Communists: Clara Zetkin: “That’s why I ask for the strictest confidentiality”

The covers of the file folders in which Clara Zetkin’s letters are kept in the Federal Archives in Berlin – mostly copies from a Moscow archive – are all labeled in the same way: with the stamp “Confidential”. Hardly anything in “actually existing socialism” was as secret as its own history. Although these stamps were declared invalid over thirty years ago, only the letters from the years between 1914 and 1923 have been published. The third volume, which reflects the years 1924 to 1933, is currently being worked on.

Until July 1921, Clara Zetkin was a combative fighter who, even when she was alone, did not avoid any confrontation – including during the 3rd Congress of the Communist International in Moscow in the summer of 1921. Knowing full well that the new putschist leadership of the KPD had only delegated her to exclude her from the party in Moscow, Clara Zetkin did not deviate an inch from her criticism of the KPD’s putsch tactics – which were supported in the background by the Bolsheviks. She underlined her attitude with the remark: “Everything that I was and did was a joint effort with Rosa Luxemburg.” Lenin prevented Clara Zetkin’s expulsion: On July 9, 1921, he brought a “peace treaty” between the KPD people loyal to Moscow and the supposedly right-wing KPD founders around Clara Zetkin.

Napoleon already knew that you could do many things with bayonets, except for one thing: sit on them. But that is exactly what the Bolsheviks tried to do. Any resistance was broken with terror – and so the socialist idea was discredited little by little. Clara Zetkin saw herself driven to this compromise by the belief that she could at least have a moderating influence on the Bolsheviks’ policies; In the SPD she had repeatedly managed to exert influence until 1914.

However, the blind woman paid a high price for this political change: First, she tried to prevent the publication of the fragment “The Russian Revolution,” written by her friend Rosa Luxemburg. When that failed, she wrote a book against Rosa Luxemburg’s criticism of the Bolsheviks’ policies: “Rosa Luxemburg’s Position on the Russian Revolution” (1922). However, it was not until the summer of 1922 that she brought herself into complete disrepute outside the party-communist camp, when she served as a prosecutor for a show trial against the socialist-revolutionaries – together with their left wing, the Bolsheviks had taken power in November 1917, but then joined them thrown over him. Clara Zetkin remained true to her intentions and wrote a letter to the Central Committee of the Bolsheviks in which she advised against capital punishment. But the reaction was clear. On August 3, 1922, Clara Zetkin sent a messenger to her future daughter-in-law: “All expectations and agreements were thrown out the window. Unfortunately I couldn’t give you a message. The telephone doesn’t work. It is uncertain when I will come to Moscow.” On the 7th/8th. In August the 22 defendants were convicted, 15 received the death penalty; However, it was converted into prison sentences in 1924; you don’t know which was better.

Napoleon already knew that you could do many things with bayonets, except for one thing: sit on them.

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Clara Zetkin gave a speech she suggested to the plenum of the Communist International in June 1923 about fascism, which had seized power in Italy in November 1922. In it she developed a political approach that aimed at a broad anti-fascist alliance instead of a “proletarian united front”. But Clara Zetkin didn’t get through to this point either; From 1928 onwards, the Social Democrats, referred to as “social fascists”, were even officially fought as the main enemy – instead of fascism.

After the failure of the “German October 1923” decided in Moscow in August 1923 and Lenin’s death in January 1924, Clara Zetkin made no further concessions. Although she continued to be revered as an icon to the outside world, in reality – and not just under Stalin – she was increasingly isolated. On November 14, 1929, she wrote to Elisabeth Mayer, a confidante who had nothing to do with the KPD: “The causes are the same ones that keep me silent now (…) Above all, they are the constant, disturbing, tearing internal ones Conflicts in this time of ferment and emergence of a new social world, born from the age-old question: What is truth, what is duty? (…)

Not that I am unclear about my attitude to the events and the people who come into the light of history. (…) But the difficult question is how long I have to remain silent in public for political reasons, with regard to the interest of the proletarian revolution. The decisive factor is not what is currently useful and pleasant to a national faction of the Comintern, but rather the exploitation of a position against the big picture by the 2nd International, the reformist parties. (…)

Do I have to tell you (…) that my conviction is completely unshakable (…) of the inevitability and (and) triumph of the proletarian world revolution, despite all the mistakes and errors of leaders, despite all the factional struggles and (and) other bad side effects of it historical revolution and its subjective deception. (…)

In the circles of the party and especially those of the “right-wing” opposition members who are closest to me politically and personally, the evil practice of gossip is rampant. But for political reasons I have to avoid in the most embarrassing way that talk and (and) whispers cling to and (and) around my person. That’s why I ask for the strictest confidentiality.”

To Ossip Pyatnitsky, another confidant – he was the actual head of the Communist International; The Stalinist Bolshevik leadership had him murdered in 1938 – wrote Clara Zetkin two months later:

»The “line” destroys everything (…) How the party in its current state, with its “line” of empty revolutionary phrases and gestures and under its totally incompetent (Thälmann) leadership, is supposed to survive a period of illegality is a mystery. (…) The behavior of the party leadership is such that some people get the impression that they want illegality in order to evade control even more than through the clique economy and to cover their subjective incompetence with the veil of the objectively impossible in the face of violence and to surround yourself with the aura of revolutionary romanticism.«

In her letter to Elisabeth Mayer in November 1929, one of the last sentences was: “But hopefully this time will pass when I, like in Moscow, vegetate in monastic solitude.” This hope was deceptive. Instead, Clara Zetkin experienced the handover of power to the National Socialists; The seriously ill woman died on June 20, 1933 in Moscow. Stalin, to whom Clara Zetkin was the only celebrity who had not publicly submitted, was forced to carry her urn to the Kremlin wall.

Reading tip: Clara Zetkin. The letters 1914–1933. Vol. II: The Revolutionary Letters (1919–1923). Ed. Marga Voigt and Jörn Schütrumpf. Karl Dietz, 735 pages, born, €49.