Carl Vital Moor

Who was Carl Vital Moor?

Karl Moor was a Swiss Communist, and a channel for German financing of the 19th-century European Bolshevik movement.

He was the illegitimate son of Swiss citizen Mary Moor, of Vordemwald, and the Swiss aristocrat Ernest de Stoeklin, of Fribourg. Moor studied at universities in both Switzerland and Germany. In the 1870s his passion for the ideas of socialism led him to take part in the work of the banned Social Democratic Party of Germany. In the spring of 1881 he was expelled from Bavaria and moved to Basel. There he became one of the eminent functionaries of Swiss social democracy. In 1889 he lived in Bern, where he edited the social-democratic newspaper Berner Tagwacht. During this period he provided assistance to many political exiles from Russia, as well as leaders of the Peoples' First Polish Socialist Party, "Proletariat," and the Bolsheviks-Lenintsev.