Identified as a " deserving co-worker in the building of socialism in the Soviet Union " , Kurt Liebknecht was given Soviet citizenship in 1937 . He moved into a small single floor house of the type normally provided to rail workers . However , the next year he was caught up in the Stalinist Clean-up ( '' " Большая чистка " '' ) - identified sometimes in western sources as the Great Terror . As part of the " Operation to take repressive measures against German national who are suspected of espionage against the Soviet Union " ( NKVD Order Number 00439 ) . For two days , as he later testified under questioning , he was left naked in an empty cell without even a board on which to lie , after which an unconscious man was placed in the cell with him , followed by many more mangled individuals . In three interrogation session during June 1938 he sought to place the blame on others . Then , under torture , he accepted that he had become a spy . He remained in detention for more than a year . By 1939 many of the Germans who had fled to Moscow as refugees for reasons of race and/or political activism after 1933 had not survived the Stalinist purges . Kurt Liebknecht did survive . Sources speculate that his cousin Wilhelm Liebknecht , the son of his Uncle Karl , intervened on his behalf . Wilhelm Liebknecht , a lawyer like his father , had lived in Moscow since 1928 , intervened with the authorities on behalf of a number of family members during the later 1930s and beyond , until he himself fell under suspicion and after 1941 was banished , with his family , to Uzbekistan . Kurt Liebknecht was one of relatively few Germans in the Soviet Union to be fully rehabilitated in the aftermath of the purges , though he lived with the awareness that he was being constantly monitored and his luck might turn again . During the rest of his time in the Soviet Union he took care never to speak German for fear of raising suspicion . As part of his rehabilitation , at the end of 1939 Liebknecht took charge of the " Department of Health and Social Matters " at the " All Unions Academiy for Architecture " in Moscow . After the German invasion , which began in June 1941 , he was mandated to work in collaboration with the Red army on plans for underground medical facilities . As the German army advanced towards Moscow it became more important than ever that he always presented himself as a " loyal Soviet citizen " . His architectural designs came with ever more " Russian national flourishes " As the Germans came closer the entire " All Unions Academy " - including all its workers - was evactuated to Shymkent ( '' Шымкент '' ) , an industrial city ( with a rich cultural heritage ) in Kazakhstan . After the focus of the fighting turned , with disastrous results for the invaders , to Stalingrad , in 1943 Liebknecht was able to return to the Architecture Academy in Moscow . With the future defeat of Nazi Germany clearly on the horizon , in 1944 Kurt Liebknecht met with Wilhelm Pieck in Moscow in 1944 . Pieck was the respected leader of the exiled German Communist Party and a senior representative of the Communist dominated National Committee for a Free Germany . Liebknecht was keen do discuss how he might contribute to the reconstruction of postwar Germany . It can have done no damage to his future prospects that Liebknecht , while they were both still in Moscow , had written to and sought out the man who later became the president of the German Democratic Republic ( East Germany ) : nevertheless , for two or three years following the war ( which in Europe ended , formally , in May 1945 ) Liebknecht remained in Moscow , receiving a doctorate in June 1945 with a dissertation on hospital construction in Soviet Central Asia
Great Terror
Great Purge
Kurt Liebknecht