Comintern activists in China: spies or theorists?

Abstract

It is no secret that Comintern emissaries played an important part in revolutionizing China in the 1920s and 1930s. They served as the most essential link between Moscow’s leaders and Chinese revolutionaries, transmitting Soviet policy down to China and submitting information about the latter up to their Kremlin bosses. Not all of them were simple reporters and spies. Many offered their own concepts of the revolution in the hope of influencing the Soviet policy makers. Did they do it on their own initiative? To what extent could they actually enjoy their theoretical independence? How long could they do it? This chapter examines various archival sources, including the former top secret Stalin and Dimitrov files, personal dossiers of the Comintern Executive (ECCI) activists, and the documentary collection of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) delegation to the Comintern, to illuminate these issues and to offer some thoughts in this regard. It seeks to demonstrate that before and during the National Revolution of 1925-1927 the Comintern agents, as well as the ECCI itself, believed that a critical analysis was an essential part of the Comintern representative’s job. It was not only major agents such as Grigorii N. Voitinsky, Hendricus Maring, Michael M. Borodin and Manabendra Nath Roy who had no doubt about the need to examine the revolution; the ‘minor’ messengers such as M. Alsky (Viktor M. Shtein), Moisei G. Rafes, Lev N. Geller, Aleksandr Ye. Albrekht, Nikolai A. Fokin, Nikolai M. Nasonov, Tates G. Mandalyan and others, did too. The Comintern representatives usually delivered the comments and observations they considered accurate, despite Moscow leaders’ views. The Soviet Ambassador to China, Lev M. Karakhan, who had friendly relations with Stalin and sent his dispatches directly to him, followed the same line. Even Stalin’s struggle against the Left Opposition, headed by his historic foes Leon Trotsky and Gregory Zinoviev and commenced in 1926 in the Bolshevik Party, did not radically change the situation. Most of the agents still preferred dangerous analytical thinking to the safer work of simple information providing. Unfortunately, their analysis often turned out to be mistaken. The theoretical activity of many of Moscow’s representatives in China is quite well known. Students of China’s history are aware of Maring’s famous initiative of 1922 to ‘allow’ the Chinese Communist Party to join theKuomintang (KMT). Maring’s tactics of ‘entrism’ assumed the CCP’s limited presence inside the KMT, stressed the absolute independence of the Communist Party inside the Kuomintang, and pointed out that intraparty cooperation with the KMT must last only until the CCP became a mass political party in its own right as a result of the deepening of the ‘gulf between the proletarian, bourgeois and petty-bourgeois elements’ in the alliance.1 Voitinsky, Borodin and Roy also played important roles in Comintern China policy. It is now known, for example, that the above three between 1925-1927 exerted significant influence upon Stalin, helping him transform Maring’s policy of ‘entrism’ into the infamous concept of a ‘multi-class party’. For instance it was Voitinsky, in April 1925, who encouraged Stalin to accept this concept. He wrote on the matter to the Soviet ambassador in China, Karakhan, on April 22, 1925:The other day during a long talk with Stalin it became clear that he thinks that the communists have become dispersed in the Kuomintang, that they do not have their own organization, and that the Kuomintang is mistreating them. Comrade Stalin, expressing his regret about the dependent position of the communists, apparently believed that in China such a situation is historically inevitable for now. He was very surprised when we explained to him that the communist party has its own organization, one that is more united than the Kuomintang, that the communists enjoy the right to criticize inside the Kuomintang, and that most of the work of the Kuomintang itself is being conducted by our comrades. In defense of his view of the situation of the communists in the Kuomintang, Stalin referred to the newspapers as well as generally to our information from China. Truly, one may suppose that for those who have not been to China and are unfamiliar with the situation there, Borodin’s reports would produce precisely such a view.2