Austria, the proclamation of a KAP in 1924 was another ‘Potemkin village’. The militants of this ‘party’,
whose press was printed in Berlin, could be counted on the fingers of one hand, and it soon disappeared. 649
In Germany itself, the Essen tendency was affected with the splitting virus. Its main theoretical figures left:
Goldstein in 1922, then Schröder in 1924 left to join the SPD, where they formed an opposition group with their
Varna tendency. After 1927, he contributed to the foundation of the BRP (Balgarska Rabotnitcheska Partiya, or ‘Bulgarian
Workers’ party’; legal cover of the CP, after 1927) in Burgas. He was interned in a lager (Khristo Pole) in 1941-42. He died
in September 1952 in Svishchov. [See: Entsiklopediya Balgariya, 4 Vols., Sofia, 1978-88.]
646 See: Die Kommunistische Arbeiter Internationale, Räte Internationale oder Führer Internationale?, p. 17-19; pamphlet
of the Berlin KAPD (1923). The two Russians in question were perhaps Kropf and Basil Ivanovich Ruminov. The former is
cited in a German police report [Lageberichte, R.K. 57 In., 11 October 1921] as being a member of the KAI’s information
bureau at the end of 1921. The second may have been the husband of Käthe Friedländer, who played a leading role in the
KAI’s international work. His name also appears spelt ‘Ramanov’ in letters in the Canne-Meijer archives, whence the name
Rumanova, which in the correspondence seems to refer to Käthe Friedländer. She (Katja in Russian) and ‘Raminov’ (in fact
her husband Vassili Ruminov [1894-?]) were excluded from the international work in January 1925, and then from the KAI
in autumn 1925, as attested by a circular of 4 th March 1926 (map 241/1, Canne-Meijer archives) entitled “warrant for
arrest”. Both were excluded “for their reformist attitude, links with groups of the Third International, and betrayal of the
organisation”. She and her husband were friends of the Franz and Cläre Jung couple, and joined probably the Rote Kämpfer
group at the beginnings of the 30s. They emigrated to New York, where they were living in 1971 [See: ‘Cläre Jung/Katja
und Wassili Ruminoff. Rote Kämpfer, Ein Briefwechsel’, in: Sklaven, Berlin, No. 49, Sept.-Oct. 1998.]
From 1922, Käthe Friedländer had represented the Communist Workers’ Party of Russia on the inner Executive of the KAI.
She was not formally a member of the Essen KAPD, doubtless because she worked at the Russian Trade Mission in Berlin
(map 38a/61). She worked with two other members of the inner Executive, Walter Dolling and Karl Schröder, who were
expelled in Mai 1924 [Rundschreiben, No. 3, Sept. 1924, map 238a/60]. It is difficult to determine whether the reason was
her support for the theories of Rosa Luxemburg against Pannekoek (idem), or her not very clear ties to the Russian
government, through her job with an institution of the Russian state.
647 Potemkin, the minister and lover of Catherine II, who during the empress’s tours of the country would build brand new
villages in order to hide from her the wretched reality of the Russian peasant’s existence. The KAPN claimed there existed a
section of the KAI in Africa, in fact a contact in Johannesburg [De Communistische Arbeider, No. 4, Jan. 1922].
648 ‘Manifesto of the Workers’ Group of the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik)’, 1923, published by the Essen KAPD,
reproduced in: G. Hillmann, Selbstkritik des Kommunismus (Reinbek: Rowohlt Verlag, 1967), translated into French in:
Invariance, No. 6, 1975. For the history of the Russian communist left, see: R.V. Daniels, The Conscience of the
Revolution: Communist Opposition in Soviet Russia (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1969).
649 The Vienna KAZ was printed in Mülheim (in the Ruhr) by Hugo Oelschläger. According to the Austrian police reports,
the KAP had some 20 members in 1922, much less in 1924. The editor of the Vienna KAZ in 1924 was Stanislaus Geiger
[2436 BKA für Inneres, 15/3, 1922-25, Polizei-Direktion in Wien, 11 th March 1924], an office worker and member of the
KPÖ in 1919. In 1927, he was a delegate to the first conference of the KPÖ opposition led by Josef Frey (1882-1957),
former president of the Vienna Council of Soldiers in the 1918 revolution, expelled from the ‘Party’ in 1927 as a trotskyist.
In 1928, Geiger was a member of the Kurt Landau group, though still keeping in contact with the Essen KAPD [Josef Frey
Archiv, Vienna, map 12]. (Documents kindly transmitted to me by the Austrian historian Hans Schafranek.)
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