Aksel Larsen

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 (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 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 (da), 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 (da) 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.

The Red Cabinet and last years in politics

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” (da).

The Red Cabinet lasted until December 1967, when six of the 20 Socialist People's Party members voted against the Krag government'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 called the Left Socialists. He was succeeded as chairman of the Socialist People's Party by Sigurd Ømann, and remained as member of parliament until his death.