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.
Activities and affiliations
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
Related historical events
KPD leadership and “Bolshevization”
At the German Communist Party (KPD)’s Ninth Congress in Frankfurt am Main in April 1924, Ruth Fischer, Arkadi Maslow and Werner Scholem formed the Political Secretariat. Ernst Thälmann, leader of the Hamburg uprising, held the formal party chairmanship, while Fischer and Maslow led the party as executive secretaries. In the May 1924 federal election, the KPD won about 3.7 million votes, 12.6 percent, and 62 seats; Fischer was elected to parliament. In December the party fell back to 2.7 million votes, 8.9 percent and 45 seats. In the Reichstag, Fischer called parliament a “shadowy theater” and voiced the party’s opposition to the government and the Dawes Plan.
At the Comintern’s Fifth Congress, Fischer supported Bolshevization: making communist parties centralized and politically unified. She argued that the International should become a single Bolshevik world party rather than an assemblage of competing currents. This line favored suppressing factions and internal dissent. In 1925, the KPD leadership partly retreated from the ultra-left course, including by issuing an Open Letter proposing cooperation with the Social Democrats. The Comintern leadership in Moscow had lost confidence in Fischer and Maslow; at party meetings in October and November 1925, the two were removed from the KPD leadership. Fischer signed the Open Letter in Moscow, but later recalled that she had signed her own “political death warrant.” In 1926, she and Maslow were expelled from the KPD. The concentration of party authority under the Bolshevization policy she had supported unfolded in a political environment that eventually removed her own faction from leadership.