Leon "Leo" Jogiches, also commonly known by the party name Jan Tyszka, is a Polish-Jewish Marxist revolutionary, mostly active in Germany, Poland and Lithuania, and long-time associate of Rosa Luxemburg.
History[]
Early Life[]
Jogiches was born into a rich Jewish merchant family from Vilnius; The family however did not speak Hebrew or Jiddish, but mostly Polish and Russian.
In 1885, at age 18, Jogiches founded one of the earliest underground socialist study circles in Russia, centered around his hometown. He attained an almost legendary local status for his tenacious dedication to the anti-Tsarist cause, which led to two arrests and short terms in jail, in both 1888 and 1889.
Swiss Exile[]
When Jogiches was threatened to be conscripted into a penal battalion, he decided to escape to Zürich, Switzerland. A few months after his arrival in Zürich, the 23-year old Jogiches met a fellow 20-year old ethnic Jewish political émigré from Tsarist autocracy, Rosa Luxemburg. The pair fell in love and became both close political allies and personal companions.
Jogiches also made contact with pioneer Russian Marxist Georgy Plekhanov and proposed a business partnership for the publication of radical literature, in which Jogiches' money and publishing expertise would be complemented by Plekhanov's prestige and copyright control of Russian editions of works by Marx and Engels. However, a feud between them started after disagreements over the financing of the project, leading to Jogiches and Plekhanov becoming bitter rivals.
Engagement in Polish Socialism[]
The rivalry with Plekhanov over publishing had the effect of isolating Jogiches and Luxemburg from most of the exile Russian colony in Switzerland. Because of that, 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. Writing as "R. Kruszyńska," Rosa Luxemburg played a key role in contributing content to this paper, soon taking over the editorship. The paper's internationalist political line proved somewhat at odds with the program of the Polish Socialist Party (PPS), however, with the latter emphasizing the aspect of Polish national liberation from Russian control, and consequently no support of the paper by the PPS leadership was to be forthcoming. Because of that, Jogiches attempt eventually failed.
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 was supported by the bulk of the Russian exile community.
1905 Revolution and its aftermath[]
When the 1905 Russian Revolution started, Jogiches and Luxemburg remained in exile. Only in late spring, Jogiches departed to Warsaw and established the Central Committee of the SDKPiL together with other famous Russian marxists like Julian Marchlewski and Felix Dzerzhinsky. 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. She only followed Jogiches in late 1905. However, in 1906, both of them were arrested by Tsarist authorities and sentenced to hard labor in Siberia. However, they managed to escape and fled back to Germany.
In 1907, Jogiches attended the London Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, where he was elected a candidate member of the party’s governing Central Committee.
In the following years, Luxemburg grew extremely famous and popular as she was able to convert her theories into written words pretty well; Jogiches was not able to do that and and became embittered about his own life, as he always stood in the shadow of his partner. Interpersonal conflict followed, exacerbated by the different trajectories of personal achievement, with the pair separating in 1907. For the next years, Jogiches lived a quit life without engaging much in politics.
The Weltkrieg[]
In 1914, a radical socialist group known as the Spartacists, led by Luxemburg, seceded from the SPD after the party's leadership had voted to support a bill authorizing war credits for the Imperial government in the early stages of the Weltkrieg. Jogiches, an antimilitarist himself, decided to join the group. The organisation sought to make contact with socialists from other European countries through letters to the Swiss socialist press, condemning the war effort and linking the struggle for peace with the class struggle to overthrow autocracy.
Eventually, Luxemburg and most of her high-ranking associates, like Karl Liebknecht, were arrested by German authorities. Because of that, Jogiches became the formal head of the Spartacists in 1916. He oversaw the publication of the organisation's official newsletter Spartacus, launched in September 1916.
In 1917, the SPD split into the moderate MSPD and the radical socialist USPD. Jogiches established close contact with the USPD, which tried to achieve a revolution in Germany as well, while the MSPD opposed it and advocated for supporting the German military leadership.
In March 1918, Jogiches was captured by the German police as well and arrested. The leadership of the Spartacists passed in the hands of Paul Levi, lawyer and new lover of Luxemburg.
The September Insurrections[]
WIP