Darsono

Raden Darsono Notosudirdjo, more commonly known simply as Darsono, was a journalist and editor of Sinar Hindia, an activist in the Sarekat Islam and chairman of the Indonesian Communist Party from 1920 to 1925.

Biography Early life Darsono was born in Pati, Central Java, Dutch East Indies in 1897. Despite his later prominence, he only had a primary school education, a fact which was later held against him by his critics.

Involvement in Indonesian National Awakening Darsono was converted to the cause of socialism when he attended the trial of Henk Sneevliet. He was impressed that a Dutch person would be willing to lose everything in order to side with the little person. He became a member of the Indische Sociaal-Democratische Vereeniging and became secretary of the Semarang branch in 1918.

The Sarekat Islam (Malay: Islamic Union) was the first mass organization of Indigenous people in the Indies, who organized themselves loosely around the identity of Islam. But the organization contained quite a lot of ideological diversity, with Islamic nationalism (led by Cokroaminoto, Agus Salim and Abdul Muis), communists (led by Semaoen, Darsono and Alimin), and a synthesis of the two by Haji Misbach. In 1918, Darsono became a paid propagandist for the SI and became well known for his tireless effort to drive that organization to the left. Although the leaders of the "Central Sarekat Islam" based in Batavia were skeptical of the move towards communism, they appointed Semaoen to their board as well as making Darsono propagandist. For this the central organization tried to make a deal with them to not publicly split with the organization or propagandize against them. At that time Darsono was still in prison in Surabaya. Darsono was accused of breaking the truce with the central Sarekat Islam that had been agreed upon in 1917.

Soviet Union and Europe Darsono left the Indies to travel through Siberia to Western Europe during 1921-23.

Darsono returned to Moscow in 1922. However, he did manage to reenter the Indies in 1923. Although they were aggressively organizing strikes and spreading the communist message, the authorities thought that deporting them might not change anything.

During this time, Darsono was relatively moderate as a communist compared to Semaoen, in that he did not believe in the use of bombings, terror or other methods.

Darsono was finally arrested in 1925 and expelled from the Indies in 1926 Adolf Baars, a Dutch communist who had been involved in the early years of the ISDV but had been deported from the Indies early on, mentioned Semaoen and Darsono in a 1928 book he published about life in the Soviet Union. He wrote that foreign representatives working in the country often had very limited social circles, and that people like Semaoen and Darsono worked in an office, received foreign letters and press clippings, and lived in a hotel, knowing little about the country they were living in.

He returned to the Soviet Union via Singapore and China; under the pseudonym of Samin, he worked for the Comintern for a number of years. However, he was expelled from the Comintern in 1931. However, Darsono was apparently able to rejoin his son in Amsterdam later in 1935, where he stayed for a number of years.;

After Indonesian independence Upon Indonesia's independence from the Netherlands, Darsono finally returned to the country in 1950, after twenty years of being barred from entry. He broke with his previous communist views and became an advisor at the Indonesian Ministry of Foreign Affairs until 1960. Darsono died 1976 in Semarang.