Iron Revolutionaries and Salon Socialists Bolsheviks and German Communists in the 1920S and 1930S‪.‬

When Osip Piatnitskii met German worker representatives for the first time in Berlin before World War I, the Bolshevik underground fighter experienced a veritable culture shock. In his memoirs published in 1927, the future Comintern functionary described his astonishment at what he confronted in Germany: "When I first came to a meeting and saw the well-dressed gentlemen sitting at the table with beer steins, I thought I had come to a meeting of the bourgeois, since I had never met such workers in Russia. But it was, in fact, a party meeting." (1) A comparable feeling of estrangement was reciprocated by the Germans. Several years after Piamitskii published his memoirs, Willy Leow--chairman of the Federation of Fighters for the Red Front (RFB)--had a discussion on the train from Khar'kov to Moscow with a diplomat from the German embassy in Moscow. After discussing Leow's recent visit to a Soviet industrial complex built during the First Five-Year Han, the diplomat reported to Berlin on the German Communist's "impression of the construction of socialism in the Soviet Union." This he summed up in Leow's laconic words: "The Russians should first learn how to shit before they build industry." When the diplomat asked Leow if he was not afraid that a communist Germany would be dominated by the Soviet Union, the Red Front fighter assured him it would surely be the other way around, due to "higher German intelligence and culture." (2)