Early Life
Radek was born in Lemberg, Austria-Hungary (now Lviv in Ukraine), as Karol Sobelsohn, to a Jewish family, his father, Bernhard, worked in the post office and died whilst Karl was young. He took the name Radek from a favourite character, Andrej Radek, in Syzyfowe prace (The Labor of Sisyphus) by Stefan Żeromski.
Radek joined the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL) in 1904 and participated in the 1905 Revolution in Warsaw where he was responsible for the party's newspaper Czerwony Sztandar.
Read more about this topic: Karl Radek
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