“RED CLARA” ZETKIN

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21988, 24 June 1933, Page 11

“RED CLARA” ZETKIN

FUNERAL IN MOSCOW HUGE ATTENDANCE OF WORKERS. MOSCOW, June 22. (Received June 23, at 5.5 p.m.) Three hundred thousand workers attended the funeral of “ Red Clara ” Zetkin. The body lay in state in the Trade Union house, and was later cremated. The ashes were immured in the walls of the Kremlin in the presence of M. Stalin, M. Molotov, and other leaders. M. Lenin’s widow delivered the oration.

Clart Zetkin, who died iu Moscow at the age of 75, was a very popular figure in German public life. She was spoken of as one of the last of the great German revolutionists. She was a close friend of Rosa Luxembourg and of Karl Liebnecht at the height of their influence. In her early womanhood she taught school for a few years, then she gave that up to devote herself to the cause of Socialism, and for more than 50 years she continued an active campaign of Socialist ideals. During the war, when the Independent Socialist Parliament was organised, she was one of the first to join that radical wing of her party. She is sometimes called the mother of Socialism for women, having always been a militant champion of the rights of women, especially proletarian women. Her husband (Ossip Zetkin), a Socialist writer, died when she was only 23. She was elected to the Reichstag in 1920 and was for a time the only Communist, in that body. Term after term she was re-elected, despite the fact that after 1924 she spent much of her time in Moscow and rarely attended sessions. When she did hobble into the Parliament, however, she made herself felt. She was famous for her skill as an orator,\for her keen wit and sparkling repartee', and her most pronounced political enemies did not fail to listen to her. In Moscow she lived at the Kremlin for a number of years, as president of the International Workers’ Aid, but her independence brought her into disrepute finally with some of the Soviet chiefs, who complained that “her ideology is now quite bourgeois,” but who were bound, by the love that she inspired in so many sorts of people, to treat her with consideration. She returned to Russia when Hitler reached power.