The red millionaire : a political biography of Willi Münzenberg, Moscow's secret propaganda tsar in the West

Sean McMeekin

"Willi Munzenberg - an Old Bolshevik who was also a self-promoting tycoon - became one of the most influential Communist operatives in Europe between the world wars. From his headquarters in Berlin, he created a variety of front groups that recruited well-known political and cultural figures to work on behalf of the Soviet Union and its causes, and he ran an international empire of newspapers, magazines, and motion picture organizations that churned out enormous amounts of propaganda and raised money for Communist concerns. In this book, Sean McMeekin tells Munzenberg's extraordinary story, arguing persuasively that his financial chicanery and cynical propaganda efforts weakened the non-Communist left, enraged the right, and helped feed a cycle that culminated in Nazism." "Drawing extensively on recently opened Moscow archives, McMeekin chronicles Munzenberg's political career throughout the 1920s and 1930s. He describes how Munzenberg parlayed his friendship with Lenin into a media empire, leveraging his corporate ventures against the currency of his reputation in the Kremlin. He explains how Munzenberg's mysterious financial manipulations outraged Social Democrats and lent rhetorical ammunition to the Nazis and how, by the last years of the Weimar Republic, Munzenberg and his Nazi counterpart Joseph Goebbels were firing off reckless propaganda salvos, feeding a destructive spiral of lies that poisoned the political atmosphere irrevocably." "McMeekin's investigation of Munzenberg sheds new light on finances of the Communist International, propaganda strategy, the use of front organizations to infiltrate non-Communist circles, and the breakdown of democracy in the Weimar Republic. It is also an engrossing tale of a Communist con man whose name once aroused fear, loathing, and admiration around the world."