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Aksel Larsen (5 August 1897 – 10 January 1972) was a Danish politician who was chairman of the Communist Party of Denmark and chairman and founder of the Socialist People's Party. Larsen became leader of the Danish Communist Party in 1932, and was elected to the Danish Parliament (Rigsdagen) 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 in 1945 Larsen served as a minister in the interim government, and subsequently led his party to its best ever result in the October 1945 election, in which it took 10% of the vote. The election, however, brought a Liberal government into office, and Larsen's party was mostly shunned by the other party leaders. Following the rising in Hungary in 1956, Larsen condemned the Soviet Union's action. This led him into conflict with the members of the party leadership who were more loyal to Moscow; a conflict that ended with his being expelled in November 1958. Larsen's reaction was to form the Socialist People's Party (Socialistisk Folkeparti), 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. Aksel Larsen, who was especially in later years highly respected among politicians, even if his party was seen as somewhat irresponsible, remained as leader of the Socialists until 1968, when he handed over to Sigurd Ømann. He remained an MP until his death in 1972. The Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS), concluded in 2005, 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." Aksel Larsen was born as the fourth child of a clog maker in Brændekilde (now part of Odense Municipality) 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 Sydfyenske Jernbaner railway company who also hired him as a railway worker in 1917 when he had finished his apprenticeship. However Larsen wanted to go to a larger city so in 1918 he moved to Copenhagen. 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 the city hall square of Copenhagen. While parts of the Social Democratic Party supported the abolishment of the monarchy the social democrats and the Danish Confederation of Trade Unions accepted a compromise and the crisis was called off. This compromise disappointed Larsen and the month after 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 1920 parliamentary election but the election result of only 5.160 votes was a disappointment to Larsen. 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 re-name 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. When the Communist Party of Denmark got
an offer from 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 (CPSU)
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 Nizhniy Novgorod. However
the Communist Party of Denmark requested that Larsen was to be allowed
to go back to Denmark and on 1 February 1929 Larsen left the Soviet
Union. 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 parliamentary election of 1929 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 superiority 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 who had gathered in Copenhagen. He became famous for holding
a speech in October that year from a rowing boat in the canals around
the seat of parliament 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. Larsen
had an ability to translate the strange and alien paroles 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 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 he 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 defence would prevent Nazi Germany for using Denmark as a bridgehead for an attack on the Soviet Union. Although
Larsen wanted more independence in developing policies he was not
critical of the Soviet Union. He was a loyal defender of Joseph Stalin and
the Soviet Union. Although they affected many of his former friends
from his stay in the '20s and even though he did not believe in all the
accusations he defended the purges and the Moscow trials. On
20 May 1937 Larsen arrived to a Moscow marked by fear, anti -
Trotskyist
propaganda and mass hysteria. A lot of his old acquaintances had either
disappeared or did not dare to meet him. The
negotiations with the Comintern developed into a political trial
against Larsen who had still not been forgiven for his Trotskyist past.
Although he defended the Danish party line he was pressured into
signing a declaration that the Danish party would follow the popular
front strategy. He was not allowed to leave Moscow before he convinced
the Comintern that he had to go home to look after his wife who was
sick with cancer and to tend to his work in parliament. His seat in
parliament is likely to have saved his life. It is suggested that the NKVD had planned to arrest Larsen but general secretary Georgi Dimitrov of the Comintern did not want to arrest a member of a foreign parliament and intervened. Arne Munch - Petersen who
had been part of the negotiations with Larsen did not have that
protection and was arrested on 26 July 1937. After three weeks of
torture and interrogations he confessed to Trotskyist activity and was
imprisoned. In 1940 he died of tuberculosis in a Soviet prison.
Aksel
Larsen and the leadership of the Communist Party got the news about
Arne Munch - Petersen’s arrest in January 1938. Although they were
shocked they saw no way of helping him without seriously damaging the
relationship to Moscow. Because of this they concealed their knowledge
not only to the public but also to his wife and family. Larsen
and the Communist Party complied with the orders from Moscow and began
working for the popular front policy. In March 1938 following Adolf Hitler’s takeover of Austria in the Anschluss Larsen
held a speech in which he used a more patriotic rhetoric than before
and warned that Denmark could suffer the same fate. After the speech
the communists urged the Social Democrats and the Social Liberal Party
to join the communists in a popular front. In a letter to the Social
Democratic leader and prime minister Thorvald Stauning Larsen
promised “the most unconditional and loyal support”. The
new party line culminated on the 1938 party congress where Larsen held
one of his most important speeches. He declared that the communist
party was both a Danish and a democratic party and put great emphasis
on his party’s wishes for unity in the labour movement. The
popular front policy won supporters outside traditional communist
constituencies and since the communists used the charismatic Larsen to
personify their policies he became increasingly popular. However the
Social Democrats refused to cooperate with the communists. In
spite of the popularity of Larsen and the popular front voter support
for the party was small. Although the communists got 40,983 votes in the 1939 election and
went from two to three seats in parliament the increase was much
smaller than they had hoped for which was a great disappointment to
Larsen. The communists were further disappointed by the 1939 constitutional referendum where they had campaigned in favour of the new constitution which was not passed. The popular front policy crumbled with the signing of the Molotov - Ribbentrop pact on
23 August 1939. Despite being confused about the pact Larsen defended
Stalin’s decision. The German invasion of Poland on 1 September and
Stalin’s invasion of Poland on 17 September and the following partition
of Poland between Hitler and Stalin caused more confusion in the
communist movement as the former image of the Soviet Union as a bulwark
against fascism now fell. The
situation was difficult but Larsen did his best to defend the Soviet
Union. This put Larsen under a lot of stress and in September he asked
the party secretariat and later the Comintern for permission to resign
as chairman. However his requests were denied as it was feared that a
change in leadership would increase the strain on the party. Larsen
raised the issue again when the Soviet Union laid pressure on Finland
to evacuate Karelia but was turned down once more. The Soviet attack on Finland on 30 November 1939 and the Winter War created
great public sympathy for Finland in the Danish public. Contrary the
communists were despised for their support of the Soviet Union and
Aksel Larsen became the target of public disdain. Shortly after the
beginning of the war the entire Folketing walked out in protest when Larsen mounted the podium. The peace between Finland and the Soviet Union removed some of the stress on the party but on 9 April 1940 Denmark was occupied by Germany.
At the time Larsen were in Moscow but on 22 April he managed to get
back to Copenhagen with instructions for how to deal with the
situation. At that time the Communist Party of Denmark was still legal
but the Comintern as well as Danish party leadership was expecting that
the party would soon be banned. The communists were to try to remain a
legal party for as long as possible and use the time to prepare to go
underground. In spite of these expectations the Danish police took the
communists by surprise when leading communists were arrested on 22 June
1941 and the party as well as the communist ideology was banned. Larsen
managed to avoid capture and went into hiding. He and the party
continued the political work with an illegal publication against the ban on communism and an open letter to prime minister Thorvald Stauning on 20 August 1941. In January 1942 Larsen was a co-founder of the resistance organisation “Frit Danmark” (lit. “A Free Denmark”) which circulated an illegal publication of the same name. A
month later Larsen chaired a party leadership meeting where it was
decided that the communists were to take part in sabotage against the
German occupiers. However Larsen did not get the possibility to be a
part of the sabotage work as he was arrested by Danish police on 5
November 1942 and incarcerated at Vestre Fængsel. There he was given over to the Germans who transferred him to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp on
28 August 1943. There he was confined to a solitary cell isolated from
the rest of the camp by a high wall with electrified barbed wire. Aksel Larsen survived the concentration camp and was saved to Sweden in April 1945 by count Folke Bernadotte's White Buses.
On 5 May he returned to Denmark and was hailed as a hero of the
resistance. The war had turned the public image of the communist
movement upside down with the Soviet Union being credited for its
efforts in the war and the Communist Party of Denmark being credited for its involvement in the resistance movement. In
the months after the liberation Aksel Larsen who was marked by his stay
in the concentration camp did not play a great political role. The communists were given seats in the liberation cabinet and Larsen got a cabinet seat although without portfolio. While he recovered from his stay in Sachsenhausen he let Alfred Jensen lead the party. The election of 1945 on
15 September was the best ever for the communists. They got 12.5% of
the vote and 18 seats in parliament. With 27,497 votes Larsen himself
was the candidate who received most personal votes. The
friendly relations between Social Democrats and communists that had
existed right after the liberation soon disappeared and the old fronts
from before the war started to re-emerge. The Danish communists became
the target of public disdain once more with the onset of the Cold War
and the communist coup in
Prague in 1948 combined with new purges and trials in Moscow and
Eastern Europe. Larsen once more showed himself to be a defender of the
Soviet Union. Although
the Comintern had been disbanded in 1943 he frequently sought the
advice of the Soviet embassy in Copenhagen and the CPSU. His loyalty to
Moscow was without conditions and he gained a reputation for being “one
of Scandinavia’s most reliable and trusted Stalinists” after he helped
to purge Norwegian communist leader Peter Furobotn. Although
he had abandoned his idea of a Danish variant of communism he still
managed to translate the Soviet party line to Danish realities. His
skills as an orator and public debater helped slow down the decline in
voter support but was not able to stop it. However as the Cold War
worsened the Communist Party of Denmark became increasingly isolated. Controversy arose in March 1949 when Gestapo protocols from the interrogations of him during the war were printed by the conservative newspaper “Nationaltidende”.
He was accused of having given the Germans too much information and
for having betrayed his comrades in the resistance. He was defended by
his party and by veterans of the resistance but the interrogation
protocols were used against him by his political opponents for many
years after. During
a 1951 stay in Moscow Larsen learned that Arne Munch - Pedersen had died
in 1940. Although the case continued to emerge in the media and in
parliament Larsen kept silent and denied any knowledge of Arne
Munch - Pedersen’s fate. Although
the Cold War was a stressful period to Larsen he kept to his communist
creed. The first traces of doubt came shortly after Stalin’s death when
all defendants of the Doctors’ Plot trials
were rehabilitated because their confessions had been made under
torture. Larsen’s doubt was however short lived and he was only
strengthened in his views by Nikita Khrushchev’s thaw both inside the Soviet Union and internationally. A strike at a Phillips plant
and an increase in party membership combined with a stronger communist
presence in the trade unions convinced Larsen that the party had a
bright future. Although he attended the 20th congress of the CPSU in 1956 Larsen did not hear Khrushchev’s “secret speech”. He first learned about it when it was reported by the New York Times on 16 March. Larsen read the speech at the Soviet embassy and proposed a party line more independent of Moscow. The
collective bargaining negotiations of 1956 and a general strike had
strengthened the party and Larsen got his party’s support to pursue a
more independent line. However his plans reached farther and he
persuaded Mogens Fog to re-join the party to help transform it to a “broad, national, socialistic party”. The positive situation for the Danish communists changed dramatically with the Soviet invasion of Hungary in
October 1956. Once again the communists were disdained in public
opinion and isolated politically. Internally Larsen had to balance
between the inner circle of the party who were in favour of the
invasion and the party members and intellectuals who were against.
Internal tension grew and resulted in an extraordinary party congress
in January 1957 where Aksel Larsen for the first time since 1932
delivered his annual report in his own name and not in the name of the
central committee. The congress elected a new central committee and
executive committee with a strong majority against Larsen’s line. The
party was sitting on a powder keg of internal disagreement which could
go off at any moment. The situation was triggered when the League of Communists of Yugoslavia invited
a delegation from the Communist Party of Denmark to go to its 1958
congress. The CPSU and other communist parties had also accepted the
invitation but suddenly the CPSU decided to boycott the congress and
pressured other communist parties not to send delegations either.
Although Larsen's decision to go anyway was supported by the Danish
executive committee, it was decided that Knud Jespersen and Børge Houmann were to go to Yugoslavia instead of Larsen. Internal
disagreements continued after the Yugoslav party congress and on 8 July
1958 Larsen revived his ideas from the 1930s about a distinct Danish
form of communism and urged the party leadership to change to a more
independent course. Larsen now also thought that the Danish party
should not necessarily support and defend the acts of the Soviet Union
and the CPSU. Fierce
faction struggle arose and Larsen lost the party congress in October
1958. On 16 November 1958 it was announced in the communist newspaper “Land og Folk” that he had been expelled from the party. The
Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS), concluded in 2005,
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." In the 2005 book Firmaets største bedrift historian Peer Henrik Hansen argues that Aksel Larsen was recruited by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
According to Hansen Larsen had his first meetings with American agents
in November 1958 in his own home. According to the newspaper Information Larsen
was offered information on sentiments among the party hard liners if he
would cause a split in the party. For years the CIA had a bugging
device in the apartment of Alfred Jensen the vice-chairman of the
Communist Party of Denmark. From there they knew about the tensions in
the party leadership. According to Hansen Aksel Larsen was at the time
afraid of retaliations from the KGB and
Larsen, suspecting the American agent of being a KGB assassin, brought
a friend with a gun to the first meeting to act as bodyguard. Poul Dam a party colleague of Larsen has reported that he had made preparations to
go into hiding in the case of a Soviet invasion. Hansen speculates that
Aksel Larsen's cooperation with the CIA was part of a trade - off where
the CIA got information on communists and Larsen in return would be
protected from the KGB. Over ten years Larsen had several meetings with the CIA where he gave information on the relationship between the Soviet Union and
communist parties in other countries. He was asked if the Communist
Party of Denmark was doing espionage work for the Soviet bloc or if the
party was preparing an illegal party apparatus. He denied direct
knowledge about this but told the agent that the party had turned down Soviet and East German requests
for aid with espionage. According to some of Hansen's sources Larsen
was rewarded with vacations, dinners and money for his co-operation. Larsen met with a CIA agent with connections to Radio Liberty.
He told the Americans much about international communism but were less
keen to tell about Danish communists especially how Moscow funded them.
He stated several times that he would like to destroy his former party
and others who did the Soviet Union's bidding.
According
to Hansen the Russians knew about Larsen's cooperation with the CIA as
did Danish intelligence agencies who learned about the connections
between Larsen and the CIA as soon as 1958. Although the CIA operation
was illegal according to Danish law the Danish intelligence agencies
promised not to intervene in return for transcripts of the debriefings. Although no longer a communist Larsen was still a socialist.
Ideas for a new political party was made public on 20 November 1958 and
a preparatory committee with Larsen as its leader was created the day
after. The Socialist People’s Party was
registered with parliament on 24 November and the party held its
founding congress on 15 February 1959 in Copenhagen. Like the Communist
Party of Denmark it was “founded on the idea of Marxism” but contrary
to the communists the new party declared its loyalty to Danish
parliamentary democracy and the peaceful path to socialism. Leading up to the 1960 election the Gallup polls were
not in favour of the Socialist People’s Party but Larsen showed his
command of the then new television media when he spoke to the viewers
from a hospital bed with a broken leg. The new party gained 6,4% of the
vote and 11 seats in parliament while the communists lost all their
seats. As
many of the members of the new party were former communists the party
were believed to be communists in disguise by other parties, especially
the Social Democrats. However those suspicions cooled and the party
gradually became accepted. In the 1966 election the
Socialist People’s Party and the Social Democrats got a majority and
there were talks about forming a coalition cabinet. However the
Socialist People’s Party could not accept the demands made by the
Social Democrats. Instead Jens Otto Krag of
the Social Democrats formed a cabinet supported by the socialists and a
joint contact committee between the two parties was formed. This
committee was soon dubbed “The Red Cabinet”.
The
Red Cabinet lasted until December 1967 when six of the 20 Socialist
People’s Party members voted against the Krag administration’s proposal
to freeze a threshold payment. An extraordinary party congress was held
and although Larsen gained a majority for his political line he had to
resign from his posts as party leader and leader of the parliamentary
group. However a split could not be avoided and on 17 December the
minority founded the new party the Left Socialists. Larsen
had just turned 70 when he resigned as party chairman and had reached
the end of his political career. He was recognized by his long service
in the Communist Party of Denmark and his time as a concentration camp
inmate. Aksel Larsen died on 10 January 1972 and is interred at Fredens Kirkegård in Odense. To
his death Larsen stayed a controversial figure. Although he had gained
acceptance with his new party and although his supporters revered him
and spoke about a special kind of “Larsenism” he was also accused of
having betrayed his principles. He was criticised for having been one
of the fiercest supporters of the Soviet Union and for his concealment
of Arne Munch - Petersen’s fate. However he was a respected parliamentarian and one of Denmark’s most popular politicians. Larsens
attempts to develop “third way” form of communism independent of the
Soviet Union is viewed by some to be one of the forerunners of eurocommunism. He is one of the parliamentarians who has been commemorated by having his bust placed in the hallways of the Danish parliament. |