Aksel Larsen
Aksel Larsen was a Danish politician who was chairman of the Communist Party of Denmark, and chairman and founder of the Socialist People's Party. He is remembered today for his long service in the Communist Party of Denmark, for his time as a concentration camp inmate at Sachsenhausen, and for being the founder of the Socialist People's Party.
Initially a Social Democrat and then a Trotskyist, Larsen came to support Stalinism, and defended the Soviet Union's policies during the early and middle parts of his career. He became leader of the Communist Party in 1932, and was elected to Folketinget in 1932. Together with other Danish communists, Larsen had to go into hiding in 1941 when the Danish police began arresting all party members. After the liberation at the end of World War II, Larsen became a minister in the liberation cabinet and subsequently led his party to its best-ever result in the 1945 election, in which it took one in eight votes. The election, however, resulted in a Liberal government, and Larsen's party was mostly shunned by the other party leaders.
After the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, Larsen condemned the Soviet Union's action. This led him into conflict with the members of the party leadership who had a greater loyalty to Moscow; a conflict that ended with his expulsion in November 1958. Larsen's reaction was to establish the Socialist People's Party, which, thanks to Larsen's personal popularity, entered parliament at the 1960 election at the expense of the Communists, who from then on played only a very peripheral role in Danish politics.
Larsen himself was highly respected among politicians, especially in his later years, even if his party was seen as somewhat irresponsible. He was the leader of the Socialists until 1968 when he handed this over to Sigurd Ømann, and he remained an MP until his death in 1972.
In 2005, the Danish Institute for International Studies concluded that Larsen held a secret working relationship between 1958 and 1964 with one of Denmark's allied partners in the Cold War, stating that "Larsen... obviously was an agent of a Western intelligence service."
Early life
Aksel Larsen was born as the fourth child of a clog maker in Brændekilde in 1897. Since his family was poor and had six children to support, it was only due to several scholarships that he got a lower secondary school exam. When he had finished school he was hired as an apprentice at the railway company Sydfyenske Jernbaner, which also hired him as a railway worker in 1917 when he had finished his apprenticeship. However, Larsen wanted to live in a larger city, and in 1918 he moved to Copenhagen.Early political career
Time as a Social Democrat
When he arrived in Copenhagen, he moved into an attic and got a job as a bicycle delivery man. He joined the Social Democratic Party, the party his parents had been members of for many years, and the Delivery Men's Union where he became shop steward. Through his political and union work he learned about syndicalism and the growing opposition to the Social Democratic Party in the labour movement.His views grew more radical and he took part in violent riots on the vegetable market in 1918. The Easter Crisis of 1920 when king Christian X dismissed the cabinet of Carl Theodor Zahle became a turning point for Larsen. During the crisis, Larsen spoke in public on City Hall Square in Copenhagen. While parts of the Social Democratic Party supported the abolition of the Danish monarchy, party leadership and the Danish Confederation of Trade Unions accepted a compromise and the crisis was called off. This compromise disappointed Larsen, and the following month he left the Social Democratic Party and joined the newly formed Left Socialist Party.
He campaigned for the Left Socialist Party as a public speaker in the September 1920 election, but the election result of only 0.4% of the vote was a disappointment to Larsen.
The early years as a communist
As Larsen had been enthusiastic about the revolutions in Russia in 1917 and Germany in 1918, he supported the decision of the Left Socialist Party to join the Comintern in November 1920 and the decision to rename the party "The Communist Party of Denmark – Section of the Communist Internationale". He gained a reputation for being a good agitator and organiser and rose in party ranks. He became chairman of the inner city branch of the Copenhagen part of the party, and member of the party leadership for Greater Copenhagen.In 1922 the party split in two due to internal faction struggles. Larsen was party secretary of one of the two parties, the so-called "Blågårdsgade party". However, he left the party leadership when the two parties merged back together in 1923. During the 1924 election, his campaigning made him so well known that he got a secret offer to go back to the Social Democrats. He refused the offer and continued to campaign for the communists, who suffered a defeat in the election.
The International Lenin School
When the Communist Party of Denmark got an offer from the Comintern in 1925 to send a party member to Moscow to attend the new Lenin courses, Larsen was chosen to go. The courses were created to educate loyal leaders to the international branches of the Comintern and was planned to last for eight months. The courses were in German, English, Russian or French so the student the party was to send to Moscow had to have good language skills. His secondary education gave Larsen a head start, and in September 1925 he left Denmark for Moscow.In Moscow Larsen was enrolled at the West University for students from the Baltics, Poland, and Belarus. After six months in Moscow, he was transferred to the International Lenin School, where the courses had been expanded to last for two years.
During that time, Joseph Stalin's purges of Leon Trotsky and the left opposition in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union were at their height. Larsen became a member of the CPSU and sided with the opposition to Stalin. Larsen was prompted for a repudiation of his previous views after Stalin's victory at the 1927 party congress and the subsequent banishment of Trotsky to Alma Ata, but it was only after severe pressure that he complied. However, the repudiation did not prevent Larsen from being expelled from the International Lenin School in April 1928 and banished to Nizhny Novgorod.
However, the Communist Party of Denmark requested that Larsen be allowed to return to Denmark, and on 1 February 1929 Larsen left the Soviet Union.
Back in Denmark
Aksel Larsen had become unpopular both in the Communist Party of Denmark and in Moscow due to his opposition to Stalin. In spite of that and in spite of the Comintern's recommendations that Larsen should not be allowed to hold any office for the time being, Larsen was elected party secretary for Copenhagen because of a lack of talented people in the party.The party was torn by internal struggles, and the 1929 election was a historic defeat for the communists. They only received 3,656 votes equal to 0.2% of the total votes. The internal disagreements were only worsened by the Comintern's decision in the start of 1930 to send a German representative of its Executive Committee to Denmark to reconcile the factions of the party. The Comintern demanded that the Danish party were to follow the militant ultra-left line decided at the sixth Comintern congress and a crackdown on the "danger from the right".
The two main combatants of the internal struggle were Aksel Larsen and Thøger Thøgersen, but Larsen gained the upper hand by leading and organising the rapidly growing movement of the unemployed. In March 1930, Larsen was elected chairman of the National Committee of the Unemployed by more than 100,000 unemployed people who had gathered in Copenhagen. He became famous for giving a speech on 9 October 1931 from a row boat in the canals around Slotsholmen while evading the police's attempts to arrest him.
The movement of the unemployed was the greatest mass movement in the party's history. Party membership increased, as did circulation of the party newspaper. In the 1932 election, the communists got 1.1% of the vote and Aksel Larsen and Arne Munch-Petersen became the first two communist members of parliament. Although the Comintern still mistrusted Larsen for his Trotskyist past, the success of the movement of the unemployed and the electoral success prevented them from blocking the election of Larsen as party chairman at the 1932 party congress.
Chairman of the Communist Party
Opposition to Moscow
Larsen had an ability to translate the strange and alien decrees of the Comintern to Danish conditions, and his oratorical skills contributed greatly to the successes in organising the unemployed and gaining seats in parliament. In parliament, he became known as a great orator. He did not keep to translating the Comintern policies but also modified them. The ultra-left line was softened, and contrary to the directions from Moscow he warned his party members of seeing the Social Democrats as the main enemy.Larsen wanted to develop a Danish variant of communism and these sentiments grew after the seventh Comintern congress had adopted the popular front strategy aiming for a close cooperation with the Social Democrats. While he did not want to make the Social Democrats the main enemy, their unsympathetic views towards the communists made Larsen doubt that cooperation was possible. Instead, Larsen was in favour of developing a popular front with the Social Liberal Party. With the exception of Arne Munch-Petersen, who had become the Danish representative of the Executive Committee of Comintern after losing his seat in parliament in 1935, the party leadership supported this course.
The Comintern grew worried about the Danish party and the Trotskyist past of its chairman, and as more and more disagreements arose, correspondence between Larsen and Moscow grew increasingly harsh. The Comintern lost its patience with Larsen and called him to Moscow for negotiations after he had published two articles against increased military spending. Not only had Larsen published the articles without clearing them with Moscow; he had also expressed views in contradiction to Soviet interests. Because of its position, Denmark is the gate to the Baltic Sea, and a strong Danish defense would prevent Nazi Germany for using Denmark as a bridgehead for an attack on the Soviet Union.