Aksel Larsen (5 August 1897 – 10 January 1972) was a Danish politician who was chairman of the Communist Party of Denmark (DKP), and chairman and founder of the Socialist People's Party. He is remembered today for his long service in the Communist Party of Denmark, for his time as a concentration camp inmate at Sachsenhausen, and for being the founder of the Socialist People's Party.
Initially a Social Democrat and then a Trotskyist, Larsen came to support Stalinism, and defended the Soviet Union's policies during the early and middle parts of his career. He became leader of the Communist Party in 1932, and was elected to Folketinget (the lower chamber of Danish parliament Rigsdagen) in 1932. Together with other Danish communists, Larsen had to go into hiding in 1941 when the Danish police began arresting all party members. After the liberation at the end of World War II, Larsen became a minister in the liberation cabinet and subsequently led his party to its best-ever result in the 1945 election, in which it took one in eight votes. The election, however, resulted in a Liberal government, and Larsen's party was mostly shunned by the other party leaders.
After the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, Larsen condemned the Soviet Union's action. This led him into conflict with the members of the party leadership who had a greater loyalty to Moscow; a conflict that ended with his expulsion in November 1958. Larsen's reaction was to establish the Socialist People's Party (Socialistisk Folkeparti, abbreviated SF), which, thanks to Larsen's personal popularity, entered parliament at the 1960 election at the expense of the Communists, who from then on played only a very peripheral role in Danish politics.
Larsen himself was highly respected among politicians, especially in his later years, even if his party was seen as somewhat irresponsible. He was the leader of the Socialists until 1968 when he handed this over to Sigurd Ømann, and he remained an MP until his death in 1972.
In 2005, the Danish Institute for International Studies concluded that Larsen held a secret working relationship between 1958 and 1964 with one of Denmark's allied partners in the Cold War, stating that "Larsen... obviously was an agent of a Western intelligence service."
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 railway company Sydfyenske Jernbaner, which also hired him as a railway worker in 1917 when he had finished his apprenticeship. However, Larsen wanted to live in a larger city, and in 1918 he moved to Copenhagen.
When he arrived in Copenhagen, he moved into an attic and got a job as a bicycle delivery man. He joined the Social Democratic Party, the party his parents had been members of for many years, and the Delivery Men's Union where he became shop steward. Through his political and union work he learned about syndicalism and the growing opposition to the Social Democratic Party in the labour movement.
His views grew more radical and he took part in violent riots on the vegetable market in 1918. The Easter Crisis of 1920 when king Christian X dismissed the cabinet of Carl Theodor Zahle became a turning point for Larsen. During the crisis, Larsen spoke in public on City Hall Square in Copenhagen. While parts of the Social Democratic Party supported the abolition of the Danish monarchy, party leadership and the Danish Confederation of Trade Unions accepted a compromise and the crisis was called off. This compromise disappointed Larsen, and the following month he left the Social Democratic Party and joined the newly formed Left Socialist Party.
He campaigned for the Left Socialist Party as a public speaker in the September 1920 election, but the election result of only 0.4% of the vote was a disappointment to Larsen.
The early years as a communist
As Larsen had been enthusiastic about the revolutions in Russia in 1917 and Germany in 1918, he supported the decision of the Left Socialist Party to join the Comintern in November 1920 and the decision to rename the party "The Communist Party of Denmark – Section of the Communist Internationale" (abbreviated DKP). He gained a reputation for being a good agitator and organiser and rose in party ranks. He became chairman of the inner city branch of the Copenhagen part of the party, and member of the party leadership for Greater Copenhagen.
In 1922 the party split in two due to internal faction struggles. Larsen was party secretary of one of the two parties, the so-called "Blågårdsgade party". However, he left the party leadership when the two parties merged back together in 1923. During the 1924 election, his campaigning made him so well known that he got a secret offer to go back to the Social Democrats. He refused the offer and continued to campaign for the communists, who suffered a defeat in the election.
The International Lenin School
When the Communist Party of Denmark got an offer from the 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.
During that time, Joseph Stalin's purges of Leon Trotsky and the left opposition in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) were at their height. Larsen became a member of the CPSU and sided with the opposition to Stalin. Larsen was prompted for a repudiation of his previous views after Stalin's victory at the 1927 party congress and the subsequent banishment of Trotsky to Alma Ata, but it was only after severe pressure that he complied. However, the repudiation did not prevent Larsen from being expelled from the International Lenin School in April 1928 and banished to Nizhny Novgorod.
However, the Communist Party of Denmark requested that Larsen be allowed to return to Denmark, and on 1 February 1929 Larsen left the Soviet Union.
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.