Comintern

Why was it founded?

Lenin judged the collapse of the Second International in 1914 a bankruptcy beyond repair. During the war his group on the left of the Zimmerwald movement argued for a new International, and the October Revolution gave the argument a material base. The founding congress in Moscow in March 1919 was a modest affair, but from the Second Congress a year later, mass parties across Europe were negotiating entry. Its self-understanding was explicit: the Comintern was not a federation of parties but a single world communist party, of which the national parties were sections.

How did it work?

The Twenty-one Conditions of admission adopted at the Second Congress in 1920 fixed the organisation's character. A party seeking entry had to remove its reformists, rename itself communist, and submit to Comintern decisions. The conditions forced splits in the socialist parties, and the communist parties of France, Italy and Germany were born of them. Day-to-day direction lay with the Executive Committee (ECCI) and its standing bodies, and money and emissaries went out from Moscow. Strategic debate was still open in the early years; it was against the left that rejected parliament that Lenin wrote 'Left-Wing' Communism: an Infantile Disorder.

How was the apparatus built?

The nominal sovereign was the world congress; between congresses the Executive Committee (ECCI) led. Real power kept moving upward, into the Presidium and the Political Secretariat, while country secretariats managed the sections region by region. Less visible was the Department of International Liaison (OMS), which ran the illegal side: couriered money, forged passports, clandestine networks. The International Lenin School and the Communist University of the Toilers of the East trained cadre in Moscow, and satellite bodies covered each sector: the Profintern for trade unions, the Young Communist International for youth, the Krestintern for peasants, the MOPR for aid to imprisoned revolutionaries.

How did the congresses run?

Seven world congresses were held. The founding congress of 1919 was closer to a proclamation; the Second Congress of 1920 built the skeleton with the Twenty-one Conditions and the theses on the national and colonial questions. As the European revolutionary wave receded, the Third Congress of 1921 turned "to the masses" and the united front, refined by the Fourth in 1922. After Lenin's death the Fifth Congress of 1924 decreed the Bolshevization of the sections, recasting them on the Soviet party model. The Sixth Congress of 1928 adopted the Third Period line and the doctrine of social fascism; the Seventh of 1935 reversed it and made the popular front official. The statutory interval between congresses had long gone unobserved, and after the Seventh no congress ever met again.

How did the line change?

The Comintern's history is a history of turns. The early offensive line gave way after 1921 to the united front; the Sixth Congress of 1928 declared social democracy to be social fascism, the Third Period line; after 1934 came the popular front, embracing even liberal forces against fascism. The turn was made official at the Seventh Congress of 1935, whose keynote was Dimitrov's report The Fascist Offensive and the Tasks of the Communist International. Its definition of fascism as the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinist and most imperialist elements of finance capital remained the movement's official formula for decades. The official Soviet account was tactical adjustment to changed conditions. Critics noted that each turn coincided exactly with the needs of the Soviet state. Once socialism in one country hardened into doctrine, the Comintern's priority shifted from world revolution to the defence of the USSR, and during the Great Purge a large part of the foreign communist cadre living in Moscow was executed.

What did it do in the colonial world?

Even after the European wave receded, the Comintern was the one international organisation that invested systematically in the colonial and semi-colonial world. The Congress of the Peoples of the East at Baku in 1920 called the oppressed peoples of the East to anti-imperialist struggle, and the Communist University of the Toilers of the East and the Lenin School trained Asian cadre. In China it directed the alliance with the Kuomintang until Chiang Kai-shek's Shanghai coup of 1927 ended it in catastrophe, a failure that became ammunition in the Soviet party struggle. Its ties to the Korean movement ran deep. The Comintern recognised the Korean Communist Party as its section in 1926; when factional fighting persisted, the December Theses of 1928 ordered the party dissolved and rebuilt among workers and peasants, and under the one-country-one-party rule Korean communists abroad were moved into the parties of their countries of residence. Ho Chi Minh of Vietnam and M. N. Roy of India were among the many colonial revolutionaries who passed through its schools and organs.

How did the Great Purge pass through it?

The Great Purge of 1937-38 went straight through the Comintern's headquarters. An exiled foreign communist in Moscow was in more danger than a Soviet citizen. Béla Kun, who had led the Hungarian Soviet Republic, almost the entire leadership of the Polish party, and the core of the German, Yugoslav and Baltic parties were executed; in 1938 the Communist Party of Poland was dissolved outright on the claim that provocateurs had captured it. The ECCI apparatus itself was drawn into cooperation through its cadre department. The paradox of communists who had fled fascism dying in the Soviet Union was officially acknowledged only with the rehabilitations of the Khrushchev era.

Dissolution and assessment

Stalin dissolved the Comintern in May 1943. The stated ground was the maturity of the national parties; it is generally read as a signal to the United States and Britain. After the war the Cominform, limited to the European parties, carried on part of its function. Assessments divide. Soviet historiography recorded the Comintern as the school of anti-fascist struggle and colonial liberation, and much of the leadership of Asian and African liberation movements did in fact pass through that school. Western scholarship and the Trotskyist tradition read it as the subordination of national revolutionary movements to Soviet state interests. Post-archival research shows both things were real.