Jules Humbert-Droz

Born in a family of watchmakers with socialist beliefs, he started having more and more involvement in the leftist movement. After studying Protestant theology in Neuchâtel, Paris and Berlin he wrote a thesis about 'Socialism and christianism'. He became a pastor in 1914, and started writing in the socialist newspaper La Sentinelle soon after.[2] Married Eugénie Perret in 1916, which would accompany him in his political life with the name Jenny Humbert-Droz.[3]

He opposed World War One and refused to serve in the Swiss army, and because of that he was imprisoned.[4] In 1918 he received another sentence for his participation in a general-strike.[2] He supported the Bolshevik revolution, and later in 1921 at the third International Congress of the Comintern, Jules Humbert-Droz was elected, on the proposal of Lenin himself, to secretary of the Communist International.[2] He became after 1920 an outstanding leader in the international communist movement, travelling all around the world to organize the national sections of the Comitern. He exerted some control over the French Communist party and called himself 'the eye of moscow in Paris'. He eventually became the first director of the Latin Secretariat of the Comintern.[5] He was an ally and friend of Nikolai Bukharin. After the Sixth Comintern Congress, Bukharin was politically isolated and only few people in the Moscow Apparatus stayed loyal to him, including Humbert-Droz,[6] who was disgraced along with his ally.[5] Their friendship later ended. He stated in his 1971 memóirs, that the reason for that was because in his last encounter with Bukharin in 1929, Bukharin said he had entered in contact with Zinoviev and Kamenev in order to remove Stalin from leadership, and were planning to use individual terror (assassination) against him. Humbert-Droz disagreed with this, because he thought this terror would destroy the bolshevik leadership, and both knew well the crimes Stalin was capable of.[7][8] He managed to re-enter the Executive Committee of the Communist International after self-criticizing and capitulating. But in 1943 he was definitely expelled from Swiss communist party.[4] Aware of his worth and his experience, the Swiss Socialist Party invited him to return to his original party. Droz was in the central secretariat until 1959, he then retired to La Chaux-de-Fonds, but still remained politically active. He militated against the atomic armament of Switzerland, and contributed to various journals. In the end of his life he undertakes the writing of his memoirs, published between 1969 and 1973.[9]