Karlo Štajner

Karlo Štajner (15 January 1902 – 1 April 1992) was an Austrian-Yugoslav communist activist and a prominent Gulag survivor.

Štajner was born Karl Steiner in Vienna, Austria-Hungary on 15 January 1902.

He worked as printing worker when he joined the communist movement in the First Austrian Republic in 1919.

He became a member of the Communist Youth of Austria and later became a member of the organization's Central Committee.

The Communist Party of Yugoslavia (CPY) was banned in December 1920 and all communist activities were prohibited by the regime of Alexander I of Yugoslavia.

In December 1921, Štajner was sent to the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes by the Young Communist International to help the CPY.

Štajner was born in Vienna, where he joined the Communist Youth of Austria, but emigrated to the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes in 1922 on the order of the Young Communist International to help the newly established Communist Party of Yugoslavia.

From January 1922 until 1931, he lived in Zagreb, where he ran an illegal communist printing house, and was helping local CPY cell.

During this time, he became a citizen of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia.

He spent the rest of his life in Zagreb with his wife Sonya whom he married in Moscow in the 1930s.

After an illegal communist printing house in Zagreb where Štajner worked was raided by the police in 1931, he fled Yugoslavia, visiting Paris, Vienna, and Berlin before finally settling in the Soviet Union in 1932 where he worked in the Comintern publishing house in Moscow.

In 1931, Yugoslav police found out about the printing house, so Štajner fled the country to avoid arrest.

He initially traveled to Paris where the Central Committee of CPY had its side-base.

He lived in Paris for almost a year, but was arrested for his communist activity and expelled from France.

He moved to Vienna, where he tried to establish an illegal printing house in order to distribute communist literature all over the Balkans.

There, Štajner was arrested again, and expelled from Austria, as he was no longer a citizen of that country.

Georgi Dimitrov helped him travel to Berlin to avoid being extradited to Yugoslavia, and to help the Communist Party of Germany.

Facing arrest once again, he fled Germany and traveled to the Soviet Union in July 1932.

Štajner settled in Moscow, where he was appointed manager of the Comintern publishing house.

While in Moscow, he met and married Russian girl Sofya "Sonya" Yefimovna Moiseeva in 1935.

During the Great Purge in 1936, Štajner was arrested and spent the next 17 years in prisons and gulags and three more years in exile in Siberia.

During the Great Purge, Štajner was arrested on 4 November 1936 by the NKVD agents and accused of being a "counterrevolutionary, Gestapo agent, and accomplice in the murder of Sergey Kirov".

He was tried together with Yugoslavian communist leaders Filip Filipović and Antun Mavrak, both of whom died during the Great Purge.

From November 1936 til May 1937, Štajner was confined in the NKVD prisons Lubyanka and Butyrka, and then submitted to the military court and confined in the Lefortovo Prison.

In June 1937 he was found guilty by the military court and sentenced to ten years in prison.

He was then transferred to the Solovki prison camp on the Solovetsky Islands, where he was held until August 1939.

He was then transferred to the Nadezhda work camp near Dudinka in northern Siberia.

There, he took part in the building of the railway and then in the building of the city of Norilsk.

In 1943, Štajner was sentenced to ten more years in prison, plus five years of loss of rights.

In 1948, after the Tito–Stalin split and the expulsion of the CPY from the Comintern, the NKVD asked him to testify against the Yugoslavian leadership, which he refused.

Shortly afterwards, he was transferred to Irkutsk, where he was held until 1949, and then to Bratsk, where he was held until September 1953.

His 17-year prison term ended on 22 September 1953, six months after the death of Stalin.

While in exile, Štajner lived in Krasnoyarsk, Yeniseysk and Maklakovo between 1953 and 1956.

There, he worked as a stonemason, and then as a factory worker.

In 1955, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union resumed diplomatic relations.

He was released in 1956 after being rehabilitated, and returned to Yugoslavia.

In June 1956, during an official visit to Soviet Union, Tito handed Khrushchev a list of 113 Yugoslav communists who had disappeared during the Great Purge, and asked about their fate.

In 1971, Štajner published a book titled "Seven Thousand Days in Siberia" about his experiences.

The book was a bestseller in Yugoslavia and was named the "book of the year 1972" by the Vjesnik newspaper.

After being released from prison, Štajner was not allowed to return to Moscow, but was forced to live in exile in Siberia according to the 101st kilometre Law.