I hope you liked my previous articles within the series about the “Red Rebels” about Bianca Tosoni-Pittoni, Lidia Dan and others. So far I have been writing about Red women. So here is a story about a man, a German Communist, Hugo Eberlein. As with the previous heros, I came across him, while writing my book, a biography of Angelica Balabanoff, due to be published by McFarland Publishers in September, The Strange Comrade Balabanoff: The Life of a Communist Rebel. Due to the lack of space I was unable to write about him in the book. A good-looking and charismatic Hugo Eberlein was born in 1887 in Germany. A prominent communist and leading German anti-militarist, he supported the 1917 October Revolution in Russia. However only a few years later, he disagreed with Lenin’s politics of the Red Terror and preferred to settle in Germany and devote his time to German Socialists. When Hitler came to power in 1933, Hugo decided that he would be safer in Russia. In 1937, four years after arriving in Moscow, he was sent to GULAG. He was shot four years later, in 1941, at the beginning of war between Russia and Germany. Bertram Wolfe wrote in his book Strange Communists I Have known, that it has been suggested that Hugo Eberlein was married to a daughter of Lenin and Inessa Armand. (It has never been proved that Lenin and Armand had a child). Wolfe further writes that when Eberlein was send to GULAG in 1937, his wife disappeared. […]
Follow Us!
