Marchlewski, Julian

(patronymic, luzefovich; pseudonyms, Karski, Kujawski). Born May 5(17), 1866, in Wloclawek, Poland; died Mar. 22, 1925, near Nervi, Italy. He was buried in Berlin, and in 1950 his remains were brought to Warsaw. Leader of the Polish and international working-class movement. Of petit bourgeois origin.

Machlewski graduated from the University of Zurich with a doctorate in economics in 1896. A participant in the revolutionary movement from the early 1880’s, he belonged to under-ground circles associated with the Proletariat I Party. He worked in Polish and German dye factories from 1887 and was one of the organizers of the Union of Polish Workers in 1889. Arrested and imprisoned in 1891, he emigrated to Switzerland in 1893, where he helped found the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland (SDKP) and joined the editorial board of the newspaper Sprawa robotnicza. Returning to Germany in 1896, he contributed to the Polish and German Social Democratic press and helped V. L. Lenin establish the newspaper Iskra. He edited newspapers of the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL) from 1900.

Marchlewski was engaged in party work in Warsaw in 1905-06, becoming a member of the Central Board of the SDKPiL in 1906. At the Fifth (London) Congress of the RSDLP in 1907 he was elected a candidate member of the Central Committee. He was a delegate to the Third, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, Eighth, and Ninth Congresses of the Second International. He was active in the German Social Democratic Party. During World War I he took an internationalist stand and was one of the founders of the Spartacus group. He was arrested in 1916 and sent to a concentration camp. In 1918, at the insistence of the Soviet government, Marchlewski was released and sent to Russia, where he became a member of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee that same year and participated in the founding of the Comintern. In 1919 he worked with the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Germany, and in September of that year he became a member of the Executive Bureau of the Communist Party of Poland in Russia. In 1920 he joined the Polish Bureau of the Central Committee of the RCP (Bolshevik) and served as chairman of the Provisional Revolutionary Committee of Poland.

Marchlewski was sent on diplomatic missions in 1921-22. In 1922 he was appointed rector of the Communist University for Western National Minorities and served as the chairman of the Central Committee of the International Organization for Aiding Revolutionaries (MOPR), which he had helped found.

Machlewski was the author of several works on the international revolutionary movement and the history of Poland; he also wrote memoirs about Lenin. In 1920 he developed the theoretical principles of the Comintern’s agrarian program, which were highly praised by Lenin (Poln. sobr. soch. , 5th ed., vol. 41, p. 169).