Ruth Fischer
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Ruth Fischer (December 11, 1895 – March 13, 1961) was a German Communist, a co-founder of the Austrian Communist Party in 1918. She was born in Leipzig.
Life and work
Ruth was the daughter of the Austrian philosopher, Rudolf Eisler and elder sister to the composer Hanns Eisler and fellow communist activist Gerhart Eisler. She studied philosophy, economics and politics in Vienna. She moved to Berlin in 1919 and she was a leader of the Communist Party of Germany from 1924 to 1926. Espousing left-wing positions, she was a member of the Reichsrat from 1924-1928. She fled to Paris in 1933 and then to the USA in 1941. She propounded critical views of Stalinism and called for a rebirth of Communism after Stalin's death. Before this period of anti-Stalinism, however, she was instrumental in the rise to power of the Triumvirs (Stalin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev), viciously denouncing Trotsky at the fifth congress of the International. Isaac Deutscher, the noted biographer of Trotsky and Stalin, described her as a "young, trumpet-tongued woman, without any revolutionary experience or merit, yet idolized by the Communists of Berlin." In 1955 she returned to Paris and published her books Stalin and German Communism and Die Umformung der Sowjetgesellschaft.
