HAIFA, Israel — The German historian and political scientist Otto-Ernst Schüddekopf wrote, “Walter Rathenau (the future German Foreign Minister, assassinated by the Nationalists in 1922 as one of the ‘ Elders of Zion’ – A.G.), who visited Radek in a Berlin prison in 1919 as an authority and read him his elegant theses with brilliance, in 1922 called him ‘an undeniably smart, but dirty guy, a true example of a nasty Jew.”
Karl Radek (Karol Sobelson) was born on October 31, 1885, in Lemberg, Austria-Hungary, to a Jewish family. He was educated at the History Department of the University of Krakow. The pseudonym Radek was inspired by the popular humorous character Andrzej Radek from the Polish playwright Stefan Żeromski’s play Sisyphus Labor (1897). Karl Radek made the mask of a humorous character for life, which passed under the sign of “red” humor, at times black, at times light, but always with a touch of cynicism.
In 1904, Radek joined the Social Democratic Party of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania. He was also a member of the social-democratic parties of Switzerland, Germany and Russia and collaborated with the future head of the CHEKA, the secret Soviet political police Felix Dzerzhinsky and with Rosa Luxemburg in the Polish Party. In 1912, Radek was accused of stealing books, clothes, and money from party members, and the party court expelled him from its ranks. His former party comrades began calling him Kradek, which means thief in Polish. Radek made no secret of the fact that he had appropriated a suit given to him by Rosa Luxemburg for a trip in which he was to perform some Party task. He laughingly played around with the nickname Kradek given to him by his Polish comrades: “Kradek is abbreviated Karl Radek.”
In 1913, Radek met Vladimir Lenin and Grigory Zinoviev and became a Bolshevik. In April 1917, he arrived in Lenin’s sealed wagon in Russia. In 1919-1924, Radek was a member of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party of the Bolsheviks. He became a supporter of Trotsky, but in 1923 the decline of Radek as a leader began: He bet on the brilliant Trotsky, but he lost to Stalin in the struggle for power, and Radek lost his position in the Comintern (Communist International). From chief he turned into a publicist. A Belgian revolutionary of Russian origin, Victor Serge (Kibalchich), who worked for the Comintern before leaving the USSR in 1936, wrote in his book Memoirs of a Revolutionary (1943): “Karl Radek was a brilliant writer. […] Thin, stunted, nervous, brimming with jokes, often cynical, realistic to the point of cruelty, he wore a beard growing a fringe around his clean-shaven face like an old pirate. His facial features were irregular and he wore thick tortoise-rimmed glasses over his nearsighted eyes. His gait, staccato gestures, protruding lips, and jubilant face made his appearance monkey-like and comical.”
Radek, who became a supporter of Trotsky, disowned him in writing in 1930. In 1931, Trotsky recalled Lenin’s attitude toward Radek, “Radek belongs to the ranks of professional wits and tellers of jokes. By this I do not mean to say that he has no other virtues. But it is enough that at the Seventh Party Congress, March 8, 1918, Lenin, generally very restrained in his remarks about people, found it possible to say: “I will return to Comrade Radek, and here I want to point out that he managed to say a serious phrase unintentionally.” […] My personal experience has taught me to treat Radek’s testimony with extreme caution: he usually does not recount events, but sets forth a witty feuilleton about them.” Radek was a joker and a clown, who enjoyed amusing Soviet nobles with his feuilletons. Here are a few of his jokes.
“We can have two parties — one in power, one in jail.” At writer Gorky’s birthday party, Radek said: “Since parks, airplanes, streets, collective farms, parks, and cities are already named after you, isn’t it left to rename all our lives?” (here Radek is playing around with the last name Gorky, which means bitter in Russian). “It is impossible to argue with Stalin: you give him a quote, he gives you a exile” (in Russian “exile” as punishment and ” citation” to a literary source are the same word). “Stalin asks Radek, “How can I get rid of bedbugs?” Radek replies, “Organize a collective farm out of them — they will disperse themselves.” Klim Voroshilov, a well-known Bolshevik and later Marshal of the Red Army, accused Radek in the mid-1920s of supporting the disgraced Lev Trotsky. Radek responded with an epigram:
“Ah, Klim, an empty head,
A manure-filled head!
Isn’t it better to be Lev’s tail
Than to be Stalin’s ass?”
(He means that in Russian the name Lev means the animal lion). The irony of fate was that a few years later Radek himself became “Stalin’s ass,” submitting to his power and praising the tyrant. Boris Bazhanov, who fled abroad in 1928, secretary of the Politburo (1923-1928), wrote in Memoirs of Stalin’s Secretary (1930): “A decent portion of the Soviet and anti-Soviet jokes were composed by Radek. I had the privilege of hearing them from him personally, firsthand, so to speak.” Bazhanov cites two jokes told to him by Radek. “When Stalin removed Trotsky and Zinoviev from the Politburo, Radek asked me when we met: ‘Comrade Bazhanov, what is the difference between Stalin and Moses? You don’t know. A big one: Moses led the Jews out of Egypt, and Stalin led them out of the Politburo.” (Radek is referring to the fact that Stalin expelled the Jews Zinoviev and Kamenev from the governing body of the Communist Party of the USSR Politburo. – A. G.)
Radek was secretary of the Third Communist International, the organization responsible for making the world revolution, but this project apparently made him laugh. Radek composed a joke in which he criticized Marx-Parvus-Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution: “The Jew got a prestigious stable job: he must climb the highest tower of the Kremlin every morning and look to the West in time to report the glow of world revolution. Many countries tried to poach the Jew to watch something else, but he refused: he needed a steady job.” Radek was apparently the first composer of anti-Soviet jokes.
Radek trusted no one. He understood that he was surrounded by bloodthirsty fanatics and treacherous murderers. Of Dzerzhinsky he said: “Felix died in time. […] He obeyed schemes and would not hesitate to get his hands dirty with our blood.” Until the very end, Radek wore the mask of a clown. When he was arrested as an “enemy of the people,” he remarked, “Contrary to all tales, it was not the interrogator who tortured me, but I tortured the interrogator. And I absolutely tortured him with my explanations and reasoning until I agreed to admit my counter-revolutionary traitorous activities and my crimes before the Party and the people.”
Radek’s humor was similar to Jewish humor in “borderline situations,” that is, in situations of crisis, danger, trials, in which the Jewish people often found themselves. Boris Yefimov, an artist of Jewish origin, wrote vividly about Radek’s cynicism: “In my view, Karl Radek is a typical vivid figure of an international adventurer. […] I am convinced that Radek believed neither in God, nor in the devil, nor in Marx, nor in the world revolution, nor in a bright communist future. And I think he joined the international revolutionary movement only because it gave him wide latitude for his innate qualities as a rebel, a seeker of thrills and adventures.”
The Karl Radek – Georgy Pyatakov trial, which took place in Moscow in 1937 after the Zinoviev – Kamenev trial, drew the attention of the Nazi leadership, which was criticized by Stalin’s prosecutors. The Nazis observed the phantasmagoria of Stalinist justice: the Bolsheviks in power accused their comrades of collaborating with the Nazis. Hitler tried to unravel the meaning of Stalin’s nonsense, the reason for the ridiculous accusations of old Bolsheviks working for his regime, among whom were many Jews.
Joseph Goebbels recorded Hitler’s reaction to the Radek-Pyatakov trial in his diary: “The Fuhrer is still in doubt whether there is a hidden anti-Semitic tendency. Maybe Stalin is going to teach the Jews a lesson after all.” The gruesome scene of Radek’s behavior at the trial in Moscow in January 1937 was described by one of those who attended it, the German writer Lion Feuchtwanger (Moscow.1937): “The writer Karl Radek, too, I am unlikely ever to forget. I shall not forget the way he sat there in his brown jacket, not his harmless thin face framed by an old-fashioned chestnut beard, nor the way he looked at the audience, most of whom were familiar to him, or at the other accused, often grinning, very coolly, often deliberately ironic, nor how he laid a hand on one or the other of the accused’s shoulders with a slight, gentle gesture as he entered, nor how he, acting a little posed, lightly scoffed at the other accused, showing his superiority as an actor – arrogant, skeptical, deft, literary educated. Suddenly pushing Pyatakov away from the microphone, he took his own place. He would slam a newspaper against the barrier, then take a glass of tea, toss a slice of lemon into it, stir it with a spoon, and, talking of monstrous deeds, drink the tea in small sips. Without drawing himself up at all, however, he gave his final word, in which he explained why he had confessed, and this statement, in spite of its casualness and perfectly finished wording, sounded touching, like the revelation of a man in great distress.”
Karl Radek was one of four convicts (seventeen in all) not sentenced to death. He engaged in self-incrimination and incriminated his comrades for acts hostile to Soviet power, which they did not commit.
Radek made a deal with the devil: He confessed to what Stalin needed in exchange for a promise to keep him alive. Radek fulfilled his part of the bargain — he confessed to crimes he had not committed, he slandered his comrades, and he invented plausible details of events that had never happened. Radek did not believe anyone and, above all, Stalin, but he had no choice: he relied on Stalin’s promise to keep him alive. Stalin, on the other hand, despised the clown Radek. He did not consider him worthy to die from a bullet, like the “serious” criminals sentenced to death. He sent a hired assassin to his cell: on May 19, 1939, Radek was beaten to death by a “prisoner” in a camp in Verkhneuralsk.
Like every prominent Bolshevik of Jewish origin, Radek increased the price Soviet Jews paid for the deeds of the Communist regime. In 1938, Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev, in his article “Christianity and Anti-Semitism: The Religious Fate of Jewry,” he wrote: “I recall that during my years in Soviet Russia at the height of the Communist Revolution, the Jewish landlord of the house where I lived when I met him often said, ‘What injustice, you will not be responsible for the fact that Lenin is Russian, while I will be responsible for the fact that Trotsky is a Jew.
The bloody bacchanalia that accompanied the “struggle for the victory of socialism” developed a tragic reaction – bitter laughter. Bloody tears and black humor became a popular reaction under Soviet rule. Amidst a sea of blood and tears, after disappointment with “socialism” and the loss of the ideals of the revolution, cynicism, opportunism, hypocrisy, and humor were born, of which Karl Radek was one of the creators.
He was not the leader of the revolution, but its jester, who sought popularity in a well-spoken word, in a pun and a joke. He was a chillingly talented collaborator in the bloody, deceitful play of the tyrant and the executioner. He composed jokes and willingly distributed them even when the bloody phantasmagoria was at its height and when his life hung in the balance. Radek’s adventure ended in failure, and he himself drowned in the sea of blood spilled by a country of socialism that had conquered humanity.
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Alex Gordon is a native of Kiev, Ukraine, and graduate of the Kiev State University and the Technion in Haifa (Doctor of Science, 1984). He immigrated to Israel in 1979. He is a Full Professor (Emeritus) of Physics in the Faculty of Natural Sciences at the University of Haifa and at Oranim, the Academic College of Education. He is the author of eight books and about 500 articles in print and online, and has been published in 62 journals in 14 countries in Russian, Hebrew, English, and German.