Comintern Policy Research Articles

Stalin, the Comintern and the Popular Front in Britain, France and Spain, 1935–1939: Some Historiographical and Political Reflections

The Popular Front politics which governed Comintern policy 1934–1939 have been positively judged by historians of British Communism. The experience cannot be properly assessed without integration of its provenance in Soviet Stalinism and subsequent unfolding in France and Spain. This article reviews the literature, analyses the origins of the line and validates explanations which locate its roots in the search for solutions to the challenges fascism offered the Russian regime. Arguments that national parties had a significant hand in its creation and development are evaluated. The Popular Front’s break with earlier Marxism; its understanding of fascism; the class structure; alliances with the bourgeoisie; its suppression of working-class insurgency; its revival of nationalism; and the relation of its theory to legitimation of the interests and strategies of the Soviet elite, are critically discussed. The successes and failures of the policy are assessed and its afterlife sketched. A short-term, instrumental tactic, it remained part of the repertoire of Stalinism and informed national parties’ journey to reformism and Eurocommunism.

III конгресс Коминтерна: между мартовской акцией и «единым фронтом»

The article examines the evolution of the Comintern policy in 1921. In the conditions of the ebb of the World Revolutionary Wave, the Com-munists faced the need to choose a political tactic: either an attempt to counterattack, reverse the trend of the offensive of capital, or the accu-mulation of forces and cooperation with social democracy in opposing this offensive. Each of these lines had supporters in the parties of the Comintern and its leadership, and the struggle between them led to splits and fluctuations in the policy of the Comintern. The expression of the first way was the "March action" in Germany, the expression of the second was the January letter of the OKPG and the policy of the "united workers' front". At the Third Congress of the Comintern, the supporters of the second line, led by Lenin, actually won, but they did not dare to condemn the "March action" and proclaim the policy of the "united front" at the congress. This inconsistency also influenced the subsequent course of the Comintern, even after it adopted the moderate line of the "united front", but did not get rid of the adventurism of the "March action". This results already affected the events of the "German October" in 1923.

“Who is a Fascist?” Jews, Nazis and Stalinist Anti-Fascism

The struggle against global fascism constituted a central thrust of Soviet and Comintern policy throughout the Stalin Revolution and the early 1930s. Yet even as Soviet leaders and policy makers railed against Nazi and Fascist enemies abroad, contemporaneous anti-fascist discourses produced within the Soviet Union revealed highly contradictory and ambivalent depictions of internal enemies who supposedly aligned themselves with the global fascist movement. This article focuses upon one of the most controversial manifestations of Soviet anti-fascist politics through an analysis of visual and rhetorical depictions of alleged Jewish fascists in Soviet Yiddish and Russian publications from Moscow and Minsk during the 1930s. It examines how depictions of alleged Jewish fascist collaborators, produced largely by Jewish actors in Yiddish public discourses during the 1930s, served to reinscribe “traditional” and non-Bolshevik Jewish groups – including religious Jews, Zionists, and capitalist class enemies – as intractable existential political enemies. As depictions of alleged Jewish fascist collaborators migrated to the Russian press during the Great Terror, they focused with increasing singularity on the alleged fascist collaboration of Jewish Bolsheviks and, above all, Trotskyists. Increasingly bestial and demonic in representation, such images not only highlighted the alleged political unreliability of Jews across the political spectrum, but also served to depict Jewish enemies as being intrinsically, inherently, and biologically outside of the acceptable Soviet body politic.

Red, Black, White: The Alabama Communist Party, 1930–1950 by Mary Stanton

Reviewed by: Red, Black, White: The Alabama Communist Party, 1930–1950 by Mary Stanton Meredith L. Roman Red, Black, White: The Alabama Communist Party, 1930–1950. By Mary Stanton. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2019. Pp. xiv, 215. Paper, $29.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-5617-4; cloth, $99.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-5616-7.) Mary Stanton has conducted ten years of research to chronicle the twenty-year history of District 17 of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA), which was based in Birmingham, Alabama, and tasked with organizing steel workers, miners, and sharecroppers across racial lines in Alabama, Tennessee, and Georgia. Much of Stanton's detailed history focuses on the early 1930s—years that are the focus of sixteen of the study's nineteen chapters—when the Communist Party was consumed with championing workers' rights as well as seeking justice for the victims of massacres, lynching, judicial violence, and other forms of racial terrorism. This CPUSA activism was exemplified in the Scottsboro Boys' case of 1931. Stanton was inspired to write this collective biography of District 17's organizers because of the research she first conducted to mark Scottsboro's eightieth anniversary, which led her to the pages of the CPUSA newspaper the Southern Worker. The impassioned commitment to social justice of the Southern Worker's contributors (many of whom were from New York City) reminded Stanton of her Brooklyn high school newspaper colleagues of African American, Jewish, and Latinx backgrounds, who encouraged her to abandon her self-described "proto-conservative" positions to advocate the causes of the progressive Left (p. 3). Although the monograph's endnotes are minimal, Stanton has consulted an array of primary sources that include newspaper articles, oral history interviews, memoirs, and the archival papers of some of her protagonists, such as James S. Allen, Harry Haywood, and Angelo Herndon. [End Page 746] In this narrative history, Stanton rejects the traditional Cold War historiographical interpretation that casts the CPUSA as a puppet of Moscow. Instead, she draws on the critically important work of historians like Robin D. G. Kelley, Mark Solomon, and Michael Kazin to demonstrate that the party operated as a dynamic organization throughout much of the 1930s, since members creatively adapted the party's internationalist demands to the local prerogatives, interests, and needs of the people whom they served. Indeed, Stanton's work reminds readers that many black southerners expressed indifference toward the Comintern's policy of national self-determination for African Americans in the black belt, which included the right to secede from the United States. Black people found appealing, however, southern communist organizers' dedication to the everyday struggle against racial violence, unemployment, hunger, evictions, and exorbitant utility bills, even as they faced fierce resistance from law enforcement officials, Ku Klux Klan members, local politicians, and industrialists who condemned the communists as a major threat to the southern way of life. To be sure, antiblack racism, anti-Semitism, and anticommunism converged in this story and fueled the various security measures that the white southern establishment employed to thwart real change. Stanton, like many of the aforementioned historians on whose work she draws, insists that black southerners were not mere pawns of the Communist Party but rather that they exploited the organization to advance their own interests. She concludes that, even though the CPUSA was of course not without its many faults, it occupies an important yet underappreciated place in U.S. history, not only because of its on-the-ground efforts to ameliorate the hardships of those who bore the brunt of the Great Depression, but also because of its challenges to mainstream organizations to pay greater attention to workers' rights, social justice, and racial equality. Stanton takes this argument further to contend that organizations like the Congress of Racial Equality and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee that emerged during and after World War II bear the indelible mark of the CPUSA's political, economic, and social activist legacy. Meredith L. Roman The College at Brockport, SUNY Copyright © 2020 The Southern Historical Association

Henri Barbusse, Stalin and the making of the Comintern’s international policy in the 1930s

This article scrutinizes the political relationship between Stalin and the French writer Henri Barbusse between 1927 and 1935. Barbusse is the only European intellectual who met Stalin four times; he was therefore, in all respects, an exception among Western intelligentsia. He was well-known as Stalin’s official biographer; but whereas many historians have focused on his contributions to the international cult of Stalin, this article emphasizes his agency in shaping Comintern policy. The Amsterdam Movement, launched in the summer of 1932, was the cornerstone of his efforts. The part Barbusse played is examined with new archival evidence drawn from the papers of Barbusse, Thorez and the Comintern papers and new insights are offered into our understanding of the machinery of the Comintern during the early Stalinist years. Barbusse’s privileged status and agency show that he was not simply a commentator on, but also an active participant in, international communist policy-making.

The revival and decline of rank and file movements in Britain during the 1930s

The economic and political crisis of 1931 provoked the reappearance of rank and file movements in Britain. This article examines the unofficial organisations that developed in building, engineering, passenger transport and the railways – as well as more ephemeral bodies. It critically synthesises the existing historiography and replenishes it with new material from the Russian archives. The progress of rank and filism to 1939 is surveyed and the largely forgotten project of a new Communist-led rank and file organisation, a Trade Union Militant League, which would supersede the National Minority Movement, is recuperated. The article stresses the role of Comintern policy in harnessing and moulding grass-roots rebellion. It validates that strand in the literature which argues that Moscow’s subsequent turn to the popular front and aspirations to alliances with labour movement leaders predominated over, and legitimated, indigenous influences, enhanced existing adaptation to trade unionism, and encouraged subordination of oppositional movements to activity in official structures. By 1939, the Communists had abandoned the idea of a national rank and file movement they had pursued since 1923. Little survived of the revolutionary enterprise launched in 1931. Rank and filism endured only as a handful of sectional, party-sponsored, trade union ginger groups.

Trotsky's Analysis of Stalinism

From 1927 until 1940 Leon Trotsky consistently characterized Stalinism as a radical departure from Leninism. However, during these years his analysis of Stalinism underwent a substantial evolution. Initially, Trotsky defined Stalinism in terms of a variety of undemocratic practices the leadership had substituted for Leninist norms, but also in terms of a pattern of economic and international policies that deviated to the right of Leninism. Trotsky associated both aspects of Stalinism with the phenomenon of bureaucratism, understood as the growth of bourgeois influence within Soviet political institutions. When this understanding was challenged by the radical shifts in Soviet economic and Comintern policy of 1928–1933, Trotsky adjusted his analysis of Stalinism to emphasize the autonomy of the Soviet bureaucracy. However, at the same time he continued to insist upon the essential correctness of his earlier views. The result was a growing distortion in Trotsky's interpretation of reality, and an increasing incoherence in his analysis of Stalinism. Ultimately, two major events led Trotsky to revise his analysis of Stalinism fundamentally: the disastrous failure of Comintern policy in Germany in 1933 and the wave of repression following the Kirov assassination in 1934. Together, these events impelled Trotsky to redefine Stalinism in terms of a political system characterized by the bureaucracy's high degree of autonomy from social classes. This view received its fullest expression in Trotsky's classic work The Revolution Betrayed. In this and other later works Trotsky provided a complex and nuanced account of the origins of Stalinism and of its relationship to Bolshevism.

Communism versus Zionism: The Comintern, Yishuvism, and the Palestine Communist Party

This article discusses how the official communist position on the Zionist project in Palestine went from hostile condemnation in the early 1920s to wary support after World War II. In so doing, it focuses on the ideological struggle between the traditional party line and ““Yishuvism,”” a theory that sought to reconcile Zionist and communist ideas, as it played out in the two bodies most closely involved in shaping Comintern policy on Palestine (the Palestine Communist Party and the Communist Party of Great Britain). In following the tortured justifications for evolving positions, the author identifies the key actors shaping the debate and turning points impacting it, especially the 1936––39 Arab Revolt, Britain's 1939 White Paper, and the wartime fight against fascism. The author contends that an important reason for the USSR's post-war about-face on Palestine was the success of the Yishuvist ideological campaign.

The British and French Representatives to the Communist International, 1920–1939: A Comparative Survey

This article employs a prosopographical approach in examining the backgrounds and careers of those cadres who represented the Communist Party of Great Britain and the Parti Communiste Francais at the Comintern headquarters in Moscow. In the context of the differences between the two parties, it discusses the factors which qualified activists for appointment, how they handled their role, and whether their service in Moscow was an element in future advancement. It traces the bureaucratization of the function, and challenges the view that these representatives could exert significant influence on Comintern policy. Within this boundary the fact that the French representatives exercised greater independence lends support, in the context of centre–periphery debates, to the judgement that within the Comintern the CPGB was a relatively conformist party.

Imperialismus und Globalisierung

The article revisits classical theory of imperialism, stressing the commonalities in seeing imperialism as an outgrowth of the basic dynamics and restructuring of capitalism, as well as the controversy over the conceptualisation of this dynamic. During World War I, the Bolshevik theorists, Bukharin and Lenin, took up the theme and gave it important twists that had grave consequences, both for later Comintern policy and for Soviet planning practice. In comparison to the classical theories, conceptualisations of globalisation address a similar, though also markedly changed situation in much more complex ways. The article discusses mainly the issues of the state and US hegemony, in connection with claims for a resuscitation of Kautsky's concept of ultra-imperialism and the different forms of wars that haunt the present, in contradistinction to the early 20th century.

Soviet anti-fascism: Theory and practice, 1921-45

Though communism and fascism are commonly seen as bitter rivals, the relationship between the two has received little attention. This article deals briefly with their common characteristics and then surveys the history of the Soviet Union's policy toward fascism. It treats theory, in terms of the changing Soviet interpretations and definitions of fascism, and practice, through the history of Soviet and Comintern policy toward fascist movements, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Differences between the years of the Third Period, the Popular Front and the Nazi-Soviet Pact are treated in detail, concluding with the strangely ambivalent Soviet policy during the Second World War.

Comment: Mao, the Comintern and the Second United Front

Sheng and I are in essential agreement that between mid-1935 and late 1936 repeated interventions by the Comintern induced changes in CCP policy which brought it successively closer to a united front with Chiang Kai-shek. We disagree about whether there were significant discrepancies between CCP and Comintern line on this issue at specific points. I argue there were. Sheng argues there were not. The Comintern did not itself adopt a true policy of a united front with Chiang until late 1936, Sheng implies. The Comintern's policy of a united front with Chiang evolved slowly, and as it inched towards this goal it communicated the ideas to Mao who adopted them fully and promptly. “Mao was amenable to Stalin's advice,” Sheng says; he was “sensitive and responsive” to Comintern directives. Any discrepancies between Comintern and CCP lines were differences emphasis, not of substance, according to Sheng. I, on the other hand, argue that Mao's policy was consistently more anti-Chiang than the Comintern's.

International Conference of Historians of the Labour Movement (ITH) at Linz, Austria

twentieth conference of ITH met in Linz, Austria, from September 11-15, with close to 200 scholars in attendance. Two themes were taken up by the conference: The Working-Class Movement and Colonialism between the Two World Wars, and February 1934 in Austria and France. nature of the themes brought an unprecedented number of participants from Africa, China, and Vietnam, in addition to those from Central and East Europe. Notable by their absence, however, were historians from Italy, Spain, and Latin America. unusually large turnout and presentation of papers meant that there was little time for speakers to develop their ideas from the floor. Confusion was also created by the failure of several participants, whose papers had been circulated, to appear, and by the intervention of speakers, whose printed texts either appeared only on the morning of the conference or not at all. conference organizers often seemed more interested in getting to the conclusion of their daily agenda than in furthering discussion. But the conference was fruitful despite these limitations, per mitting mutual understanding and the establishment of contacts between scholars who had not known of each others work. This participant, for example, was able to discuss mutual interests with scholars from Denmark, Holland, Germany, Poland, Hungary, Zaire, Nigeria, and Vietnam. high point of the conference was a magisterial address by former Austrian Chancellor Bruno Kreisky, who brilliantly examined the current state of relations between developing and industrial nations in the light of the conference's major theme. Needless to say one should not look for examples of the new social history, given the nature of conference themes. All the same, it is surprising that more historians present did not examine working class attitudes toward racism and impe rialism rather than the resolutions and policies of specific parties and the interna tionals. A notable exception here was James Young's (Scotland) examination of the racism of British workers. policies of the Communist International and its member parties tended to dominate the proceedings. tendency of East Euro peans, as exemplified by Hans Piazza (GDR), to justify virtually every Comintern policy, gloss over the famous third period with its doctrine of social fascism, and

More on the Zinoviev Letter

Many Comintern policy decisions and missives to foreign Communist parties were, as Dr Carr observes, made public at the time.' But many were not. Aino Kuusinen, wife and assistant of Comintern's Finnish secretary-general, later described the 'three days and nights of feverish activity' which were necessary to remove 'secret instructions to the British Party' and other 'compromising documents' from the Comintern archives in preparation for the visit of a T.U.C. delegation anxious to discover the truth about the Zinoviev letter. 'After the delegation had left', she recalled, 'there was general relief and everyone had a good laugh over the fact that they had been able to pull the wool so easily over the Englishmen's eyes.' It was less easy to pull the wool over the eyes of foreign intelligence services. In the pre-Stalinist era Comintern security appears to have been woefully defective. As Aino Kuusinen later acknowledged, 'many of its secrets were penetrated by agents of foreign governments'. Documents were not the only things to go astray. On several occasions Comintern's secret subsidies to foreign Communists were embezzled en route.2 The contents of the Zinoviev letter of I5 September 1924 were, as Dr Carr says, 'no novelty'. Internal evidence alone is insufficient to prove or to disprove the charge of forgery. Advocates of the forgery hypothesis (like Mr Chester and his colleagues)3 have, however, invariably neglected a substantial part of the external evidence. They have notably failed to place the Zinoviev letter within the broader context of British communications intelligence. Yet GC & CS, SIS, MI 5, the special branch, and the Indian intelligence bureaux were all involved with varying regularity and varying success in intercepting Soviet and Comintern communications at source, in transit, or at destination. The authenticity of the largest category of Soviet intercepts the coded telegrams and wireless messages intermittently decrypted by GC & CS until 1927 (and invariably left out of account by the forgery theorists) is in scarcely greater doubt than that of the German intercepts during the Second World War. Those intercepts must have been of at least some assistance in checking the credibility of the other Soviet and Comintern documents less frequently obtained by other

Communism and Nationalism in India: M. N. Roy and Comintern Policy, 1920-39. by John Patrick Haithcox

Communism and Nationalism in India: M. N. Roy and Comintern Policy, 1920-39. <i>by John Patrick Haithcox</i>

Documents of the History of the Communist Party of India, Vol. One, 1917–1922. Edited by G. Adhikari. (New Delhi: People's Publishing House, 1971—distributed by South Asia Books, Columbia, Mo. Pp. xxiv, 640. $6.50.) - Communism and Nationalism in India: M. N. Rop and Comintern Policy, 1920–1939. By John Patrick Haithcox. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971. Pp. xiv, 389. $12.50.

Documents of the History of the Communist Party of India, Vol. One, 1917–1922. Edited by G. Adhikari. (New Delhi: People's Publishing House, 1971—distributed by South Asia Books, Columbia, Mo. Pp. xxiv, 640. $6.50.) - Communism and Nationalism in India: M. N. Rop and Comintern Policy, 1920–1939. By John Patrick Haithcox. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971. Pp. xiv, 389. $12.50. - Volume 67 Issue 3

Communism and Nationalism in India: M. N. Roy and Comintern Policy, 1920–1939 and Maoism in India

Journal Article Communism and Nationalism in India: M. N. Roy and Comintern Policy, 1920–1939 and Maoism in India Get access Communism and Nationalism in India: M. N. Roy and Comintern Policy, 1920–1939. By John Patrick Haithcox. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press; London: Oxford University Press. 1971. 389 pp. Bibliog. Index. (Written under the auspices of the Research Institute on Communist Affairs, Columbia University.) £6.00.Maoism in India. By Mohan Ram. Delhi: Vikas. 1971. 196 pp. Bibliog. Index. Rs. 22.50. Evan Charlton Evan Charlton Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Affairs, Volume 48, Issue 2, April 1972, Pages 362–363, https://doi.org/10.2307/2613512 Published: 01 April 1972

Communism and Nationalism in India: M. N. Roy and Comintern Policy, 1920-1939

Communism and Nationalism in India: M. N. Roy and Comintern Policy, 1920-1939

Communism and Nationalism in India. M. N. Roy and Comintern Policy.

Communism and Nationalism in India. M. N. Roy and Comintern Policy.

Book Reviews

Book reviewed in this article:THE PARTITION OF INDIA: Policies and Perspectives 1935–1947. Edited by C. H. Philips and M. D. WainwrightCONSTITUTIONAL RELATIONS BETWEEN BRITIAN AND INDIA. Editor‐in‐Chief N. Mansergh and edited by E. W. R. Lumby.THE GREAT DEPRESSION IN AUSTRALIAN HISTORY. Edited by Robert J. CookseyTWO ENGLISH REPUBLICAN TRACTS. Edited by Caroline RobbinsFINANCING THE SMALL STATES IN AUSTRALIAN FEDERALISM. By R. J. MayCOMMUNISM AND NATIONALISM IN INDIA: M. N. Roy and Comintern policy 1920–1939. By J. P. HaithcoxCONTEMPORARY POLITICAL THEORY. Edited by A. de Crespigny and A. WertheimerNON‐WHITE IMMIGRATION AND THE “WHITE AUSTRALIA” POLICY. By H. I. LondonOPPOSITION IN A DOMINANT PARTY SYSTEM: A Study of the Jan Sangh, the Praja Socialist Party, and the Socialist Party in Uttar Pradesh, India. By Angela BurgerAUSTRALIAN INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS SYSTEMS. By Kenneth F. WalkerAUSTRALIAN ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. Edited by C. ForsterDISCLOSURE BY AUSTRALIAN COMPANIES. By R. W. GibsonMAN, STATE, AND SOCIETY IN CONTEMPORY SOUTHEAST ASIA. Edited by Robert O. TilmanAUSTRALIAN AMBASSADOR: International relations at first hand. By W. R. CrockerTHE ARMY IN PAPUA‐NEW GUINEA. By Robert J. O'Neill. CanberraASIA IN THE MAKING OF EUROPE: Volume II, A Century of Wonder, Book 1, The Visual Arts. By Donald F. Lach. ChicagoTHE OLD WORLD AND THE NEW, 1492–1650. By J. H. ElliottPACIFIC ISLANDS PORTRAITS. Edited by J. W. Davidson and Deryck ScarrANCIENT POLYNESIAN SOCIETY. By Irving GoldmanLAND TENURE IN THE PACIFIC. Edited by Ron CrocombeTHE STUDY OF COALITION BEHAVIOR: Theoretical perspectives and case studies from four continents. Edited by Sven Groennings, E. W. Kelly, Michael LeisersonTHE STRUGGLE FOR THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH, 1914–1919. By Frank HonigsbaumTHE WAR OF NIGERIAN UNITY: 1967–1970. By Sir Rex Niven. IbadanAMERICA THE DUTIFUL: An assessment of U.S. foreign policy. By Philip W. QuiggFRONTIERSMAN: A Biography of George Elphinstone Dalrymple. By Jean FarnfieldCOME WIND COME WEATHER: A Biography of Alfred Howitt. By Mary Howitt WalkerIF I REMEMBER RIGHTLY: The Memoirs of W. S. Robinson 1876–1963. Edited by Geoffrey BlaineyC.E.W. BEAN, AUSTRALIAN HISTORIAN: By K. S. InglisMIDDLE EASTERN POLITICAL SYSTEMS. By Dankwart A. RustowJOHN CURTIN FOR LABOR AND FOR AUSTRALIA. By Lloyd Ross