Comintern

The Third International, founded in Moscow in March 1919 in the expectation of imminent European revolution. It declared itself a single world communist party, and the Twenty-one Conditions adopted at the Second Congress in 1920 forced the splits that created the communist parties of France, Italy and Germany.

After the German revolution failed, the Third Congress fell back on the united front tactic of winning the masses. Under Zinoviev's chairmanship the Fifth Congress of 1924 decreed the Bolshevization of the sections, and the faction fights of the Soviet party began to be replayed as leadership changes in every national party.

The Sixth Congress of 1928 declared the final crisis of capitalism at hand and branded social democracy as social fascism. By blocking joint action between communists and social democrats, the line is counted among the reasons the German workers' movement failed to stop Hitler.

The shock of Hitler's victory reversed the line. Dimitrov's report to the Seventh Congress in 1935 made the anti-fascist popular front official policy, and the popular front governments of France and Spain followed. In the same years the Great Purge consumed much of the foreign communist cadre living in Moscow.

With the Nazi-Soviet pact of August 1939 the anti-fascist line was withdrawn overnight. The war was declared an imperialist war with guilt on both sides, and the national parties bled members in the confusion of the sudden turn.

The German invasion restored the anti-fascist line. In May 1943 Stalin dissolved the Comintern with an eye to relations with the Allies; parts of its apparatus passed to the party Central Committee's international department, and part of its role to the Cominform founded in 1947.