First woman to lead a major European communist party, and its sharpest anti-Stalinist apostate
“We are condemned to death, since terror reigns in Leningrad.” — her letter to Maslow, intercepted by Soviet censorship and read aloud at a Comintern special session, sealed her break with Stalin (February 1926).
Co-chair of the KPD (1924–1925), the first woman to lead a major European communist party. Born to a Vienna philosophy professor, she co-founded the Austrian Communist Party in 1918 and then, with Arkadi Maslow, led the KPD's ultra-left in Berlin, providing the theoretical groundwork for the 1923 uprising. A fierce factional warrior who publicly denounced Trotsky at the Fifth Comintern Congress, she was expelled in 1926 after refusing to submit to Stalin and spent the rest of her life as an anti-Stalinist left intellectual. Her dramatic trajectory took her from Comintern leadership to US intelligence cooperation in exile, and finally back toward communism in her final years.
Career Timeline
- 1918Co-founds the Austrian Communist Party (KPÖ); member no. 1
- 1919–1921Moves to Berlin, joins the KPD
- 1921–1923Berlin district leader; with Maslow develops the left-wing 'theory of the offensive'
- 1924–1925KPD co-chair; Reichstag and Prussian Landtag deputy; candidate member of the Comintern Executive
- 1924Leads the German delegation to the Fifth Comintern Congress; publicly denounces Trotsky
- 1925–1926Detained in Moscow; refuses Stalin's demand to submit to the party line
- 1926Expelled from the KPD for supporting the United Opposition
- 1928Briefly joins the Leninbund, soon departs
- 1933–1941Exile in Paris; cooperates with Trotsky, founds the Gruppe Internationale
- 1941–1955Exile in the US; publishes Stalin and German Communism (1948)
- 1947Testifies before HUAC against her brothers Gerhart and Hanns Eisler
- 1955–1961Returns to Paris; publishes From Lenin to Mao (1956), renouncing anti-communism