The founding of the Comintern

The call for a new International

Lenin saw the socialist parties’ votes for war credits in August 1914 as a “sheer betrayal of socialism” and from that autumn declared the Second International dead and called for a Third. The Zimmerwald Left formed at the anti-war conferences of Zimmerwald and Kienthal laid its ideological foundations. For the Bolsheviks the October Revolution of 1917 was the first act of a world revolution, and for European workers to follow they needed a new organisation purged of reformist “traitors”. 1

When the monarchies fell in Germany and Austria in autumn 1918 and councils took power, the Bolsheviks believed world revolution imminent. On 24 January 1919 Moscow sent by wireless a letter inviting thirty-nine communist parties and revolutionary groups — timed to pre-empt the conference in Bern in early February where reformist socialists tried to revive the Second International. 1 2

The founding congress of March 1919

The congress opened in the Kremlin on 2 March 1919. Because of the Allied blockade only nine of the fifty-one delegates came from abroad; the rest lived in Soviet Russia and many lacked proper credentials. Hugo Eberlein, the German Communist Party’s delegate, came mandated to oppose immediate founding, reflecting Luxemburg’s fear that a premature International would be dominated by the Bolsheviks. On 4 March the congress voted overwhelmingly, with Eberlein abstaining, to found the Third International. The Swiss Fritz Platten sat on the presidium. 1 2 3 4

The congress’s principal document was Trotsky’s “Manifesto to the Proletariat of the Entire World”, which put forward soviets as the instrument of working-class unity, dismissed “bourgeois democracy” and reaffirmed the dictatorship of the proletariat. No statutes were adopted, but an Executive Committee was elected with Grigory Zinoviev as president. Places were provided for foreign parties, but the prestige of the Russian Revolution and the weakness of the foreign parties left the Bolsheviks in charge. 1 5 6

Soon after the founding, Béla Kun’s Soviet Republic was proclaimed in Hungary on 21 March, and a Bavarian Soviet Republic in April, but neither survived the summer. When Kautsky condemned the Bolshevik dictatorship, Lenin replied that “proletarian democracy is a million times more democratic than any bourgeois democracy”. 7 1

The Second Congress and the Twenty-one Conditions

In “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder (April 1920) Lenin wrote that certain “fundamental features” of the Russian Revolution had international significance, and criticised Western left communists who refused to work in parliaments and reformist unions. The Second Congress, held in Petrograd and Moscow from 19 July to 7 August 1920, is considered the true founding congress. Delegates travelled for weeks through blockade and civil war, and the congress met as the Red Army advanced on Warsaw. 8 9 1 10

The congress adopted the “Twenty-one Conditions” for admission, drafted mainly by Zinoviev under Lenin’s guidance. Parties had to remove reformists and centrists from every responsible post, combine legal and illegal work, break completely with figures such as Kautsky and MacDonald, form communist cells in the unions, adopt democratic centralism with iron discipline, support every Soviet republic unconditionally and call themselves “Communist Party”. Point sixteen made the decisions of congresses and the Executive binding on all parties. 11 12 13 1

After debate with the Indian communist M. N. Roy the congress also adopted Lenin’s theses on the national and colonial questions: in the colonies communists could ally temporarily with “bourgeois-democratic” nationalist forces provided the proletarian movement kept its independence. At the Congress of the Peoples of the East in Baku that September, 1,891 delegates gathered and Zinoviev called for a “holy war” against British imperialism. 14 15 16 1

Halle, Tours, Livorno: the split of European socialism

The Twenty-one Conditions were meant to split the rank and file of Europe’s socialist parties from their “opportunist” leaders. At Halle in October 1920 the German Independent Social Democrats (USPD) voted 236 to 156 to join the Comintern and broke in two; the left merged with the KPD into a united Communist party that December, while the right returned to the SPD in 1922. 17 11

At the congress of the French Socialist Party (SFIO) in Tours on 25–30 December 1920, a majority led by Marcel Cachin, Ludovic-Oscar Frossard and Boris Souvarine voted 3,208 to 1,022 to join, founding what became the French Communist Party. Léon Blum stayed in the SFIO with the minority, declaring that “someone has to stay and keep the old house”. The young Nguyen Ai Quoc (Ho Chi Minh) spoke at the congress against colonial exploitation and for joining. 18 19

The Italian Socialist Party’s Livorno congress of January 1921 refused to expel the reformists as the Twenty-one Conditions required; its leader Giacinto Menotti Serrati chose party unity. The left under Amadeo Bordiga and Antonio Gramsci of Turin’s L’Ordine Nuovo walked out on 21 January to found the Communist Party of Italy. 20 21

The March Action and “To the masses!”

In March 1921 the German Communists launched a rising in the Mansfeld, Leuna and Halle districts of Prussian Saxony. The “March Action” ended in defeat, with 180 dead and 6,000 arrested. Paul Levi, party chairman until February, publicly criticised the party’s tactics and was expelled. 22 23

As the revolutionary wave in Europe subsided, Lenin concluded that proletarian revolution was no longer on the immediate agenda. The slogan of the Third Congress of June–July 1921 was “To the masses!”, and on 18 December the Executive issued theses on the “united workers’ front” — joint defensive struggles with socialist rank-and-file against the capitalist offensive. The Red International of Labour Unions (Profintern), to co-ordinate communist work in the unions, was founded on 3 July 1921. 1 24 25 26

Moscow’s authority and its price

The statutes made the world congress the supreme body and the Executive the leading body between congresses, but the Executive’s work fell mainly to the party of the host country, the Russian Communist Party, which had five voting representatives to one for each other major party. From 1921 the International Liaison Department funded foreign parties and clandestine work from the Soviet treasury, making the parties economically dependent on Moscow as well. 1 6

Even so, the Comintern of Lenin’s time left room for debate that later vanished. Leaders such as Levi and Bordiga were not docile, and national parties resisted or reinterpreted Moscow’s directives. The founding of the Comintern institutionalised the split of the international labour movement between communism and social democracy, a split that lasted through the twentieth century. 1