The Comintern’s Popular Front turn

“Class against class” and the theory of social fascism

In summer 1928 the Comintern’s Sixth World Congress declared that the period of relative capitalist stabilisation was over and a “Third Period” had begun: capitalism was entering its final crisis, and a new revolutionary upsurge and imperialist wars lay ahead. Social democracy was identified as the communists’ main enemy. The Tenth Enlarged Plenum of the Executive in July 1929 formalised the theory of social fascism, which held that social democracy had turned from a right-wing workers’ party into a wing of the bourgeoisie, the “moderate wing of fascism”. The idea went back to Stalin’s 1924 speech describing fascism and social democracy as organisations that supplement rather than negate each other: “They are not antipodes, they are twins.” 1 2 3

The line ruled out any united front with social democratic leaders and required a strategy of “class against class”, in which communists fought independently for the leadership of the working class. The Comintern urged separate “Red” unions or revolutionary oppositions inside existing ones, but the policy isolated communists from most organised workers and cost them members and influence in countries such as Britain and Czechoslovakia. In Germany hostility deepened on both sides. In 1929 Berlin police under a Social Democratic government fired on communist May Day demonstrators, and the communists’ Red Front Fighters’ League was banned. Ernst Thälmann’s KPD directed its main fire against the SPD and in 1931 joined the Nazis in a referendum meant to bring down the Social Democratic government of Prussia. 3 2

When Hitler took power in January 1933, the KPD and the SPD were both outlawed and thousands of their members, Thälmann among them, were arrested. Yet the Comintern’s official line did not change at once. The Thirteenth Enlarged Plenum in December 1933 blamed the SPD for the Nazi victory and reaffirmed the social fascism line. When the exiled SPD executive called for revolutionary unity against Nazism in its Prague Manifesto of January 1934, the Comintern still denounced social democracy in a May appeal as the “ally of Fascism”. 2 3

1934: unity from below and Dimitrov

The catalyst came in February 1934. In France, after the far-right leagues’ riot of 6 February, socialist and communist workers acted together against a common fascist threat, creating a strong current of unity from below. From 12 to 15 February in Austria, the Social Democrats’ Republican Protection League rose in arms against the Dollfuss government and was crushed. The Bulgarian communist Georgi Dimitrov concluded from these two events that the Comintern’s hostility to joint action between communists and socialists was ill-considered. 3 4 5

At the Reichstag fire trial before the Reich Supreme Court in Leipzig from September to December 1933, Dimitrov refused counsel, defended himself and confronted his Nazi accusers, Göring above all. On 23 December he was acquitted for lack of evidence and expelled to the Soviet Union. When he arrived in Moscow on 28 February 1934, Stalin encouraged him to end the practice of denouncing Social Democrats as “social fascists” and to promote united front tactics against European fascism. In May a Pravda article commenting favourably on socialist-communist collaboration gave the first official signal of the new policy. 6 7 8

Throughout 1934 a long debate went on in Moscow. Dimitrov, Dmitry Manuilsky and Otto Kuusinen pressed for the new line, while hard-liners such as Vilhelm Knorin, Béla Kun and Solomon Lozovsky resisted any departure from established doctrine. Stalin was at first indecisive but finally gave the new course his cautious approval. Meanwhile national parties moved first. In July 1934 Maurice Thorez’s French Communist Party signed a “Pact of Unity of Action” with the Socialists, and in October it called for a broader Rassemblement populaire that reached out to the Radicals. 3

Collective security and the Comintern line

In the early 1930s Maxim Litvinov’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs sought an international disarmament agreement, but the Nazi seizure of power in January 1933 and Germany’s departure from the Geneva disarmament talks that October brought the effort to a dead end. The Soviet Union joined the League of Nations in September 1934 and argued for united resistance to fascist aggression, that is, collective security. The Franco-Soviet Treaty of Mutual Assistance was concluded in Paris on 2 May 1935, and a treaty with Czechoslovakia followed on 16 May. A joint communiqué issued after French Foreign Minister Pierre Laval’s talks in Moscow with Stalin, Molotov and Litvinov recognised France’s right to maintain armed forces consonant with her security. 4 3 9

Preparations were difficult. The commission set up by the Executive late in 1934 to draft resolutions split between advocates of a “general democratic, anti-Fascist” orientation and hard-liners who held that the fight against fascism could not be separated from the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, and on 8 March 1935 the opening of the congress was put back to the end of July. What decided the turn is disputed. The English Wikipedia article on the Seventh Congress says that the exigencies of Soviet foreign policy ultimately shaped it. The article on the Comintern describes a “triple interaction” of national factors such as anti-fascist unity in France, internal Comintern dynamics and Soviet collective-security diplomacy. 4 3

The Seventh World Congress, July–August 1935

The Seventh World Congress opened on the evening of 25 July 1935 in the Hall of Pillars of the House of the Unions in Moscow and lasted until 20 August. Of 513 delegates, 371 had full voting rights, representing 65 member parties and 19 sympathising parties. Stalin did not attend, but every mention of his name drew “tumultuous applause”. On the second day Wilhelm Pieck of the KPD gave the report on the Executive’s activities; he defended the “class against class” tactic of 1928 while conceding that “a certain number of sectarian mistakes were committed”. Arguing that the SPD had rebuffed the communists’ united front offers, he declared that a new era had begun with the “turn of the Socialist workers towards a united front with the Communists”. 4 10

On 2 August Dimitrov, in his report on working-class unity, defined fascism in power as “the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital”. He stressed that fascism’s accession was not the replacement of one bourgeois government by another but the replacement of one state form of bourgeois class rule, bourgeois democracy, by open terrorist dictatorship. Unlike the earlier line, which blurred the difference between “fascism” and “social fascism”, he argued that ignoring this difference would make it impossible to mobilise the broadest masses of working people. 4 11 12

The congress endorsed as its new tactic a “broad people’s anti-fascist front”, based on the proletarian united front but extending to the peasantry and the urban petty bourgeoisie. Communists were to defend bourgeois-democratic liberties against fascism and present themselves as tribunes of national independence, and the resolution allowed participation in Popular Front governments under certain pre-revolutionary conditions, seeing them as possible “transitional forms” towards proletarian revolution. Dimitrov was elected General Secretary of the Comintern at the congress, and his speeches appeared in September as the pamphlet The United Front Against Fascism, which ran through many editions. It was the last of the Comintern’s seven world congresses. 3 7 13

The break with the past was partial, however. The universal applicability of the Bolshevik model was not questioned, and the conditions for “organic unity” with socialists remained prohibitively strict. National parties gained more room for local adaptation, but Moscow kept ultimate control, especially over foreign policy. 3

The national united front in colonial and semi-colonial countries: China

On 1 August 1935, while the congress was under way, the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, then on the Long March, issued its “Message to All Compatriots on Resistance against Japan and National Salvation”, the August 1 Declaration. It called on the Nationalists to end the civil war and proposed a national united front against Japan of all parties, organisations and people of every class, including overseas Chinese and ethnic minorities, with a “National Defence Government” and “Anti-Japanese Allied Forces”. After the Mukden Incident of 1931 the CCP had called for immediate armed resistance, while Chiang Kai-shek’s government followed a policy of “first internal pacification, then external resistance”, putting the suppression of warlords and communists first. 14

By then, however, the Comintern’s direct influence was already waning. At the Zunyi Conference in January 1935 Mao Zedong rose to pre-eminence over the Moscow-backed leadership. The Xi’an Incident of 12 December 1936, in which Zhang Xueliang and Yang Hucheng detained Chiang Kai-shek, brought the two sides to suspend fighting, and when war with Japan became general in 1937 the Second United Front was formed. The Comintern article attributes this outcome to the Seventh Congress’s adoption of the Popular Front together with the growing threat of Japanese expansion. 3 15

The Popular Front tested: France and Spain

The French Popular Front won 386 of 608 seats in the election of 3 May 1936, and the Socialist Léon Blum became prime minister, with the Communists supporting the government from outside. The victory was followed by a wave of strikes and factory occupations in May and June that led to the Matignon Agreements. Communist membership and union influence grew enormously, but the strikes alarmed the Radicals and complicated Soviet diplomacy aimed at alliance with France. Thorez’s leadership moved to end them, arguing that one had to know when to stop and that “the People’s Front is not the revolution”. The Comintern article sees this line as driven by the need to preserve the Franco-Soviet pact. 16) 3

In Spain, in January 1936, left-wing parties led by Manuel Azaña formed the Popular Front electoral alliance, which included the Socialist Workers’ Party and the Communist Party. In that year’s election it won 4,654,116 votes against 4,503,524 for the combined right. When Franco’s military coup began the civil war in July, Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy backed the insurgents. The Comintern and the Soviet Union at first joined the policy of non-intervention so as not to antagonise Britain and France, but in September 1936 the Comintern began organising the International Brigades for the defence of Madrid. Their headquarters were in Albacete, and the Soviet Union sent arms and military advisers. 17) 3 18

Soviet intervention was a turning point in the war, and the Spanish Communist Party, until then a marginal force, grew enormously in numbers and prestige. The Comintern strategy, carried out by figures such as Palmiro Togliatti, was to subordinate every revolutionary objective to military victory while keeping the appearance of a “democratic parliamentary republic” so as not to alienate the Western democracies. This brought the communists into direct conflict with the anarchist CNT and the revolutionary Marxist POUM. After the Barcelona May Days of 1937, Prime Minister Largo Caballero fell and was replaced by Juan Negrín; the POUM was outlawed and its leader Andreu Nin was tortured and murdered by Soviet agents. Fernando Claudín, writing a Marxist history of the Comintern, judged the whole episode “the sacrifice of a revolution to the interests of Soviet raison d’état”. 3 18

The Great Purge and the end of the line

The Popular Front era coincided with the Great Purge in the Soviet Union (1936–1938), which fell heavily on the Comintern. Foreign communists and political émigrés in Moscow were prime targets. Leading Comintern figures such as Osip Piatnitsky, Béla Kun and Vilhelm Knorin were arrested and shot; Piatnitsky had questioned at a Central Committee plenum whether the charges against party comrades were valid. The Communist Party of Poland, after almost its entire leadership had been purged, was accused of Trotskyism among other deviations and dissolved by the Comintern on 16 August 1938. Of the roughly 320 Comintern employees named in a study by Brigitte Studer, nearly a third died violently, 58 of them in the Stalinist purges before 1945. Dimitrov and Manuilsky were complicit in the purges, though Dimitrov also tried to save some individuals. 3 19 20

When the Nazi-Soviet Pact was concluded under the date of 23 August 1939, the Comintern line turned again. After Germany invaded Poland, Dimitrov met Stalin on 7 September and was instructed to characterise the war as an “imperialist” conflict between two groups of capitalist states, for which the bourgeoisie of every belligerent bore equal responsibility. Theses of the Executive’s Secretariat on 9 September declared that the division between “fascist” and “democratic” capitalist countries had lost its former sense and had the Popular Front slogan renounced. The line held until the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. The democratic socialist historian G. D. H. Cole called it a “gross betrayal of the anti-fascist faith” but also “not without excuse in face of the attitude of the Western ‘appeasers’”. 3 21

The Comintern was dissolved on 15 May 1943. The stated reason was that a centralised international organisation had become a drag on the strengthening of national workers’ parties; the dissolution is widely seen as a gesture by Stalin to appease the Western Allies. Assessments of the Popular Front era also differ. Cold War Western scholarship pictured the Comintern as a monolithic tool of Soviet foreign policy, while E. H. Carr allowed a degree of autonomous action by Comintern leaders and national parties. Research after the opening of the Soviet archives confirmed the extent of Moscow’s control but also revealed debates within the apparatus and the complexity of relations between the centre and national sections. Both judgements stand: that communists were among the most active anti-fascists, notably in organising the International Brigades, and that this support was also used to enforce Soviet orthodoxy and suppress other left-wing currents. 3