UPDATE: Look to the West has been completed, and can be found in full down below:
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Look to the West
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The Second Comintern Congress had, prior to adjourning, formulated several important decisions, the most notable of which was the twenty-one conditions laying down strict guidelines for entry by a new party into the Comintern.
The congress also took a stance on the utilization of traditional forms of struggle, primarily parliamentary politics and trade unionism, to further the interests of revolutionaries operating in Europe. This recommended form of revolutionary strategy was in keeping with Lenin’s views hashed out in his influential ‘Left-wing’ Communism: An Infantile Disorder, attacking the communist ‘lefts’ for their aversion to participation in parliaments and trade unions. With its emphasis on making tactical compromises at the expense of stubbornly held ideological principles, the important work set the stage for the upcoming congress, the book itself having been given out to congress delegates upon their arrival.
Communist parties were actively encouraged to struggle within parliament, running candidates and participating in elections with the final aim of smashing the bourgeois representative institution. All that was needed to achieve this goal, in the opinion of Lenin and his fellow Bolsheviks, was the winning of mass support. At the same time, the communists were to remain pure and close knit. Still, this was harder said than done, no doubt contradictory in practice.
The struggle within the trade unions went side-by-side with the running of candidates in parliament, with a similar logic behind both tactics. British, Italian, and American participants in the Second Comintern Congress, feeling that the trade unions associated with the moribund Second International had betrayed the workers, were eager to gather communist workers into independent bodies separate from the old unions. Zinoviev, likewise, proved to be a staunch supporter of creating a new international organization designed to consolidate the much talked about red trade unions as an alternative to yellow unionism. As such, a rebirth of the European trade union movement was eagerly sought by the Russian Marxists, albeit one distinct from the reformist Amsterdam International linked to the traitorous Social-Democrats. A Red International of Trade Unions was eventually formed, spreading propaganda with the intent of winning over workers from yellow unions.
European communists were slow to organize.
In Britain, there existed only a desperate smattering of various left leaning groups operating throughout the country. Trade unionists, shop stewards, feminists, and various others advocating struggle both legal and illegal would coalesce into the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). Sylvia Pankhurst’s Socialist Workers’ Federation spearheaded the push to form the CPGB, effectively gathering up all of these isolated movements into a single large grouping. Her party, at its founding congress held on August 1st, 1920 in London, advocated participation in parliament and affiliation with the Labour Party.
A French communist party had been formed from the French Socialist Party, the latter of which was considered a reformist party that had committed the grave sin of supporting the war effort. A scattering of French syndicalists, confused by the French Socialist Party’s betrayal of class struggle and lacking any decisive leadership, gingerly opened up diplomatic channels with the broader European left. Loriot and Rosmer, two ardent French radicals, soon took the initiative and orientated their budding communist movement closer to the Comintern. In time, the Communist Party of France (PCF) would be created out of the ashes of the defunct Second International.
Bordiga, representing the left-wing in the Italian Socialist Party, arrayed his supporters against the right and center factions of the party. At the party’s congress held at Leghorn in January of 1921, Serrati’s hundred thousand strong center pushed the right out of the party, not willing to tolerate divergence from the official party line. After the predominately center congress voted to leave the Comintern, Bordiga and the left consequently went on to form the Italian Communist Party. (PCI)
New communist parties would appear throughout the whole of Europe, in the center as in the periphery, most of which remained relatively minor.
The most important major communist party in Europe to the Bolsheviks, without a doubt, was the German Communist Party (KPD). Leaders of the Spartakusbund, during the tumultuous German revolution, would form the KPD.
The revolution was sparked by mass unrest sweeping through the naval base in the port city of Kiel, lowly sailors turning against their officers in the waning days of the Great War.
The Navy High Command, eager to retain its honor, ordered the High Seas Fleet to steam out of harbor with the intent of locking horns with the much stronger British Grand Fleet. Realizing that they would all surely perish in a clearly lopsided battle against the British, which could only end in the total destruction of the High Seas Fleet, on the third of November around twenty thousand enraged sailors and dockworkers gathered at an exercise field just outside of the city. The many sailors hailing from the German Empire’s few remaining battleships and destroyers refused to commit suicide, all in the interest of safeguarding the ‘honor’ of their officers. Opting instead to liberate 180 of their fellow sailors from the battleship Markgraf, they marched up Feldstrasse singing the Internationale and carrying blazing torches, emboldened by fiery speeches from such colorful men as the naval stoker Karl Altelt and Arthur Popp of the Independent Social-Democratic Party of Germany (USPD), both of whom called for the Kaiser’s immediate abdication and the creation of a workers’ and sailors’ soviet. The marchers were promptly fired upon by counterrevolutionary volunteer sailors under the command of the reactionary Lieutenant Steinhauser, resulting in the deaths of numerous individuals within the sizable crowd.
Consequently, after having regrouped shortly after the shootings, the mutineers broke into arms lockers found both on their respective ships as well as on the mainland. The German revolution had begun.
Makeshift soviets embracing workers, peasants, soldiers, and sailors were formed nationwide, deepening the revolutionary foment spreading across an ailing nation tired of war.
Events moved quickly.
The Imperial German Army continued to fight fiercely on French and Belgian territory, machine gunners selflessly allowing their comrades-in-arms making up the bulk of the army to retreat by tying down tens of thousands of U.S. forces streaming through the Argonne Forest in droves.
General Ludendorff, getting cold feet upon seeing his forces crumble before him in the face of total defeat, found himself out of power as the Kaiser replaced the dictatorial military junta with a civilian chancellorship under Prince Max. The new chancellor, eager to put a final end to the bloody and entirely pointless fighting on the Western Front, ridded himself of the likes of Ludendorff, which allowed him to begin the gradual process of negotiating a binding peace treaty strictly on President Woodrow Wilson’s terms; the U.S. president did not want to hammer out a lasting peace with either paternalistic generals or even the Kaiser himself.
The monarchy was fatefully ended by Prince Max on November 9th by having the humiliated Kaiser abdicate from the throne, as a pragmatic means to put a lid on rising discontent in the capital and elsewhere. The long ruling and proud Hohenzollern dynasty had ceased to exist.
Germany was now a republic.
At the behest of Prince Max and fellow Majority Socialists, Friedrich Ebert was declared the new chancellor during a brief meeting in Berlin at the Chancellery Library. Prince Max simply wished him the best of luck before leaving Ebert to his own devices, probably half expecting to himself that the overweight forty-seven-year-old saddle-maker turned party stalwart could make do with what little means he had at his disposal.
Dissent faced the new, unproven chancellor on all sides.
In Bavaria, a nascent republic wholly independent from conservative, highly centralized Prussian rule was decisively proclaimed by a workers’ and soldiers’ soviet just two days before the Kaiser’s reign had ended. The aging Jewish social-democrat Kurt Eisner, a former amateur satirist and vocal antiwar political prisoner, merely strode into the local Munich parliament with his supporters close behind him and took charge. This was made possible after the traditional state leader, Ludwig III of Bavaria, a family member of the royal House of Wittelsbach, fled the disorder rocking the state in the wake of the collapse of the Reich. The plain fact that he had the broad support of the masses staunchly behind him was underscored by the gigantic crowd that had gathered on the westernmost side of the Theresienwiese field, enamored by powerful rhetoric delivered by dedicated socialists telling their audience to take power.
Although Bavaria possessed a long history first of independence and then loose autonomy after the unification of all German kingdoms, duchies, principalities, and free cities by Bismarck after 1871, Eisner chose to recognize the authority of Chancellor Ebert’s Berlin regime. The hero of the people had spoken. He had managed to put aside his many differences with the ruling chancellor as to offer up reconciliation, soon to be followed by the complete reintegration of the self-proclaimed Republic of Bavaria back into Germany. It was no surprise, then, that the Munich Landtag elections held on January 12th proved overwhelmingly favorable to the somewhat short, big black hat wearing suited politician and his Independent Socialist comrades.
Berlin, on the other hand, was blighted by a bloody uprising led by the Spartakusbund. Chancellor Ebert had every right to feel nervous as he walked ceaselessly around his office, for Berlin had been gripped by a feverish frenzy of riots and strikes in recent days. The streets were devoid of police, the guns from the local police headquarters distributed generously amongst liberated political prisoners by the Independent Socialist and new ‘police commissioner’ Emil Eichhorn. While Karl Liebknecht rallied Berlin’s surging proletariat around the red banner of labor, Rosa Luxemburg worked relentlessly on Die Rote Fahne, as to best get the revolutionary word out through the use of a captured printing press seized from a more conservative, soon to be dissolved political force.
Chancellor Friedrich Ebert, luckily, not only had the support of the army behind him but that of the Freikorps as well. War veterans bound together as brothers through the hell of a war that had been ended only months before on November 11th, these defeated but proud warriors were eager to cleanse Berlin and ultimately all of Germany of the traitorous Red menace.
Communist units, sporting red armbands that had spontaneously become symbolic of the quickly unfolding revolution, took over Berlin’s railway stations. Crack shots situated high above the city atop the Brandenburg Gate covered the main avenue leading into the very heart of the capital. Ever patient, the first Freikorps men of the Potsdam Regiment entered the city while the iron was still hot on the ninth of January, chewing up an office building defended by the Reds with trench motors and machineguns. Holes were blasted into the collapsing roof while machinegun fire cut through windows mercilessly. As heavy artillery was brought to bear against the defenders, now cowering deep within the walls of the office building, tanks and armored cars tore away at the already collapsing structure with awesome firepower. Potato masher grenades, for good measure, were thrown through shattered windows bathed shortly thereafter in fire sent forth from hulking flamethrowers wielded by the most daring of Freikorps veterans. The white flag of surrender had been raised by the few surviving communists without any hesitation.
The Freikorps next fanned out through the city, seizing control of ‘Red Berlin’ in its entirety, facing almost no opposition as they did so.
Searing, bright searchlights shone directly onto buildings emanating from armored cars, which ran their way lazily down the streets of Berlin’s working-class districts. Armed foot patrols only added to the sense of sheer terror that must have been felt by the average proletarian watching in stunned silence the grim spectacle unfolding before them. Luxemburg and Liebkneckt, both hiding from the marauding counterrevolutionary bands of ex-soldiers in the same nondescript apartment building, managed to slip away undetected in the dead of night. They fled south to Bavaria in search of refuge. All that it would have taken for them to be arrested and probably murdered was a simple tipoff given by an informed citizen passing by a foot patrol. But no such informed citizen came by a patrol who was at the same time eager to see the two treasonous radicals executed.
In the aftermath of the crushing of the Red uprising in Berlin, the defiant KPD leadership held the Heidelberg Congress, which got its name from the Hamburg neighborhood in which it was secretly convened.
Levi, a thirty-six-year-old son of a banker with a penchant for luxurious bourgeois living, led the party congress in the absence of Luxemburg and Liebkneckt, both of whom were welcomed with open arms by the Independent Socialist Eisner once they finally arrived safely into Munich.
The Zentral asserted that the German revolution was to be a long, drawn out process of trial and error. Levi likewise asserted at the congress that the KPD should focus solely on participation in the Reichstag and in the trade unions respectively. In this way, class consciousness could and ultimately would be developed slowly amongst the proletariat by the communists.
The model of federalism within the party was adopted, as to better unify the KPD’s scattered local activists. A motion condemning passive resistance and sabotage was furthermore narrowly carried by a vote of 25 to 23, much to the disappointment of the leftist faction in the KPD; the leftist faction was represented by a varied grouping of men such as Laufenberg, Wolffeim, Wender, Becker, and numerous others, all of whom disagreed sharply with Levi’s antagonistic policies.
However, the KPD would remain wholly united despite deep divisions brought forth by the several controversial motions passed as part of the overarching theses. Radek managed to get a letter sent to Levi just in time while the congress was still in session, discouraging the petty-bourgeois intellectual from forcing an unnecessary split in the party. Levi, agreeing upon reading it, simply dropped the motion forcing leftist dissenters out of the KPD.
The finalized theses as championed by Levi was promptly adopted by an overwhelming majority of delegates.
Although the leftist opposition grumbled a bit, they regardless stayed within the ranks of the party.
By March of 1920, discontent amongst officers with the Treaty of Versailles that had been forced onto the country against the prestige of the military simmered. The officers wanted known war criminals to be sent back to Germany as free men, discontented further still by the strict provisions of the treaty that significantly chipped away at the size and strength of the armed forces.
General von Luttwitz, who believed himself to be the direct successor to Hindenburg, sought to protect the honor and tradition of the army whatever the costs.
The ambitious general absolutely loathed the Weimar government, which he viewed as fickle. Martial law was to be the answer to the impotence of the republic. To do this, he arranged a conspiracy with generals Enrhardt and Ludendorff along with the Prussian director of agriculture Wolfgang Kapp, the latter of whom installed himself in the Chancellery after Enrhardt occupied Berlin with his troops.
Imperial tricolor flags flew on all public buildings once the autocracy was firmly established in place of republicanism as personified and led by Defense Minister Gustav Noske and President Ebert. In a panic, both leaders along with bureaucrats too numerous to name would flee to Dresden hoping to be protected by the loyalist General Maerchker.
The organized left was quick to act. Legien, a staunch revisionist and notorious supporter of class collaboration, nonetheless immediately convened a meeting of the General Commission of Trade Unions to oppose the putsch. The defense of the republic was to be the watchword of the day.
Due to the glaring differences between the moderate socialists and their radical counterparts, two separate centers of struggle based off of the trade unions were formed. The All-German General Trade Unions (ADGB), the Free Trade Unions (AFA), and various civil servants’ associations were led by the SPD, while the USPD and the KPD drew together left leaning labor union leaders around them in Berlin, Rusch, and elsewhere.
Fights soon erupted between workers and soldiers across Germany.
In Chemnitz, an Arbeiterwehr was created to defend the nascent committee of action, which included all trade unions and workers’ parties. The hastily formed workers’ militia took over control of the local police station, post office, and city hall. A similar committee of action inspired by the one created in Chemnitz was also formed in Stettin.
Armed clashes raged in Leipzig, Frankfurt, Halle, and in Kiel where another munity had taken place, the sailors of the Wilhelmshaven port arresting their commander Admiral von Leventzow and a coterie of officers.
A Ruhr Red Army was hastily cobbled together in Hagen by the miner Stemmer and the metal worker Josef Ernst, who sent off 2,000 armed workers to Wetter to bolster workers there battling the local Freikorps. In time, Dortmund would be seized by the Ruhr Red Army.
In the economically depressed region of Erzgebirg-Vogtlang, KPD activist Max Hoelz organized a Red Guard made up of the unemployed and youth. His loose, ragtag force stormed the prison at Ploven as its first dramatic act of resistance. To finance his army, bank and shop assets were seized. The daring commander, who was treated by workers as a modern-day Robin Hood after having improved the food supply to working-class districts, would continue to harass isolated Reichswehr detachments during the opening stages of the German Civil War. Although his adventurous actions were condemned by the KPD Zentral at first, his urban guerilla warfare tactics were reluctantly recognized as decisive in the fight against the reactionaries once the civil war initially began. As a result, Max Hoelz was given a surprising amount of autonomy even after the creation of a formal, national Red Army in the early days of the conflict.
Back in Berlin, the Kapp regime couldn’t even get a single poster set up as the trains stopped and the trams all the same. Water, gas, and electricity supplies were also severed. Kapp would desperately open up negotiations with Vice-Chancellor Schiffner, representative of the legitimate Bauer government. Meanwhile, General Groener began negotiations with President Ebert around the same time.
By March 17th it looked as if the tottering regime of Wolfgang Kapp would swiftly crumble.
But the dying order brought to power by military fiat chose to go down with a blaze of glory. Against the wishes of Berlin’s leading industrialists, General von Luttwitz ordered the mass shooting of workers in the capital. The first shots were fired in the Berlin working-class district of Neukolln, which only resulted in much bloodshed and, detrimentally to the military dictatorship, a mass demonstration of workers down the streets of the capital. Armed with weapons given to them by fraternizing Reichswehr troops, the Chancellery where Kapp still stayed despite everything was stormed by the unwashed masses who clashed with any remaining Reichswehr men outside who had yet to see the writing on the wall.
In only a few days of fierce fighting, the capital was under the total control of armed workers, who at once set up a committee of action and an accompanying military committee to oversee the creation of a Red Guard workers’ militia.
The legitimate Weimar government leaders, now based in Stuttgart under the protection of General Bergmann after Maerchker had earlier fallen out of favor, were furious. However, with the capital firmly under the control of the Red Guard, there was little that that they could do about it.
Meanwhile, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebkneckt ventured forth from Munich over to Berlin. The capital had changed greatly since it first fell to those wishing to restore the Reich; the KPD, SPD, and USPD party branches had been revived, while a Berlin Soviet had been setup by the masses just prior to the reestablishment of traditional party politics.
Luxemburg at once began working on Die Rote Fahne again, writing a relentless flurry of fiery articles calling primarily for the convening of a Second All-Germany Congress of Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’, and Peasants’ Deputies to take place in the capital.
At the time, there were only two soviets, one in Chemnitz and the other in the Ruhr. However, the nation was pockmarked due to the unrest by a series of vollusrate or executive committees, which would quickly push to form proper regional soviets. These regional soviets would immediately dissolve all municipalities, fix rents and rates, and implement universal labor service, in doing so effectively dissolving the bourgeois state at the local level.
It was amidst this hopeful atmosphere that Radek returned to Berlin with the reopening of the Russian legation.
The nature of what form the new revolutionary regime would take took center stage in the various debates and speeches put forth at the fractious, heated, and sometime chaotic Second All-Germany Soviet Congress.
Radek, along with Luxemburg, Liebneckt, and the three fellow German communist leaders Pieck, Heckert, and Brandler had Lenin’s sincere endorsement when it came to the creation of a multiparty ‘socialist-communist’ government.
Already, while in Munich, Luxemburg and Liebneckt had taken the left faction of the wavering USPD with them. The majority left faction merged with the KPD, greatly augmenting the already powerful presence of the KPD at the congress. The KPD, due to the merger, would become known henceforth as the United Communist Part of Germany (VKPD)
It became clear, as the tense proceedings wore on, that the right-wing SPD deputies had become sidelined by those left SPD deputies not willing to take orders from President Ebert in far off Stuttgart. After the rightist deputies left the meeting hall in disgust, the left deputies voted unanimously in favor of a ‘socialist-communist’ government, which would be ruled jointly by the VKPD and the left-wing of the SPD respectively. The right-wing Congressional section consisting of a rump USPD and the SPD remained in direct opposition to the nascent Soviet government, who vacated the Congress hall and vowed to staunchly support the ‘proper authorities’ in Stuttgart.
A new Council of People’s Deputies was created at the Congress to replace the old one, with Liebneckt serving as Volksbeauftragten Chairman and Luxemburg as Secretary.
The Second All-Germany Soviet Congress wrapped up by announcing the holding of a tribunal to punish Generals Ludendorff and Hindenburg, among others, for their part in leading the proletarian masses to their deaths in the Great War (The measure was passed at Rosa Luxemburg’s behest, who had proposed such a measure in her earlier writings dating back to the first revolutionary setbacks of 1918-19, much to her utmost pleasure) and the creation of a security organ designed to combat counterrevolution; yearning to distance themselves from naming it after the dreaded Cheka, the Congress delegates on Levi’s urging agreed to name the regime’s new security organ the VolksPolizeiamt (People’s Police Office)
At its closing, the delegates elected an executive committee to function as the supreme organ of executive and legislative power to govern when the Soviet German Congress was not in session. Work also began on the drafting of a constitution for the United German Socialist Republic, the laborous process put aside only because the defense of the revolution was paramount at the moment. Regardless, a preamble modeled closely after the Bolshevist Declaration of Rights of the Working and Exploited People was nonetheless created to be implemented in the future constitution.
Swiftly, the Volksbeauftragten sprang into action, issuing a seemingly relentless torrent of revolutionary decrees. Decrees were issued unifying Berlin’s numerous factories under factory committee control, nationalizing banking and, at Luxemburg’s insistence, socializing childcare and providing quality care for the elderly and universal healthcare.
Ever zealous, Luxemburg sought to not only abolish the nation’s war and munitions industries but also to collective agriculture. Liebkneckt, as Volksbeauftragten Chairman, had the final say, however. After consulting with the respective People’s Deputy for Trade and Industry and the People’s Deputy for Agriculture, he chided her.
He pointed out to her that the revolutionary regime must be armed, up to an including the formation of a ‘Socialist Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army’ on the Bolshevik model. As for the agricultural question, he merely pointed to Lenin’s failed attempts to organize Committees of Poor Peasants in the Russian countryside. Luxemburg had wanted to mobilize the landless proletarians and poorer peasants against the rich ‘rural bloodsuckers.’ As for collectivization, assuming it was to begin at all, would have to be a gradual process of trial and error. For the time being, he told her, the Soviet government must refrain from antagonizing the peasantry as a whole by abolishing small land holdings and inciting class warfare in the villages. A Decree on Land was promptly issued by Liebkneckt, merely announcing the redistribution of land and nothing more.
Hungary, too, likewise caught the attention of the Bolsheviks. The young soviet republic there would serve to add a second European nation to the revolutionary camp. Despite its backwardness, developments in the small nation of Hungary were watched closely.
