obeyed all the commands of the advancing army of Tukhachevsky.
Members of the Polish Communist Party aided us in organizing sabotage, in creating diversions, and in impeding the arrival of munitions from France. We organized a strike in Danzig to prevent the landing of French munitions for the Polish army. I traveled to Warsaw, Cracow, Lemberg, German and Czech Silesia and to Vienna, organizing strikes to stop arms shipments. I organized a successful railroad strike in the Czech railroad junction of Oderberg, persuading the Czech trainmen to walk out, rather than handle Skoda munitions for the Poland of Pilsudski.
“Railroad workers!” I wrote in a leaflet. “You are transporting on your line guns to slaughter your Russian working-class brothers.”
At the same time, a Polish Soviet government, organized in anticipation of the capture of Warsaw, was moving with Tukhachevsky’s staff toward the Polish capital. Felix Djershinski, veteran Polish revolutionist and head of the Russian Cheka (the earlier name for the Ogpu) had been appointed by Moscow to head this government.
The Russo-Polish war was the one serious attempt made by Moscow to carry Bolshevism into Western Europe on the points of bayonets. It failed, despite all our efforts, military and political, despite the victories of the Red Army, and although we had a Polish section of the Comintern working with our political agitators and intelligence men behind the Polish front. In the end the exhausted Red Army was forced to fall back. Pilsudski remained master of Poland. Lenin’s hope of joining hands through Poland, with the revolutionary workers of Germany and helping them extend the revolution to the Rhine was lost.
The idea of hastening Bolshevist Revolution through military invasion had been entertained earlier, in 1919, during the existence of the short-lived Hungarian and Bavarian Soviet republics. Detachments of Red Guards were then only about a hundred miles from Hungarian territory. But the Bolsheviks were then too weak, and were moreover fighting against the Whites for their very existence.
By the beginning of 1921, when the treaty of Riga was signed between Russia and Poland, the Bolsheviks, and especially Lenin himself, realized that to bring successful revolutions to Western Europe was a serious and long-time task. There was no such hope of quick triumph on an international scale as had existed at the first and second Congresses of the Comintern when Zinoviev, its President, proclaimed that within one year all Europe would be Communist. Even after 1921, however, and as late as 1927, Moscow launched a series of revolutionary adventures and putsches.
In this series of irresponsible attempts, thousands of workers in Germany, in the Baltic and Balkan countries, and in China, were needlessly sacrificed. They were sent to slaughter by the Comintern on a gamble, with cooked-up schemes of military coups d’état, general strikes and rebellions none of which had any substantial chance of success.
Early in 1921 the situation in Russia was particularly threatening to the Soviet regime. Hunger, peasant uprisings, the revolt of the sailors in Kronstadt, and a general strike of the Petrograd workers, brought the government to the brink of disaster. All the victories of the Civil War seemed to have been in vain, as the Bolsheviks groped blindly in the face of opposition from those workers, peasants and sailors who had been their chief support. The Comintern, caught in this desperate situation, decided that the only way of saving Bolshevism was through a revolution in Germany. Zinoviev sent his trusted lieutenant Bela Kun, former head of the Hungarian Soviet republic, to Berlin.
Bela Kun appears in Berlin in March, 1921, with an order to the Central Committee of the German Communist Party from Zinoviev and the executive committee of the Comintern: There is a revolutionary situation in Germany. The Communist Party must seize power. The Central Committee of the German Communist Party is incredulous. The members can scarcely believe their ears. They know that they cannot hope to overthrow the Berlin government. But Bela Kun’s orders are clear: an immediate uprising, the abolition of the Weimar republic, and the establishment of a Communist dictatorship in Germany. The Central Committee of the German Communist Party obeys the instructions from Moscow. As a loyal subordinate of the Executive Committee of the Communist International headed by Zinoviev and directed by Lenin, Trotsky, Bukharin, Radek and Stalin, the German Communist Party it can not disobey.
On March twenty-second, a general strike was declared in the industrial districts of Mansfeld and Merseburg, central Germany. On March twenty-fourth, the Communists seized the city administration buildings at Hamburg. In Leipzig, Dresden, Chemnitz, and other cities of central Germany the Communists directed their attack upon court houses, city halls, public banks and police headquarters. The official German Communist newspaper, Die Rote Fahne, openly called for a revolution.
In the Mansfeld copper mining district, Max Hoelz, the Communist Robin Hood who had a year before single-handedly waged guerrilla warfare against the Berlin government throughout the Vogtland area of Saxony, arrived to announce that he was in charge of operations. About the same time a series of bombing outrages took place throughout Germany, including attempts to blow up public buildings and monuments in Berlin. In this the government recognized Hoelz’s expert hand.
On March twenty-fourth, the Communist workers in the huge nitrogen plant at Leuna, armed with rifles and hand grenades, barricaded themselves within the factory.
But the Communist effort to co-ordinate these localized actions broke down completely. Their loyal, trained party regulars responded to the call, and were sent to their death by the party, battalion after battalion, more ruthlessly than Ludendorff had sent his troops into battle. The great mass of workers neither responded to the call for a general strike, nor joined in the scattered outbreaks. By early April, the uprising had been put down everywhere.
The leader of the German Communist Party, Dr. Paul Levi, who had opposed the adventure as madness from the very start was expelled from the party for putting the blame in no uncertain language where it belonged.
He informed Moscow that it understood nothing of the conditions in Western Europe, that it had sacrificed the lives of thousands of workers upon an insane gamble. He referred to the Bolshevik leaders, and the emissaries of the Comintern as “scoundrels” and “cheap politicians.”
Within a short time after this March uprising, the Communist Party of Germany had lost half of its members. As for Max Hoelz, the Communist firebrand who expected to seize power by dynamite, he was tried on charges of “murder, arson, highway-robbery and fifty other counts” and sentenced to life imprisonment.
I was interested in Hoelz’s fate, because for all his wild notions, he was undoubtedly an honest and bold revolutionist. To the workers of his native Vogtland he has become a legendary figure. When I was stationed several years later in Breslau, where Hoelz was imprisoned, I established contact with one of his jailers who had become deeply attached to him. Through him I sent Hoelz books, chocolates and food. Together we plotted to liberate Hoelz. But it was necessary for me to obtain assistance as well as authorization from the Communist Party. I communicated with Hamann, the leader of the party in Breslau, and he promised to have several reliable men for me. I then went to Berlin and conferred with the Central Committee of the party. They debated the issue. Some wanted Hoelz released through a legal maneuver, such as electing him to the Reichstag. Others believed that his escape would be the very thing to galvanize the masses, who were then very apathetic to the Communist Party. I was granted permission to attempt the jail delivery. Upon my return to Breslau, however, the first thing Hoelz’s jailor told me was: “We have been ordered to chain up his door.”
The authorities had learned of our plot, through none other than Hamann himself, the leader of the Breslau Communists, member of the Reichstag—and police stool pigeon.
Hoelz was later released by legal means. Although I had been working to effect his escape and was in constant communication with him while in Breslau, I met him for the first time in Moscow in 1932, at the apartment of Kisch, the German Communist writer.
