Communist Party of Austria

The Communist Party of Austria was founded on 3 November 1918 by the left wing of the labour movement, amid workers’ protests such as the general strike of January 1918, as the Allied naval blockade of the First World War caused severe shortages. Ruth Fischer, Karl Steinhardt, Franz Koritschoner and Lucien Laurat were among its founders, and until 1920 it was called the Communist Party of German Austria. Unlike in Russia or Germany, the councils took root only in Vienna and the industrial areas of Upper Austria, and the coup attempted on 12 November 1918 collapsed within hours; several armed attempts in 1918–1919 were partly backed by the Hungarian Soviet Republic.

In the First Republic the Communist Party of Austria won no seat in parliament, partly because the Social Democrats held the workers together, and it was badly weakened by factional struggles. Reorganised on democratic centralism and stricter discipline in the 1920s, it overcame its factional fights by the late 1920s and from 1924 followed the ideology of the Soviet Bolsheviks; yet it often disagreed with Stalin’s line branding social democracy “social fascism” in the late 1920s. The Viennese psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, radicalised by the burning of the Vienna Palace of Justice on 15 July 1927, secretly joined the Communist Party of Austria while openly remaining a Social Democrat, and was expelled from the Social Democratic party in January 1930 for splitting activities on the communists’ behalf.

In 1933 Dollfuss’s Austrofascist government banned the Communist Party of Austria by emergency decree, but the party carried on underground. It took part in the workers’ uprising of 12 February 1934 launched by the Republican Defence League, and after the uprising was crushed disappointed Social Democrats flocked to it, raising its membership from 4,000 to 16,000. Following Alfred Klahr’s theory that the Austrians were a nation distinct from the Germans, it called for an independent Austria at the annexation of March 1938. After the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact some exiled communists, among them the founding member Koritschoner, were handed over by the Soviet Union to the Nazis. Under Nazi rule the party became the most important antifascist resistance force in Austria: more than 4,000 members were imprisoned and more than 2,000, including 13 members of its central committee, lost their lives.

In 1945, with the backing of the Soviet occupation authorities, it joined Karl Renner’s provisional government, in which chairman Johann Koplenig became vice-chancellor, but it won only 5.4 per cent in the elections of November 1945. It left the government in 1947 over the Marshall Plan and led a large general strike that failed in 1950. Its failure to condemn the crushing of the Hungarian uprising of 1956 caused mass resignations, and it lost its seats in the National Council in 1959. It first condemned the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968 but swung back to the Soviet line in 1971, expelling Ernst Fischer, who called it “tank communism”. It distanced itself officially from Stalinism for the first time in 1994, and has held seats in the Styrian state parliament since 2005 and in Salzburg since 2023.