Harvard University Press Stalin and German Communism: A Study in the Origins of the State Party

Excerpt from the Preface: There are three strong threads which run through Ruth Fischer's present volume and bind its diverse details and complicated ideological expositions firmly and closely together. The first thread is the history of the German Communist Party, 1918-1929. The second thread is the story of the internal Soviet struggle for political power during Lenin's last years and immediately after his death up to the point where Trotsky was eliminated by exile. The third thread is the connecting tie-up between the other two threads - the interrelation between German Communist policy and the internal conflicts in the Soviet Politburo and the Moscow Comintern; or, to put it more bluntly, Russian efforts to manipulate German Communist policy, not for Germany's own good, but in the interests of Russian internal factions or of Soviet foreign policy. It was this, together with Stalin's use of terror and secret police, and his ruthless elimination of those who stood in his way, which led Ruth Fischer to break with Moscow and with the pro-Soviet German Communists, including her own brother, Gerhart Eisler.