Bukharin Speaks To The “Devil”

In the May 1963 issue of Unser Zeit, the Yiddish-language journal of the Jewish Labor Bund, there appears an important memoir by the late Lydia Dan, wife of the Menshevik leader Theodore Dan. During the early thirties, relates Mrs. Dan, either when Hitler’s accession to power seemed imminent or shortly after he had already taken power, the German Social Democrats were concerned over the disposal of Karl Marx’s papers, which had until then been kept in their files. The Soviet government, which somehow heard of this, put out some feelers offering to buy the papers, and the German Social Democrats, desperate for funds, expressed some interest. As intermediaries in the negotiations—which finally came to nothing—there...