Council for European Studies Seminar "Karl Radek, Then & Now: 45 Years to Warren Lerner's The Last Internationalist"

Karl Radek, Then & Now: 45 Years to Warren Lerner's The Last InternationalistOf the many scholarly works on revolutionary socialism in Russia, Warren Lerner's biography of the Bolshevik Karl Radek as The Last Internationalist is not only among the most compelling, but it is also among the few that remain enduringly relevant despite changing intellectual fashions. In his small 176-page book, Lerner pierced through many of the tropes of the day to create a distinctive portrait of a socialist revolutionary that was uncompromisingly empirical and brave. From Radek's early radicalism in Polish groupings in Austrian Galicia, to his journey through various German and Russian socialist parties, to his final, famous days in the Stalinist purges, Radek becomes an unlikely lens through which we glimpse both the impossibilities of the fragile empires and the equally impossible socialist utopia. But in the age of nationalism, understanding what animated Radek's core commitment to internationalism's universalism might still be his- and indeed Lerner's- most elusive contribution. In an attempt to grasp Radek's internationalism, Riga offers relative departures from Lerner's Radek, but she hopes thereby to reaffirm the continuing suggestiveness and vitality of The Last Internationalist to our own debates.