Karl Bernhardovich Radek

Karl Bernhardovich Radek (1885-1939?), Soviet political figure, born in Lemberg, Austria (now L'viv, Ukraine), and educated at the universities of Kraków, Poland, and Bern, Switzerland. He joined the Polish and later the German social democratic movement. After the Russian Revolution of 1917, Radek joined the Communist Party and was a member of the Soviet delegation that negotiated the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk for peace with Germany during World War I. He was active during the revolution in Germany in 1918, and after his return to Russia in 1919 he became a leading official of the Presidium of the Comintern (see International). In 1923 he lost that post when he supported a German Communist uprising that never took place. Accused by Joseph Stalin of supporting a subversive conspiracy led by the discredited Leon Trotsky, Radek was expelled from the Soviet Communist Party in 1927. He regained party membership in 1930, however, and served as an editor of the government newspaper Izvestia from 1931 to 1936. Arrested for treason during the Trotskyist purge trials of 1936, he was convicted in 1937 and presumably died in prison.