Comintern, Stalinism and Totalitarianism

Abstract

The concept of totalitarianism has enjoyed a marked revival since the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Scholars and commentators, especially in Eastern Europe, have returned to the idea of ‘totalitarianism’ to define not only Stalinist Russia, but also the post-Stalin regimes that dominated the region, and this regardless of the cogent challenges to the concept which began in the late 1960s.1 This durability of the term suggests that it incorporates some essential truths about the nature of Soviet-style communism. But how relevant is this concept for an understanding of the Comintern and the international communist movement in the inter-war period? Several leading experts have adopted the thesis of totalitarianism to describe the political evolution of the Comintern. For instance, Milorad Drachkovitch and Branko Lazitch wrote in an article published in 1966 that ‘the conditions of totalitarian monocracy, established by Lenin and carried to their logical extreme by Stalin, made the Comintern a glittering citadel for outsiders and a death trap for those within its walls’.2 A similar rendition has been put forward more recently by Richard Pipes in his book Russia under the Bolshevik Regime.3 The message is clear, I think: the Comintern was a totalitarian organisation more or less from its birth, there was a direct line of continuity between the Leninist and Stalinist phases of its history, and the Terror of the late 1930s was the logical outcome of the Comintern’s totalitarian essence.KeywordsCommunist PartyTotalitarian RegimeSoviet LeadershipSurgical KnifeDemocratic CentralismThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.