Leo Jogiches

Leon Jogiches was born on 17 July 1867 to a wealthy Polish-Jewish family in Vilnius, now Lithuania, then part of the Russian Empire. As a young man of 18, Jogiches founded one of the earliest underground socialist study circles in Vilnius, its 1885 origin predating the foundation of the first mass international socialist organization in the Russian Empire by a dozen years. This commitment led to two arrests and short terms in jail, in both 1888 and 1889. ==Zürich emigration==

quickly became a lasting enemy of the young Jogiches With the threat of conscription into the Tsar's army looming — possibly a penal battalion — Jogiches escaped to Zürich, Switzerland. The pair fell in love and became both close political allies and personal companions. Jogiches turned his primary attention to Polish affairs for the next several years, doubtlessly influenced in the decision to a great extent by Luxemburg. In July 1893 Jogiches financed a new Paris-based socialist publication in the Polish language, Sprawa Robotnicza (The Workers' Cause), which emphasized close cooperation between Polish and Russian radicals in their joint goal of overthrowing Tsarist autocracy and emphasizing the internationalist essence of the socialist movement. Writing as Rosa Luxemburg played a key role in contributing content to this paper, soon taking over the editorship. The mandate of the upstart young socialist representing the new independent socialist publication was challenged by the PPS in front of the Congress, however, and by a vote of 9 to 7, with 3 abstentions, Luxemburg was denied a seat at the Congress. Luxemburg departed the gathering under protest — with bad feelings between her and Jogiches on the one hand and the PPS on the other festering further. Late in 1893, Jogiches and Luxemburg took yet another step towards permanent independence from the mainline Polish socialist movement with the establishment of a new Marxist political party, the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland (SDKP), a group later known as the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL). This new group stood aloof from PSP, a broad coalition party founded in 1892 and supported by the bulk of the Russian exile community. ==Revolution of 1905==

The Russian Revolution of 1905 erupted abruptly on "Bloody Sunday," 22 January with the shooting deaths of hundreds of peaceful protesters who were attempting to present a petition to Tsar Nicholas II. Within days, protests and strikes calling for establishment of a constitutional order swept the empire, which rocked the state censorship and threatened the stability of the government for months. For the time, Leo Jogiches and his common-law wife, Luxemburg, remained in German exile, their eyes set firmly on the German movement. Jogiches returned to Poland first, traveling to Warsaw in the spring of 1905 to Warsaw to establish the Central Committee of the SDKPiL there together with Julian Marchlewski, Adolf Warski, Felix Dzerzhinsky, and Yakov Hanecki. Luxemburg remained in Berlin as the representative of the SDKPiL abroad, representing it before the Socialist International and attempting to win support for the organization and its activities among the German socialist movement. Jogiches would return to delegate to the annual congress of the SPD, held at Jena in the middle of September 1905. As part of an ongoing battle to radicalize the party's daily newspaper, Vorwärts (Forward), Luxemburg was named to the paper's editorial board in the fall of 1905. She would spend the months of November and December 1905 churning out aggressive commentary about Russian events for her German readers, attempting to draw analogies between the Russian and German situations whenever possible, her contributions appearing almost daily. It was not until the morning of 28 December 1905, that she would board a train for Warsaw in Russian Poland to herself become a direct participant in the ongoing revolutionary effort to overthrow the Tsarist government of the Russian Empire. In March 1906, Luxemburg and Jogiches were arrested for their revolutionary activity. Jogiches was sentenced by the court to 8 years of hard labor followed by lifetime exile to Siberia. He served months in prison before managing to escape across the border to Berlin. Jogiches attended the 1907 London Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, where he was elected a candidate member of the party's governing Central Committee. ==Split with Luxemburg==

Although an intelligent person and dedicated revolutionary socialist thinker, Jogiches was virtually incapable of converting his ideas into written words: "the mere thought of putting his ideas on paper paralyzes him," Luxemburg later recalled. Consequently, the chief contribution of Jogiches was that of literary stimulant to the skilled publicist Luxemburg as well as behind-the-scenes organizer of the fledgling underground political party that he had helped to establish. Interpersonal conflict followed, exacerbated by the different trajectories of personal achievement, with the pair permanently separating in 1907. Their political collaboration continued, despite the personal rift. During 1909, Jogiches formed a tactical alliance with the Bolshevik leader, Vladimir Lenin, and backing him as he tried to gain control of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, by excluding the Mensheviks. In the process, Jogiches gained control of funds belonging to the party, which had been held in trust by Karl Kautsky and Klara Zetkin, leading German Marxists, who were advised by Rosa Luxemburg to hand the money to a commission that Jogiches controlled. He tried to use his position to create an organisation that would have brought together Bolsheviks and left-wing Mensheviks, but was outwitted by Lenin, who wrested control of the money. The outcome was a bitter rift between Lenin and Jogiches, whose position was further weakened by a revolt against his leadership of the SDPKiL, led by Hanecki and Karl Radek, who formed a separate faction that aligned with Lenin. ==Spartakusbund==

On 4 August 1914, the parliamentary representatives of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) agreed among themselves to maintain party discipline and voted en bloc in support of a bill authorizing war credits for the Imperial government in the erupting international conflagration that would be remembered to history as World War I. This stunning reversal of the Second International's position on capitalist war came as a shock to radical internationalist elements in the party, including Jogiches. Luxemburg's idea was soon abandoned due to lack of support from the broad circle of party leaders tapped for the effort, of whom no more than a small handful responded. These included Leo Jogiches, Julian Marchlewski, Franz Mehring, and Klara Zetkin, her lawyer Paul Levi, and second secretary of the SPD in Berlin Wilhelm Pieck, among others. It would be several months after getting together before the first leaflet of the group would be published. Luxemburg was similarly targeted not long after, arrested later that same month and held for eight weeks. Anti-war sentiment was short-circuited by arrests of leaders and suppression of anti-war publications, but not silenced entirely, with more than 1,000 women demonstrating for peace in front of the Reichstag on 28 May 1915 — further adding to the government's unease. Active efforts were made to locate active supporters in every locality and every large factory and the radical Luxemburg circle was in contact with individuals in more than 300 places by the middle of 1915. The Internationale group held a conference on 1 January 1916, in the apartment of Karl Liebknecht, attended by 12 delegates. This group adopted a program drafted from prison by Rosa Luxemburg and was preparatory to a more authoritative gathering held on 19 March in Berlin. They sought to drive out pro-war political leaders, leaving a mass revolutionary party to await the forthcoming national revolution. Following the jailing for their anti-war efforts of Liebknecht in May 1916 and Luxemburg that same July, Jogiches took over as the leader of the organization's underground activity. As leader of the underground organization it was Jogiches that oversaw the publication of the official newsletter Spartacus, launched in September 1916, which gave a new name to the faction — the Spartakusbund, rendered into English as the Spartacist League. While the revolutionary left chose not to pursue an immediate split, seeking instead to purge the party of its right-wing leadership, the pro-war majority of the SPD worked throughout 1916 to pursue a purge of their own, marked by the 24 May 1916, expulsion of 33 dissident SPD members of the Reichstag from the party for their formal disavowal of the war effort and the October seizure of Vorwärts (Forward) from the SPD's pacifist wing by the pro-war party officialdom. A national conference of dissident socialists was held in Berlin on 7 January 1917, with 35 of the 157 delegates members of the Spartacistbund. This gathering was ruled an effort to "sabotage" the SPD through factionalism and mass expulsions of leftists followed. The acrimony and expulsions within the SPD culminated with a formal split of the party. A Congress was held at Gotha during Easter 1917 by the pacifist center and revolutionary left socialists, with the gathering launching a new organization, the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD). The Spartakusbund would later become one of the primary forces in the unity congress which established the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) at the end of 1918. ==Assassination==

The Spartacus League led the failed Spartacist uprising, after which Luxemburg and Liebknecht were killed by right-wing paramilitary Freikorps troops. Jogiches was murdered in Moabit prison in Berlin on 10 March 1919, likely since he was investigating the assassination of Luxemburg and Liebknecht. ==Pseudonyms==

Throughout his life as an underground revolutionary, Jogiches used a massive array of pseudonyms such as Jan Tyszka, the Polish pseudonym by which he was most commonly known (rendered into Russian as "Tyshka") as well as the lesser-known pseudonyms "Grosovsky," "Johannes Kraft", "Otto Engelmann", and "Krumbagel." ==Works==

• "A Letter from Prison to Sophie Liebknecht," Mike Jones, trans. New Interventions, vol. 9, no 2. Originally published in Internationale wissenschaftliche Korrespondenz zur Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung, vol. 33, no 1 (March 1997), pp. 100–102. ==Footnotes==