Leader
Karl Radek
Karol Sobelsohn · 1885–1939
Photograph, 1919. Wikimedia Commons.
Radek could write the revolution so that it sounded inevitable. He could also, under arrest, perform a confession that winked at its own fraud — and it did not save him.
Origin and religion
Born in Lemberg (Lviv), then in Austria-Hungary, to a Jewish family. Galician, Polish-speaking and German-speaking journalist, socialist, then Bolshevik. A cosmopolitan of the empire’s borderlands — the social type Liliana Riga’s research finds all over the early leadership, and not only among Jews.
Jewish family (born Sobelsohn) in Lemberg. Secular. Atheist.
Responsibilities
- Comintern propagandist and journalist
- Member of the Central Committee
- Defendant in the 1937 show trial
He was a voice of the Comintern in Europe, especially toward Germany, and a licensed satirist inside the party until the license was revoked. He sided at times with Trotsky, recanted, and was allowed back, briefly.
The record
Sentenced to ten years at the January 1937 trial, he was killed in a camp in 1939. Later accounts, including camp testimony, say criminal inmates murdered him at the administration’s convenience. The exact choreography is better attested than many camp killings and still short of a filmed record. Grade it as scholarship built on camp and investigative testimony.
What they said
No short quotation is filed here. A line that cannot be tied to a book, a decree, or a named archive does not get invented to make the page symmetrical. The record above is the case.
Others filed as Jewish
- Leon Trotsky — Chairman of the Petrograd Soviet (1917)
- Yakov Sverdlov — Chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee
- Grigory Zinoviev — Party boss of Petrograd
Evidence marks such as Opened archive are explained in How to read.