Aksel Larsen

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Aksel Larsen : biography

August 5, 1897 – January 10, 1972

Legacy

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.

Early life

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 larger city so in 1918 he moved to Copenhagen.

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 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.

The International Lenin School

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.