Influences and Origins
National Bolshevism is said to have roots in World War I Germany, where nationalist writers such as Ernst Niekisch and Ernst Jünger were prepared to tolerate the spread of communism as long as it took on the clothes of nationalism and abandoned its internationalist mission. This tendency, although minor, continued into the 1930s when it became associated with the National Socialist Combat Movement, a dissident breakaway movement from the Nazi Party which espoused left-wing economics and which was led by Hermann Ehrhardt, Otto Strasser and Walther Stennes.
Karl Radek wanted some of the right-wing nationalists he had met in prison to unite with the Bolsheviks in the name of National Bolshevism. He saw in National Bolshevism a way to "remove the capitalist isolation" of the Soviet Union. Radek had been influenced by the earlier ideas of Heinrich Laufenberg and Fritz Wolffheim, two Hamburg-based dissident communists whose ideas about a Germany-Soviet Union alliance in a nationalist war against the United States and the United Kingdom he had previously criticised.
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