by the German embassy in Stockholm. He decided to take the train to Copenhagen, where he made a new attempt at the German embassy in Denmark. He was denied a visa once again, but instead he managed to get help from some sailors and was smuggled on board a boat that took him to Germany. There he was greeted by Willi Münzenberg, who bought him a new suit and provided him with a fake passport with the name Karl Derry. He spent over three months in Germany and Austria, working to eliminate the ultra-leftist factions within the Communist parties. Back in Moscow in 1926, Kilbom reported to Joseph Stalin about his work in Germany and expressed his concern about Ernst Thälmann not being a capable leader for the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). Stalin met the allegations against Thälmann with silence, and Kilbom would soon find out that Thälmann would be one of Stalin's closest allies in the unfolding internal struggle of the world communist movement. Grigory Zinoviev wanted to send Kilbom on new missions for the Comintern to China and France, but Stalin objected. In 1927, Zinoviev together with Leon Trotsky were expelled from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). In 1927, Karl Kilbom tried to work within the Comintern on how to develop strategies to combat fascism and to defend the Soviet Union against attacks from the Capitalist world. Kilbom advocated the creation of a popular front suggested that communists should try to collaborate with radical social democrats. The Italian communist leader Palmiro Togliatti agreed with Kilbom that the only way to defeat the fascist leader Benito Mussolini in Italy would be for the communists to unite with the social democrats. Stalin opposed Kilbom's suggestions and together with Ernst Thälmann, who now saw Karl Kilbom as a personal enemy, Stalin started to develop the idea of Social fascism, i.e., that social democrats were just as bad as fascists. Expelled from the Communist Party In the fall of 1929, a Stalinist coup took place within the Swedish Communist Party, and Karl Kilbom together with the majority of the party's members were expelled by a group led by Hugo Sillén and Sven Linderot. That same year, Kilbom launched a new Communist Party of Sweden, one that would be independent from Moscow, and became more critical of Stalin and the Soviet Union. In 1934 his party took the name