Ernst Niekisch (23 May 1889 – 23 May 1967) was a German writer and politician. Initially a member of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), he later became a prominent exponent of National Bolshevism. Early life Born in Trebnitz (Silesia), and brought up in Nördlingen, he became a schoolteacher by profession. He joined the Social Democratic Party in 1917 and was instrumental in the setting up of a short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic in 1919. Indeed, for a time at the start of the year, after the resignation of Kurt Eisner and immediately before the establishment of the Bavarian Soviet Republic, Niekisch wielded effective power as chairman of the central executive of Bavarian councils, an interim governing body. He left the SPD soon afterward and was the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD) for a time before he returned to his former party. He served a brief spell in prison in 1925 for his part in the abortive Bavarian coup. Nationalism In the 1920s, he stressed the importance of nationalism and attempted to turn the SPD in that direction. He was so vehemently opposed to the Dawes Plan, the Locarno Treaties and the general pacifism of the SPD that he was expelled from the party in 1926. Upon his expulsion, Niekisch joined the Old Social Democratic Party of Saxony, which he influenced to his own nationalist form of socialism. He launched his own journal, Widerstand (Resistance), and he and his followers adopted the name of "National Bolsheviks" and looked to the Soviet Union as a continuation of both Russian nationalism and the old state of Prussia. The movement took the slogan of "Sparta-Potsdam-Moscow". He was a member of ARPLAN (Association for the Study of Russian Planned Economy) with Ernst Jünger, Georg Lukács, Karl Wittfogel and Friedrich Hielscher, under whose auspices he visited the Soviet Union in 1932. He reacted favourably to Jünger's publication Der Arbeiter, which he saw as a blueprint for a National Bolshevik Germany. He also believed in the necessity of a German-Soviet alliance against the "decadent West" and the Treaty of Versailles. The attempt to combine ultranationalism and communism, two extreme ends of the political spectrum, caused Niekisch's National Bolsheviks to be a force with little support. Third Reich Although anti-Jewish and in favour of a totalitarian state, Niekisch rejected Adolf Hitler, who he felt lacked any real socialism, and Niekisch instead looked to Joseph Stalin and the