Abraham Kheifets (August Guralsky)
editAbraham Kheifets (Хейфец, Абрам Яковлевич) (1890-1960) also known as August Guralsky, August Kleine, Lepetit and Rustico) was a Russian revolutionary, an activist of the Bund, later, the Comintern emissary, member of the central committee of the German Communist Party, and organizer of Communist movements in Latin America[1].
Biography
editBorn Abraham Heifetz in 1890; he lived in Riga and later went to Kiev to study at the university. Using the pseudonym Benjamin he became a militant in the Bund, the Jewish socialist movement. In January 1913 he was arrested in Lodz but released on bail; he remained abroad until after the February 1917 revolution in Russia. In August he was elected a member of the Bund provincial committee for the Ukraine and in December a member of the Bund central committee. In early 1919 he broke with the Bund and joined the Bolsheviks under the name of Guralsky. He then worked for the newly founded Comintern. Like other former Bundist militants—such as D. Petrovsky, Mikhail Borodin, and Moisei Rafes — he was sent on missions abroad. He was a Comintern emissary to KPD (using the name of Kleine), the PCF (as Lepetit), and the Latin American Communist movement (as Juan de Dion and Rustico). During the March action of 1921 in Germany, he was Bela Kun’s lieutenant. In June 1921 he was the member of the RCP(B) delegation to the Third Congress of the Comintern (with a consultative vole) and took part occasionally in the meetings of OCCI during the congress[1].
in 1922 he returned to Berlin as a permanent representative of the Comintern[2]. Early in 1923, at the Leipzig congress of the KPD, he was elected a member of the party central committee and remained in Germany during the 1923 Comintern attempt to organize a German October. When the Comintern decided to eliminate Heinrich Brandler and August Thalheimer, Guralsky formed a centrist group to support that policy. In January 1924 he took part in the Moscow deliberations between the ECCI presidium and factional representatives of the KPD. He did not return to Berlin but in the spring of 1924 he was sent to Paris to eliminate the influence of Boris Souvarine and organize a “safe” delegation to the Fifth Congress of the Comintern, at which he participated in three different capacities: he sat on two commissions for the RCP(B); he spoke at public sessions for the German delegation; and he participated in the debates of ECCI for the French delegation[1].
In 1924-1925 he was permanent representative of the Comintern in Paris and as such was active in the affairs of the PCF[3]. At the fifth enlarged plenum of the ECCI in 1925 he sat on a commission as the RCP(B) representative; in 1926 he returned to Moscow and was sent abroad again on several missions. In 1929 he was chief of the Latin American Secretariat of the Comintern and lived in Brazil, Argentina, and Chile and during that time occasionally wrote for the Comintern press signing his articles with the abbreviation Gur-i. In 1933 or 1934 he was recalled to Moscow and arrested shortly thereafter, during Stalin’s purges. He died in about 1960[1].
Family
editNephew: Grigory Kheifets
Citations
edit- ^ a b c d Drachkovitch, Milorad M. (1986). Biographical Dictionary of the Comintern. Stanford, CA: Hoover Press. pp. 159–160. ISBN 0-8179-8401-1.
- ^ Fischer, Ruth (2017). Stalin and German Communism: A Study in the Origins of the State Party. New York: Routledge. p. 392. ISBN 978-0-87855-822-3.
- ^ Slavin, David H. (1991). "The French Left and the Rif War, 1924-25: Racism and the Limits of Internationalism". Journal of Contemporary History. 26 (1): 5–32. ISSN 0022-0094.