Schlesinger, Dr Rudolf (1901-1969: Marxist Theoretician, lecturer and co-founder of the University of Glasgow Institute of Soviet and East European Studies)

Dr Rudolf Schlesinger was born at Vienna, Austria, in 1901 . He was born the son of a Jewish Doctor and a German mother. He attended a Catholic secondary school, which was run by Jesuits, before then attending Schottengymnasium, a renowned boys’ school in Vienna. It was here that he first encountered the anti-Semitism that was to be the inspiration for his life-long fight against fascism. He received his doctorate from the University of Vienna in 1922. At this time he was a member of the Young Worker’s Socialist Organisation. In 1923, he moved to Berlin, Germany, to take up the position of assistant to the economist Professor E Varga. During his time in Berlin he was actively involved in the organisation of anti-Fascist demonstrations. In 1926, backed by Professor Varga, he moved to Moscow, USSR, for fourteen months, to study the failure of Soviet Socialism, and the implications that this posed for the German Communist Party. On his return to Berlin, he worked at the International Agrarian Institute and studied the problems of the Volga German Republic. He also worked as a member of the Committee on Agitation and Propaganda in Lichtenberg, Germany.

In 1927, Schlesinger married Mila Sellvig, whom he had first met in 1923. Although, they married in a secret ceremony, they were able to live together in Berlin. Schlesinger wrote for a number of underground communist magazines, including Die Neue Welt, and promoted discipline at anti-Fascist demonstrations. Consequently, in 1933, he was ordered by police to leave the country. He stayed in Berlin, however, in hiding until he was arrested and imprisoned on 7th August 1933. His wife sought the assistance of the Austrian Embassy so that after some weeks he was released and taken across the German Austrian border. He arrived in Vienna but went to Prague, Czechoslovakia, where he helped to set up the anti-Fascist newspaper Gegenangriff. At the end of 1934 he left for Moscow, where he took up the editorship of the German edition of Communist International . A friend of Schlesinger’s was arrested in 1936 and after the subsequent hearing, Schlesinger was declared 'alien to the Communist party'. Schlesinger returned to Vienna, but the impact of his expulsion from the Communist party meant that the only way he could publish any of his work was to do so anonymously.

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