MANES SPERBER
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of making fateful decisions. Still I believe to this day that he was a
remarkably intelligent, at once passionate and skeptical politician.
Dedicated to the cause from earliest youth , he refused to com–
promise his ideals, and atoned for that in Moscow with his life.
In October or at the latest November 1933 we both arrived at
the conviction that very soon now, before the end of winter, an
uprising of the Socialist Party and its branch organizations could
take place in Austria.
It
was bound to happen, in fact, because the
leaders of the rightist groups involved in the civil war had
methodically plotted to draw the socialist into a confrontation. Since
at that time, nine months after Hitler's seizure of power, the com–
munists and their sympathizers were still calling the socialists fascists
or Nazi accomplices and, at least in words, were fighting them as
though they remained the arch enemy, we decided to inform
Moscow without delay of the impending events and to warn in no
uncertain terms against mistaking the real situation and the mood in
the socialist camp. We spent hour after hour discussing in what way,
with what arguments, we could make them understand. A report
which Djuka had submitted in his capacity as foreign political
observer for Tass, was answered by a sharp rebuke. Letters to Bela
Kun, who played an important role in the Comintern, Manuilski,
and some other comrades highly regarded in the Kremlin, went long
unanswered. Finally the instructions came; we were to pay no atten–
tion to such coffeehouse gossip and should stop bothering the Com–
intern with it.
But Djuka would not give up. He penned a report which he
sent not to any communist organization but to the Narkomindjel,
the foreign ministry of the Soviety Union. He was convinced that
there were enough people there who would at least seriously consider
the question why and under what conditions such an uprising might
occur.
It is well known that Moscow, which does not believe in tears,
Moscow, which had led the German communists into unresisting
defeat, let the communist penpushers go on as before castigating the
socialists, who shortly afterwards, on February 12, 1934, fought a
battle in Austria, a battle they were bound to lose. But it was they
and not the German communists who were willing to risk armed
resistance.
The fact that he turned out to be right sealed Djuka's fate. A
short while later he was called to Moscow and was there killed by the
