Karl Radek: The Last Internationalist [Hardcover]

Warren Lerner (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 254 pages
• Publisher: Stanford Univ Pr (June 1970)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0804707227
• ISBN-13: 978-0804707220
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,238,930 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars addendum, April 30, 2001

By 

"yenukidze" (California, United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Karl Radek: The Last Internationalist (Hardcover)

Though I have not read this book about Radek, I wish to add this information as a follow-up to the previous review. It has been substantiated that both Radek and Sokolnikov were killed by fellow inmates in prison in 1939. See for reference "The Road To Terror: Stalin and the self-destruction of the bolsheviks, 1932-1939" by Getty and Naumov.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Karl Radek: 1885-1939 (or circa 1960;or still alive)., February 1, 2001

By 

Yuli Martov - See all my reviews

This review is from: Karl Radek: The Last Internationalist (Hardcover)

'Karl Radek: The Last Internationalist', seems to be a very pretensious title, considering the fact that Trotsky, Che, and even Fidel lived after Radek's "alleged" death (much like Jim Morrison and Tupaq Shukur, there are a remarkable amount of "Radek still lives" types of theories), but after reading a few pages, the title is of absolutely no importance. Because Radek, much like every other revolutionary emigre during the early twentieth century, was a captivating figure, personally, and ideologically.

Karl Radek, born in Poland, essentialy raised in a German area, was an associate to perhaps the most famous Socialists of the twentieth century, Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Trotsky, Vladimir Lenin, Karl Liebknecht, Karl Kautsky, and the psuedo-Bolshevik, Joseph Stalin (does expropriating money from banks, and having a National Socialist ideology make a person a genuine Bolshevik?), which obviously means that a bio of him will be of a high caliber. The author's life of Radek is very revealing. Studying the works of Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin, a person inevitably stumbles upon Radek's zig-zags from Trotskyism, Leninism, and Stalinism, but nobody really understands his motive for such actions. This brief book (176 pgs.), outlines most of the "gaps" in a person's knowledge. Radek, who was a grubby type of character (much like Che Guevara, Radek cared little for personal hygiene, and apperance), was a polemicist and journalist of the first rank, and usually had his own agenda. Unfortunately, his personal opinions rubbed most of the people he came into contact with the wrong way; which is why an intellectual as prominent as Radek never became a member of the Soviet politbureau. He was opposed to the 1923-24 putsch, in Germany, which resulted in a disastrous set back for the German Communist Party, yet, because of the animosity between he and the President of the Comintern, Grigory Zinoviev, he recieved most of the blame anyway (he was stripped of his Central Comitee Membership, and his prominence in Comintern was eliminated). Conversely, his sheepish betrayal of Trotsky while in exile in Siberia during the late 1920's is described with some amount of accuracy; such as his motives for doing such a despicable thing.

The last chapter, which is the same as the title of the book, mentions many of the "Radek still lives" theories. Such as Radek possibly writing Khrushchev's secret speech in 1956, and Radek possibly writing for pravda and izvestia under a different penname. I am compelled, to some extent, into believing that Radek lived longer than his supposed death in 1939. Radek, much like Trotsky, was a very resilient individual (with the mortality rate in eastern Europe during the nineteenth century, it's really a miracle Radek lived long enough to experience the Russian Revolution in the first place!), and is gossip and hearsay from "stoolies" in GULAG enough to place a concrete statistic on Radek's date of death? 'Karl Radek: The last internationalist', is a captivating work, and needs to be read by anyone that has a brain, or thinks they have a brain (by this, I mean haughty psuedo-intellectuals).