Mark Rein (journalist)

Mark Rafailovich Rein was a socialist journalist who disappeared during the Spanish Civil War. His father was the Menshevik leader Raphael Abramovitch Rein. He was presumed kidnapped and murdered by the Soviet secret service, the OGPU.

Biography

Mark Rafailovich Rein was born in 1909 in Vilna, Russian Empire. His father was Raphael Abramovitch Rein, a Menshevik Russian and a prominent leader of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers' Party. In 1911, as a small child, Mark Rein left Russia with his parents, who were escaping from the Tsarist Okhrana.
In 1917, he returned to Russia with his parents; his father played a role in the events of the Russian Revolution of 1917. In 1920, aged 11, Mark Rein left Russia again with his parents and lived mostly in Berlin and Paris. As a young man he became a member of the Mensheviks, the German Social Democratic Party and the Swedish Social Democratic Party. In 1932, he graduated from the Technische Hochschule in Charlottenburg. He worked as a journalist for several socialist papers. He was more sympathetic to the Soviet Union than his father, and for a while supported the idea of a unification of social-democratic and communist parties.
In 1936, he went to Spain to support the Republican faction during the Spanish Civil War, arriving on March 4 and initially working as an electrical engineer in a radio factory. He became a friend to Willy Brandt there, whom he met in Barcelona. On April 9, 1937, he was kidnapped in Barcelona by agents of the Soviet secret service OGPU. He was spirited to Russia, apparently with the intention of using him in the show trial of Alexey Rykov and Nikolai Bukharin. He was supposed to connect the accused in the third Moscow Trial in 1938 to the exiled Menshevik leadership. The kidnapping was apparently organised by Aleksandr Mikhailovich Orlov, who supervised the kidnapping and the execution of left-wing opponents of Stalin in Spain during the Civil War and later defected to the USA.
Another Russian prisoner testified he was alive in Russia as of May 22. In spite of frantic efforts by Raphael Abramovich Rein and western socialist supporters, Mark Rein was never seen alive again and is thought to have been murdered by the OGPU.