The International Lenin School
When the Communist Party of Denmark got an offer from 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 Nizhniy Novgorod.
However the Communist Party of Denmark requested that Larsen was to be allowed to go back to Denmark and on 1 February 1929 Larsen left the Soviet Union.
Read more about this topic: Aksel Larsen
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