Krestintern

Founding and governing bodies

The Krestintern was the Comintern's attempt to build an international organization for the peasantry, parallel to the auxiliaries it created for the radical youth movement (the Young Communist International) and the trade union movement (the Red International of Labor Unions, or Profintern). The initiative is commonly credited to the Polish Communist Tomasz Dąbal, a former member of the Polish Peasant Party and a deputy in the Polish parliament, who argued in Pravda on 19 June 1923 that a surge in the popularity of peasant parties, particularly in Eastern Europe, might provide fertile soil for Communist ideas, and proposed that the Comintern form an organization to promote united front political activity between communist and peasant parties.

The founding congress was held in Moscow on 10–16 October 1923. The English source counts 158 delegates from 40 countries, a majority from Eastern Europe and Asia; John Riddell gives 128 delegates from 40 countries. The Russian source lists organizations from the USSR, Poland, Germany, France, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, the United States, Mexico, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Indochina, and Japan. With the pro-peasant New Economic Policy in full swing in Soviet Russia, the idea gained institutional traction quickly.

The congress created a governing body comparable to the ECCI, the International Peasant Council. The English source names the veteran Bolshevik A. P. Smirnov as formal head of the organization until 1928, with Dąbal as its leading public spokesman; Riddell has the founding conference forming the Council under Smirnov as its head with Dąbal as his deputy. The Russian source describes a council electing a permanent presidium headed by a general secretary. Two plenary sessions of the International Peasant Council were held, in October 1923 and November 1927.

The Krestintern published the journals The Peasant International and the International Peasant Bulletin. The English source adds that the official organ launched in April 1924 carried articles by the Japanese communist Sen Katayama and Nguyễn Ái Quốc (Ho Chi Minh) of Vietnam, stressing the goal of building a radical agrarian movement in Asia alongside bridges to Eastern European peasant parties.

Limits of the united front

The core task, gathering and mobilizing non-Communist peasant parties, largely failed. According to the English source the Krestintern attracted only a small number of factional grouplets, frequently artificial creations of the national communist parties themselves. Riddell likewise concludes that although the Peasant International was launched with the demand for a workers' and peasants' government in the fight against fascism, only one peasant movement in capitalist Europe rallied to it.

The sole exception was the brief affiliation of the Croatian Republican Peasant Party (HRSS) under Stjepan Radić in 1924. The English source states that Radić joined during a visit to Moscow, that the HRSS and its publication Radnik were banned on 12 July 1924, and that the journal appeared illegally for a short time before ceasing at the end of September. Radić was imprisoned within months of his return, and the banned party's Central Committee was quick to renounce his decision. Four months after his release from prison in July 1925 he endorsed the monarchy and the Yugoslav constitution and joined the government, drawing a Communist Party of Yugoslavia charge of 'shameful capitulation.' Historian E. H. Carr judged the affiliation to have had less to do with Communism than with the national aspirations of non-Serbian ethnicities inside Yugoslavia. Riddell argues that the episode contradicted the Comintern's declared orientation toward exploited peasants and ended up diminishing the Peasant Council's authority.

China policy and its consequences

In 1926 the Krestintern tried to broker cooperation between the Chinese Communist Party and the Kuomintang headed by Chiang Kai-shek, and at the end of April the presidium of the International Peasant Council sent the Kuomintang and its peasant section an open letter praising it as the center rallying all revolutionary forces against reactionaries and imperialists. Riddell notes that the Comintern hailed the movement in 1927 as a revolutionary bloc of workers, peasants, intelligentsia, and urban democracy, only for the Kuomintang to kill more than five thousand people in Shanghai a few months later. The English source states that Chiang converted the relationship into Soviet aid and a list of CCP members, assets later used in the Shanghai massacre of 1927, and that the Krestintern's China activities again failed to advance Comintern policy interests.

Later years and dissolution

In 1926 the Krestintern also established the International Agrarian Institute in Moscow for the study and publication of agrarian problems. It outlived its parent body, publishing books through 1942, when the German invasion forced its termination. Carr described it as the organization's only 'effective and durable creation.'

On the end date the sources differ. The English source points to the end of pro-peasant moderation in 1928, with forced requisitioning against the Grain Crisis, the failed European Peasant Committee launched in Berlin in 1930, and the grim brutality of forced collectivization, followed by agrarian collapse and the massive famine of 1932–1933, which essentially terminated any chance of reestablishing the smychka between the communist movement and the peasantry; the organization nonetheless remained nominally functional until its formal dissolution in 1939. Riddell reports that the Comintern's sharp ultraleft turn of 1928 put an end to its projects for alignment with peasant movements and that, according to Trotsky, the Peasant International was not even mentioned in Bukharin's main report to the 1928 world congress. The Russian source instead gives the Krestintern's period of work as 1923–1933. Read together, the sources support an effective activity that ended around 1928–1930 alongside nominal survival to 1939, and a separate Russian dating of activity to 1933.

Assessment and legacy

Carr stated that within two years of its foundation attention to the Peasant International 'visibly languished.' Trotsky condemned it as a phase of idealizing the peasantry, an uncritical exaggeration of every symptom of its break with bourgeois society, and a downright adulation of 'peasant' demagogues. Riddell argues that despite its failure the Krestintern expressed a historic breakthrough by Marxism in charting a path to unity of working people in the factories and on the land, noting the decisive role of revolutionary peasant movements in twentieth-century anti-capitalist revolutions, notably in China, Vietnam, and Cuba, and the emergence of the peasant-based La Via Campesina as the most effective recent global alliance of exploited working people.

Death-related claims about Smirnov and Kolarov are not stated here as established facts: the English source records only that Smirnov was replaced as the organization's top official in 1928 without covering his end, and the Russian source does not address it either.