Zimmerwald Movement

Origins

The war split international social democracy along two axes: between Entente and Central Powers parties, and domestically between supporters of the civil truce and supporters of class struggle. Since the Second International had failed to unite the quarrelling parties, the Swiss socialist Robert Grimm, editor of the Berner Tagwacht, together with Italian socialists led the initiative for a new international anti-war conference. The Lugano conference of September 1914 is regarded as the cradle of the Zimmerwald movement.

The Zimmerwald Conference of 1915

The conference met from 5 to 8 September 1915. Thirty-eight participants from 10 countries included Lenin, Zinoviev, Trotsky, Radek, Axelrod, Ledebour, Merrheim, Serrati, Rakovsky, Balabanova and Fritz Platten. The manifesto it adopted condemned the socialist parties' support for the war and demanded withdrawal from the civil truce and a peace without annexations or war reparations. Signed by German, French, Italian and Russian socialists, it received wide attention. The conference established the International Socialist Commission in Bern under Grimm's leadership, with Balabanova as political secretary. In the belligerent countries Zimmerwald ideas were blocked by censorship and arrests, but in Switzerland they could be spread openly.

The Kiental Conference of 1916

The second conference was held 24 to 30 April 1916, again in secret, in Kiental. Forty-one participants took part, among them Willi Münzenberg. Its manifesto dealt more severely with the majority socialists who continued to support the war and identified imperialism and militarism as the causes of the war. The Zimmerwald Left's wish to found a new International was rejected. Because opposition to the war had grown, the Kiental conference became the zenith of the movement. The conference criticised the work of the International Socialist Bureau and made the attitude toward it a central dispute; the majority aimed at internationally coordinated agitation against the war while the Left around Lenin supported revolution, and the differences between the two currents widened afterwards.

The Stockholm Conference of 1917 and the end of the movement

In 1917 the entry of the USA into the war and the February Revolution in Russia undermined the movement's common ground. Grimm lost authority through the Grimm-Hoffmann affair and withdrew from international functions in summer 1917, and the International Socialist Commission was relocated to Stockholm and came under the influence of the Zimmerwald Left. The Third Conference, held in Stockholm from 5 to 12 September 1917, remained a skeleton conference because delegates from Entente states could not obtain passports. Its manifesto, calling for a mass strike to end the war, was not approved by the affiliated parties and was published only after the October Revolution, receiving no attention.

ISC statements and its new bulletin continued to appear until September 1918. Immediately before the constitution of the Third International on 3 March 1919, a statement signed by Lenin, Zinoviev, Trotsky, Platten and Rakovsky announced the end of the Zimmerwald movement and demanded that all documents be handed over to the new International.

The Zimmerwald Left

The Zimmerwald Left was founded on Lenin's initiative in September 1915; it consisted of delegates from the Central Committee of the R.S.D.L.P., Left Social-Democrats of Sweden, Norway, Switzerland and Germany, the Polish Social-Democratic opposition and the Social-Democrats of the Latvian area. Led by Lenin, it fought the Centrist majority of the conference, condemned the First World War, exposed the betrayal of the social-chauvinists and urged active struggle against the war. It succeeded in getting several points from its own draft into the conference manifesto, and voted for the manifesto as a first step while issuing a statement on its inadequacy. It elected an executive body of Lenin, Zinoviev and Radek and published the journal Vorbote (Herald) in German, and it became the rallying point for internationalist elements of world Social-Democracy, playing an important role in the establishment of Communist parties in various countries.

Postwar memory

Postwar memory of the movement was controversial: Communists integrated it into the founding myth of their International, while in most Western European social democracies members of the movement were among the losers. Historians took interest from the late 1960s and 1970s, amid the 50-year anniversary and the expiry of blocking periods for archived documents. Communists and right-wing parties both read the movement as the seed of the Communist International, while social democrats and much academic research emphasised it as an anti-war movement resting on pre-war social democracy.