He Made a Deal with Stalin to Survive — Stalin Killed Him Anyway | The Story of Karl Radek – HT
January 23rd, 1937, Moscow. The second of what would become known as the show trials. 17 men are charged with treason, terrorism, espionage, and sabotage. The outcome has already been decided. The confessions have already been signed. This is not a trial. It is a performance and everyone in the room knows it.
What nobody expected was that one of the defendants would give the performance of his life. His name was Carl Radc. He was 51 years old, small and thin, with thick spectacles and a fringe beard that made him look, in the words of one observer, like an oldtime pirate. He was the wittiest man in the Soviet Union.
He was also the most dangerous man in that courtroom. Not because of what he had done, but because of what he was about to say. 13 of the 17 defendants at that trial were shot within hours of the verdict. Rodic was not among them. He had made a deal. This is his story. He was born Carol Soilson on October the 31st, 1885 in the city of Lemburgg.
A place that has been claimed by so many countries over so many centuries that its very name changes depending on who is telling the story. His family was Jewish, of Lithuanian descent. His father worked in the post office and died while Carl was still young. There was not much money. There was apparently a great deal of reading.
He took his alias from a novel, a character named Andre Radc in Stefan Geromsky’s book, The Labors of Sisphus, a story about a boy from a poor family trying to make his way through a world not built for him. The name fit. He kept it for the rest of his life. As a teenager, he joined the revolutionary left.
By the time he was 20, he was in Warsaw working on an underground newspaper, taking part in the 1905 revolution and getting arrested for it. In prison, he taught himself Russian. It was a productive use of the time. After his release, he went to Germany, worked as a journalist for the German Social Democratic Party in Leipig and then Brmond built a reputation sharp, fast, provocative, attacked the party’s leading theorist, Carl Kowsky, in print, made enemies quickly, and did not seem to mind.
He was expelled from the Polish Socialist Party in 1912, accused of stealing books, clothes, and money from party comrades. The charges were never conclusively proven. They were never conclusively cleared either. Rodek denied everything and his enemies brought it up for the rest of his life.
He was then expelled from the German Socialist Party as well. two party expulsions before the revolution. He had been thrown out of every organization that tried to contain him. In 1915 at an anti-war conference in the Swiss village of Zimmervald, Radc met Vladimir Lenin for the first time. They argued.
They agreed on the important things. Lenin recognized in Rodek something he valued. a man who could write, who could think quickly, and who was not attached to any institution that might make him cautious. What Lenin perhaps did not fully appreciate was that this quality had already gotten Radic expelled from two parties. In April 1917, after the fall of Thesar, Lenin and approximately 30 other Bolsheviks boarded a sealed train in Switzerland and rode it through Germany toward Russia and the revolution.
Rodek was on the train. At the Russian border, everyone was allowed to enter except Rodek. The Russian authorities refused him entry. His papers were wrong. His nationality was ambiguous. The bureaucracy had decided he did not qualify. Lenin’s sealed train crossed into Russia without him.
He went to Stockholm instead, set up a printing operation, produced Bolevik publications in German, did from Stockholm what he would have done from Petrorad. When the October Revolution succeeded, he made his way to Russia at last and arrived the day after the uprising. He had missed the revolution by one day. It did not slow him down.
After the October revolution, Radc became vice commasar foreign affairs, took part in the breast leavsk negotiations and was elected to the bolevik central committee and then secretary of the common turn. He was at the center of everything. And then in December 1918, when the German Kaiser’s Empire collapsed and revolution seemed possible in Berlin, Rodek crossed the German border illegally, disguised as an Austrian prisoner of war on his way home to help found the Communist Party of Germany. The Spartacist uprising of
January 1919 was not something Radic had advised. He thought the timing was wrong, the preparation insufficient. He said so. He was arrested anyway. February 12th, 1919, and placed in Moab beatat prison in Berlin. While he sat in his cell, Rosa Luxmbourg and Carl Lee Connect, the leaders of the uprising, the people he had come to Germany to work with, were beaten and shot by right-wing soldiers.
Their bodies were thrown into a canal. Radc in prison was safer than they were outside it. He spent nearly a year in Moabitete. And in that time, something unusual happened. Germany was trying to figure out its relationship with Soviet Russia. The idea of a new alliance, nations humiliated by the Versailles treaty, principally Germany and Russia, was gaining ground in Berlin.
And Rodek, as the most prominent Bolevik in Germany, became a man worth talking to. They came to his cell, industrialists, politicians, military figures, Walter Rothanau and Ver Pasha. Rodc held what amounted to a political salon from inside a German prison, conducting the diplomacy of a revolution from behind bars, a pipe in his mouth, and a stack of books on the floor.
He was released in January 1920 and returned to Moscow. The man who could not be kept out of Russia, who could not be kept out of Germany, who could not be kept in prison, was now briefly at the height of his powers. From 1920 to 1923, Carl Radc was one of the most important figures in international communism.
He wrote constantly, two editorials a day for Pravda and his Vestia, radio dispatches, pamphlets, speeches. He received foreign delegates daily. He spoke every major European language. He knew things that nobody else knew, and he knew how to say them in ways that stuck. Victor Serge, who knew him in this period, described him as a sparkling writer with an equal flare for synthesis and for sarcasm.
Thin, nervous, full of anecdotes that often had a savage side. And then in 1923, the German Revolution failed. Rodek had traveled to Germany with a plan and a lover. Lissa Risner, a Soviet writer of considerable brilliance who was married to another man under false identities to spark a German worker’s uprising. The plan collapsed at Kemnets when the Communist Party leadership canled the insurrection at the last moment.
Rodek had staked everything on it. It had produced nothing. Gregori Zenovf, his rival, his enemy, used the failure to destroy him. At the fifth congress of the common turn, Radic and his ally Hinrich Brandler were made the scapegoats. Radicc was removed from the Common Executive Committee, then from the Central Committee.
He had been thrown out of two socialist parties before the revolution. Now he was being pushed to the margins of the one he had helped to build. In 1925 he was made prost of the newly established Sununyatsen University in Moscow. A prestigious sounding position that was in reality a way of keeping him occupied and away from real power.
Then Lissa Risner died of typhoid in 1926. She was 30 years old. Those who knew Radic said her death changed him. The caution he had been maintaining, the careful positioning, the hedging, fell away. He began arguing openly against Stalin’s doctrine of socialism in one country. He began saying in public what he had been saying in private.
In 1927, he was expelled from the Bolevik party. In 1928, he was exiled to Siberia. In Siberia, Radic had time to think. He thought about what Trosky represented and what Stalin represented and what the odds were. He thought about the trajectory of the revolution and where it was going. He thought about what he was willing to do to come back.
On July 10th, 1929, Rodk signed a document of capitulation to Stalin. He was not the only one, but what he did next made him singular. A man named Yakov Blumin came to see Rodic. Blumin was a Troskyist, a true believer, one of the men who had not broken. He was carrying a secret letter from Trosky who was by now in exile in Turkey addressed to Rodek.
Rodc read the letter and then Rodek reported Blumin to the NKVD. Blumin was arrested. He was shot. Trosky when he heard what had happened wrote that Rodek had committed an act of pure betrayal. The opposition what remained of it never forgave him. Rodek came back to Moscow, was readmitted to the party in 1930, joined the editorial board of Isvestia, became one of the Soviet Union’s most prominent commentators on foreign affairs.
He wrote about the rise of Hitler with great insight. He attended international conferences. He praised Stalin publicly and profusely. And in the evenings, apparently he told jokes. Carl Rodek was credited across Moscow with originating some of the sharpest, most dangerous political jokes about Stalin circulating in this period.
The kind of jokes that could get a person shot for repeating them, told in whispers at dinner tables across the city. He wrote the propaganda. He mocked the propaganda. He seems to have been unable to help himself. In 1934, he co-authored the Soviet Constitution, the document that declared the USSR the most democratic state in the world at the precise moment it was becoming the opposite.
He knew what it was. He wrote it anyway. In October 1936, Radc was arrested. He had watched the first Moscow trial two months earlier, had seen Zenovv and Kamev confess to crimes they had not committed and be shot within hours of the verdict. He understood the mechanics of what was happening. For 2 and 1/2 months, the NKVD interrogated him.
When Rodek appeared in court on January 23rd, 1937, the foreign journalists in the gallery expected to see a broken man, a hollow recitation, eyes that looked at nothing. That is not what they saw. Rodek was sharp. He was composed. He sparred with the prosecutor, Andre Visinsky, in a way that left observers genuinely uncertain whether they were watching a man confessing or a man performing a confession and whether there was any difference.
The American diplomat George Kennan who served as interpreter for the US ambassador wrote afterwards that the exchange between Vashinsky and Rodek was a magnificent verbal duel. that Rodek was clearly confessing for reasons of his own that the confession was not simply the product of a broken man but of a calculating one.
Rodek confessed to everything and in confessing he named names. Nikolai Bukarin, Alexe Roff, Marshall Tukachevski. He handed Stalin the pretext for the third Moscow trial and the military purge that followed. Thousands of people would be arrested and killed on the basis of what Rodic said in that courtroom over those eight days. He knew what he was doing.
He had made a deal, his life, in exchange for everything he could give them. 13 of the 17 defendants were taken from the courtroom and shot. Rodek and three others received 10-year sentences. He had calculated correctly. He had survived. Rodek was sent to the Verk Nuralsk political isolator in the Urals. He had bought himself time.
The question was how much. In the camp he encountered men from the opposition, men who had refused to confess, who had watched what Radic did at the trial with something that was not admiration. former comrades, former colleagues, men who remembered Blumin. On May 19th, 1939, Carl Radc died in the prison. The official account said he was killed in a fight with a fellow prisoner.
A former left opposition member named Vesnikov. The investigation conducted after Kruch’s Thaw established something different. The murder had been organized by the NKVD under direct orders of barrier, supervised by a senior operative named Ptor Kubatkin. Stalin had used him and then had him killed.
The deal had bought him 2 years and 4 months. Carl Radc had been expelled from two socialist parties for dishonesty. He had been imprisoned in Germany, exiled to Siberia, stripped of every position he had earned. He had betrayed Blumin. He had named names at the trial. He had done everything a man could do to survive in Stalin’s system. He was the cleverest man in every room he ever entered.
In the end, it did not matter. Stalin did not need clever men. He needed useful ones. And when Rodex stopped being useful, the calculation he had built his life around turned out to have one more variable that he had not accounted for. Joseph Stalin.