Abstract
The moderate policy reached its culmination in the offer of 9 October 1927 to tolerate an SPD government in the city of Hamburg. Elections to the local council had proved successful for both left-wing parties. The SPD and KPD together had a majority of 20 over the others. It followed that, if not a coalition government, at least a KPD-tolerated SPD government could be set up. Nothing came of this as the SPD refused the offer.1 A similar experiment was tried in Brunswick in December. But the ‘course to the right’ was not to last long, and as long as Thälmann rather than Meyer was in control of the party there was reason to doubt the genuineness of the KPD’s conversion to collaboration with the SPD for positive work in a regional framework. The first signs of a change, not just in the KPD but in the whole of the Comintern, emerged in December 1927 at the Fifteenth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party. Bukharin, in his capacity of chairman of the ECCI, was forced by Stalin to deliver a report calling for a ‘shift of the accent in united front and trade union policy’. Lominadze and Shatskin called for ‘a fight against the right’ on the same occasion.2
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Notes and References
E. H. Carr, Foundations of a Planned Economy 1926–9, vol.3, London, 1976, p. 430.
A copy of Ernst Meyer’s speech is preserved in the Nachlass Ernst Meyer. The passages quoted are on pp.127, 156 and 165. See also Weber, Wandlung, p.214; J. Humbert-Droz, De Lénine à Staline, Neuchatel, 1971, pp.326–40.
M. Buber-Neumann, Von Potsdam nach Moskau, Stuttgart, 1957, p. 288.
T. Weingartner, Stalin und der Aufstieg Hitlers, Berlin, 1970, passim.
See S. Bahne, in Jahrbuch für die Geschichte Mittel- und Ostdeutschlands, vol.13/14, Berlin, 1965, p. 323.
S. Bahne, ‘Die Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands’, in E. Matthias and R. Morsey (eds), Das Ende der Parteien,1933, Düsseldorf, 1960, p. 671
H. O. Meissner and H. Wilde, Die Machtergreifung, Stuttgart, 1958, pp. 195–210.
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© 1984 Ben Fowkes
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Fowkes, B. (1984). The Left Route to Catastrophe. In: Communism in Germany under the Weimar Republic. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17373-0_7
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