Popular Front Research Articles

Two Communist Esperantists: A Bulgarian-Japanese Dialogue

The Japanese Kurisu Kei (1910–2009) and the Bulgarian Nikola Aleksiev (1909–2002) never met. They were devoted to communism (for which they were imprisoned several times) and at the same time enthused about Esperanto. In 1933–34, Kurisu received a coded warning from a Soviet citizen (a veteran Communist and Esperantist) against Stalin’s terror regime. Kurisu put this experience aside for a long time. In the 1930s, he used Esperanto to spread Georgi Dimitrov's plea for an anti-fascist popular front in Japan. He became a renowned translator from Czech literature and maintained a worldwide correspondence. It was not until 1951 that he left the Japanese Communist Party. His Esperanto involvement contributed significantly to the departure from communist beliefs. In 1992, after the collapse of the Eastern bloc, he got in touch with Aleksiev, who had been a leading figure for the party in Bulgaria and for the Esperanto movement as well. Kurisu accused him of having unswervingly defended the imperialist policy of the Soviet Union. Aleksiev exercised some self-criticism. He admitted that communist rule had not been brought down by the class enemy , but by its own mistakes and crimes , and recalled an old taboo: the murder of Soviet Esperantists under Stalin.

Fighting Fascism on Empire’s Doorstep

Abstract From 1936 to 1939, the Cuban magazine Mediodía brought together Communists, socialists, and other progressives in a common battle against fascism, imperialism, and racism. Published in Havana, Mediodía was centrally concerned with Cuban domestic politics, in particular with struggles for democratic representation and for racial and gender equality. But for the magazine’s editors, these battles could not be disconnected from the broader turbulence afflicting the world in the 1930s, from the Spanish Civil War to the Japanese occupation of China and the Nazi threat in Europe. As a case study in imaginative radical publishing, Mediodía would be worthy enough of scholarly attention. But it also provides a compelling window onto Cuba’s Popular Front politics of the 1930s. Not only were the antifascist, antiracist convergences reflected in Mediodía’s pages formative for a generation of Cubans; they also anticipated the ideological alliances that shaped the island’s trajectory after the 1959 revolution.

Producción y circulación de la edición comunista en el Cono Sur: el caso de la editorial Sudam (1929-1935)

Objective/Context: This research aims to analyze the editorial practice of the ssa, especially the Sudam publishing house; as well as to identify what were the functions of the published writings and what motives drove the organization to sustain its editorial efforts in the repressive conjuncture of the 1930s. Methodology: We used a qualitative methodology, which consists of the analysis and interpretation of a vast body of documents (composed of internal documents and the public press of the ssa, correspondence, pamphlets and books published by Sudam and Ediciones Europa-América), in relation and dialogue with the secondary bibliography referred to the history of communist books and publishing, of the Communist International and of communism in South America. Originality: The Sudam publishing house has not been approached by historiography as an object of specific analysis so far. This research seeks to contribute to the studies on the Latin American communist book and publishing in the early 1930s, and to favor the understanding of the role of publishing in the development of communist ideology in South America. Conclusions: Although Sudam’s production and diffusion level was limited, its main contribution was to propose a political-editorial practice based on militant and partisan networks, on which the editorial proposals with regional projection of the later period, during the years of the Popular Front policy, were based. Likewise, the titles introduced had a strong ideological and political indoctrination content, so that they collaborated in the Bolshevization and Stalinization of the South American communist parties.

Āl-e Ahmad's Faustian Bargain? Antonio Gramsci, the “Progressive Clergy,” and the Search for Hegemony in Late-Pahlavi Iran

This article explores the first translations of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci into Persian and a more speculative reconstruction of Gramsci's reception during the second half of the 1960s by two prominent Iranian intellectuals and dissidents close to the League of Iranian Socialists. After examining the initial translations by the influential translator and political activist, Manūchehr Hezārkhānī (d. 2022), the author moves to unpack, Jalāl Āl-e Ahmad's (d. 1969) interpretations, reconstruction, and deployment of these fragmentary translations from an already disjointed and curated edition of the Prison Notebooks. Gramsci's analyses of culture, religion and religious institutions, intellectual production, and political mobilization were drawn upon for a variety of purposes. Thus, while some intellectuals, most famously Āl-e Ahmad, hypothesized that the politically engaged clergy's moral and political leadership was essential to the successful mobilization of the masses against imperialism and the overthrow of the US-backed Pahlavi dictatorship, others, including Hezārkhānī, ultimately came to advocate in favor of a popular front and coalition of secular and religious forces in defense of “democratic freedoms” against the threat of clerical domination in the 1979 revolution's aftermath.

Коминтерн и попытка организации Народного Фронта в Перу в 1934–1936 гг.

The VII World Congress of the Comintern 1935 led to a sharp change in the tactics and strategy of the international communist movement and to a transition from radical “class against class” tactics to the formation of broad united anti-fascist fronts. In the period 1935-1939, the policy of “popu-lar fronts,” which consisted of building political alliances be-tween left-wing parties and organizations to fight the right, was implemented in many countries. In Latin America, where this tactic was implemented even before the VII Congress of the Comintern, “popular fronts” became widespread, some-times playing a significant role in the history of their coun-tries. Historiography covers in detail the history of the estab-lishing of alliances in Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Cuba, etc. How-ever, the history of the organization of the “popular front” in Peru is less covered, although this story is interesting in that it largely reflects the problems that faced the sections of the Comintern. An attempt to form a "popular front" in Peru in 1934-1935, primarily based on the creation of an alliance be-tween the Communist Party of Peru (the CPP) and the Ameri-can Popular Revolutionary Alliance (the APRA) to participate in the 1936 elections, failed. There were several reasons for this: from the personal hostility of the APRA leader V.R. Haya de la Torre to the leader of the CPP E. Ravines before the policy that the CPP implemented according to the direc-tives of the Comintern during the period of “class against class” tactics in 1930-1933.

The Rise and Fall of the Popular Front of Moldova: The Activities of Local Branches of the Popular Front of Moldova from 1989 to 1992

The Popular Front of Moldova (PFM) was a sociopolitical movement in the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic that spearheaded several initiatives that helped dismantle Soviet power in Moldova. However, the group’s pan-Romanian position created deep divisions within Moldovan society. Drawing on extensive archival research, this article explores how local branches of the PFM, officially known as coordination committees, sought to reshape local politics between 1989–1992. I examine the composition of these coordination committees, their policy initiatives, and their relationship with local authorities, which varied according to geographic and demographic factors. I argue that the group’s hard-line position eventually caused it to lose support across Moldova, including in regions where the PFM had initially been immensely popular.

The Global Jukebox and the Celestial Monochord: Alan Lomax and Harry Smith Compute Folk Music in Cold War America

AbstractTypically understood only within the cultural history of the post–World War II folk music revival, documentarian Alan Lomax's “Cantometrics” research and artist Harry Smith's Folkways Anthology of American Music also deserve to be positioned within the broader Cold War–era rise of the digital computer and tactics of computation in American society. Linking what Ross Cole describes as the “folkloric imagination” to what we might call the Cold War “computational imagination,” Lomax and Smith each examined folk music not through conventional ethnographic or musicological modes, but rather through computational lenses of data analysis, systems theory, informatics, and cybernetics. Both sought to expand cultural democracy by doing so, carrying Popular Front ideals into the postwar milieu while also presaging dilemmas found in today's fraught context of data analytics, artificial intelligence, and the application of digital technologies to almost all aspects of human culture.

Marx Memorial Library and Workers’ School at 90 Symposium: Popular Fronts and Resistance to Fascism: Learning the lessons of 1933 and the founding of the Marx Memorial Library in Context

This symposium, held in November 2023, marked the 90th anniversary of the year that the Marx Memorial Library and Workers’ School (MML) was formed in 1933. That was, of course, also the year in which Hitler came to power in Germany. Between March and October 1933, all over Germany, Nazi supporters publicly banned and burned books and writings proscribed as un-German — book burnings that were a symbolic prelude to the systematic persecution of Jews, Marxists, pacifists and politically so-called ‘undesirables’. That context was highly significant for the formation of the MML. The common thread throughout the symposium was fascism: what we can learn from different experiences of fascism and the fight against it. Having defined fascism theoretically, the symposium went on to explore experiences of fascism and popular front strategies in response in India, Germany and France. There are powerful implications for progressive struggles in the contemporary context.

The Forward March of Labour Resumed

This article, which explores the development of a new wave of industrial struggles, derives from a session at the symposium held in November 2023 to mark the 90th anniversary of the Marx Memorial Library and Workers’ School (MML). As the chair, John McDonnell MP explained that these mobilisations have been on a scale not seen for a generation; trade unions have been campaigning around pay, but also around working conditions and the future of their services, particularly public services. These struggles have been mobilising a new generation of trade unionists, demonstrating what can be achieved through determined trade union mobilisations. The contribution by Lord John Hendy KC focused on trade unions, the law and the importance of the role of trade unions in terms of building a popular front. Fran Heathcote, president of the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS), explained the contributions of her union in the most recent wave of industrial action, helping to coordinate a strategy that puts maximum pressure on employers and minimises the financial impact on low-paid members. Alex Gordon, president of the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT), has been at the forefront of some of the most significant industrial disputes in recent history, demonstrating the determination that a particular union can inspire in others. Building on the previous speakers’ contributions, he developed the discussion of the role of trade unions in developing a popular/united front.

Writing the History of the Palestinian Nakba in Return to Haifa. From Novella to Militant Film

Directed in 1982 and primarily screened to Western audiences, the film Return to Haifa is one of the first visual productions to show to the West a major episode of the Palestinian modern history, namely the expulsion of most of the Palestinian population from their homes by Zionist forces in 1948. This article examines the film of Kassem Hawal, an Iraqi filmmaker engaged in the Popular Front of the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), as a medium that writes the history of the Palestinian Nakba. Reproducing on the screen Ghassan Kanafani’s eponymous novella (published in 1969), the film borrows major features of the Palestinian author’s visual style, specifically in the use of the narrators’ points of view and in its depiction of the individual experiences lived by the novella’s characters. Yet, far from being a mere adaptation, the film stands out in its representation of the collective experience of the Nakba by Palestinians. The predilection of Hawal for archival images is central to understand the film as a tentative to use the novella in a visual writing of the Palestinian history of 1948. The analysis of interactions between archival and fictional shots demonstrates that Hawal’s film reflects on the types of images that are necessary to write this history. The analysis finally shows the cinematic suggestion of the need of impossible images to visualize the collective experience of Palestinians in 1948.

Resisting fascism: The Argentine Junta de la Victoria and its president, 1941-1955

Created in 1941, the Junta de la Victoria (Victory Board, JV) was a Popular Front movement that supplied the Allies. It attracted about 45,000 diverse women throughout Argentina. The JV challenged local fascism by modelling a genuine democracy based on pluralism, intersectional solidarity, freedom, and women's political incorporation. Members created ties across social differences. The JV's promotion of multiculturalism facilitated a shift from the Argentine ideal of a melting pot to one of ethnic diversity. Its president, Ana Rosa Schlieper, seemed an unlikely resistance fighter. Initially her main identities were those of wife, philanthropist, and upper-class socialite. Her whiteness, beauty, and charm enhanced her prestige. In the mid-1930s Schlieper added antifascist and feminist to her intertwined identities. Seizing power in 1943, military officers suppressed the JV, seeing it as a communist organisation. Some Argentine and U. S. officials accused Schlieper of being a communist dupe, although she was loyal to the democratic centrist Radical party. Under populist president Juan Perón (1946-1955), her class and political identities became liabilities. Peronist hegemony and fear of being identified with an anti-Peronist and leftist group obliterated the public memory of Schlieper and the JV until recently.

CВІТАНОК БІЛОРУСЬКОЇ НЕЗАЛЕЖНОСТІ ТА УЗУРПАЦІЯ ВЛАДИ РЕЖИМОМ ОЛЕКСАНДРА ЛУКАШЕНКА

Despite the geographical and cultural proximity, the contemporary history of Belarus is poorly represented in Ukrainian historiography. The study of the socio-political processes that took place in the Republic of Belarus after it became an independent country is necessary to understand the reasons for the failure of its nationally oriented course in 1991–1994, the Lukashenko regime’s coming to power and its subsequent transformation into a state unfriendly to Ukraine and the Euro-Atlantic bloc. After gaining independence during the «parade of sovereignties» in 1988–1991, Belarus began to experience the processes of national revival of the Belarusian language and culture and democratisation of social and political life, initiated by the national conservatives from the Belarusian Populat Front (BPF), but already in the fourth year of independence, the above-mentioned processes were curtailed and the Republic of Belarus, headed by the permanent president Alexander Lukashenko, became known as «Europe’s last dictatorship». Nevertheless, mass opposition protests have been taking place almost throughout the entire period since 1994, from the so-called Minsk Spring to the large-scale protests of 2020. The article generally chronicles the anti-authoritarian resistance of civil society in Belarus in the 1990s, examining the formation and activities of Zianon Pazniak’s Belarusian People’s Front party, the confrontation between different branches of power against the backdrop of Alexander Lukashenka’s first victory in the presidential election and his subsequent usurpation of power, human rights violations, fraud during the presidential election, regime repression of the opposition and its activities. A special focus on the Belarusian Popular Front is due to the importance of this party as the most significant opposition force during the period of independent Belarus’ existence.

Tirer La Couverture À Soi. PSOE Factions’ Views on French Socialism and the Popular Front

The Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE) has been interpreted as exceptional among its European counterparts because of its internal divisions, radicalization and the impossibility of reaching cross-cutting agreements. This article demonstrates how, during the 1930s, the PSOE's evolution went hand in hand with other socialist parties in Europe, especially with the Section Française de l’International Ouvrière (SFIO). In particular, this article focuses on the views of the Spanish socialist factions – prietismo and caballerismo – on the formation and development of the Popular Front in Spain and France. The press of these factions – El Socialista, Claridad and Leviatán – had a similar role in the evolution of both parties. Furthermore, this study points out how the different factions of Spanish socialism used the French experience to legitimize their positions during the first part of 1936.

Global Revolution Starts with Palestine

This article examines the development and history of the alliance between the Japanese Red Army (JRA) and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). It draws upon Arabic and Japanese sources such as memoirs like those penned by JRA leader Shigenobu Fusako, the 1971 propaganda film Sekigun PFLP sekai sensō sengen (Red Army/PFLP: Declaration of World War), statements by the PFLP and the JRA, and interviews conducted by the media with members of the JRA. The article traces the development of the JRA's ideology, how it came to view Palestine as the center of global revolution, and the logics underpinning the need for direct action by its members for the liberation of Palestine. The JRA's militancy represented a hitherto unseen aspect of support for Palestine rooted in anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism, and anti-capitalism outside the strictures of mainstream leftist action.

Unintended consequences: International trade shocks and electoral outcomes during the Second Spanish Republic, 1931–1936

An intractable domestic conflict between forces on the right and the left roiled the Second Spanish Republic. We claim that international trade shocks exacerbated political instability. Leveraging an exposure design and disaggregated trade and employment data, we study the effects of import and export exposure on vote shares of parties and coalitions in the Republic's three elections, 1931, 1933, and 1936. An increase in import exposure had a modest effect on election outcomes. The primary vector of change was the disruption in export markets caused by the world depression and discriminatory trade practices, most importantly the United Kingdom's adoption of imperial preference. Trade dislocation harmed the left and benefitted the right. If trade had remained at 1928 levels, our projections show that the Popular Front would have gained a clear and comfortable majority in the decisive 1936 election.

The Enduring Significance of the 1930s for Chile's Long Cold War

Abstract: Chile was no exception to the reorientation of Latin American politics during the 1930s. Radical politics, mass mobilizations, and defeated coups established major reference points for the memory and behaviour of political actors during the Cold War. Salvador Allende's template for how to deal with a military coup in 1973, for instance, came from his experience as health minister in 1939. That year he witnessed the Popular Front government defeat an insurrection. Events earlier in the decade profoundly shaped the Pinochet regime (1973–1990)'s view of democratic political transitions and their potential for anti-military backlash. Overseas, the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) tore the Iberian country apart and deeply impacted its former colonies. In Chile, the Spanish Civil War contributed to the establishing of ideological fault lines and political speech that framed the nation's electoral choices as one between fascism and communism, slavery or liberation. This article examines the significance of events in the 1930s for the subsequent politics of revolution and counterrevolution that gripped Chile in the second half of the twentieth century. It concurs with the concept of a 'long Cold War' in Latin America and argues that Chile entered a distinctly new phase in that struggle after 1931.

Hard Labor and Sweet Delights

Abstract Luisa Carnés’s novel Tea Rooms: Mujeres obreras (1934) recounts the corporeal and sensory experience of workers in a pastelería, capturing their hunger and fatigue amid the smells of freshly baked pastries. These working women are thus inserted into economic space, defined as the production, distribution, and consumption of the material goods that sustain life and give pleasure. The novel makes palpable their desire to enjoy the consumer products that surround them—whether in the tea room, in nearby shops, or in the cinema across the street—pleasurable goods that remain beyond their means. In the musical comedy El bailarín y el trabajador (1936), a ruined señorito, formerly a ballroom dancer, finds himself relegated to working in a cookie factory. As he redirects his bodily exertion from nonproductive to productive labor, he sings of the working life as “dulce y sabrosa” (sweet and flavorful). Based on a play by Jacinto Benavente (1925), and repurposed in the era of the Popular Front, the film attempts to ease class conflict by celebrating the working life and asserting interclass harmony, thereby appealing to viewers on both the left and right. But despite its bourgeois perspective, the striking shots of the machinery, with the masa (dough) emerging from the cylinders—flattened, stamped, and cut into cookies—clearly suggest the masses in the process of organizing and coming to consciousness. And juxtaposed with these factory scenes are segments showing the glamorous, “sweet” life of the idle rich. Both the novel, with its Marxist critique, and the film, with its bourgeois message, mobilize affects by deploying the material metaphors of foodstuffs—sweets, in this case—that provide not so much sustenance as pleasure. These two works thus foreground in quite different ways the notion of “communal luxury,” the right of workers to beauty, to pleasure, and to a life of the mind.

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.

Palestinian Literary Criticism in Ghassan Kanafani’s On Zionist Literature

In Fi al-adab al-sahyuni (On Zionist Literature, 1967) 1 , the Palestinian writer and Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) spokesperson Ghassan Kanafani provides an analysis of Zionist literary production from the early nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century, situating it in a broader schema of Western imperialism, settler colonialism, and dispossession in Palestine. Through a treatment of the early Zionist texts, Kanafani’s study traces the evolution of literary representations of the Jewish subject and explores their utility in repudiating integration and advancing racial supremacist logics. The Zionist works in question venerate different relationships to land—extractive, romantic, fraudulent—in contrast to those of Palestinian literary and oral traditions; the former are connected to the ongoing, material efforts of colonizing Palestine. Kanafani’s study was drafted in Beirut and is a reflection of the broader sweep of Arab nationalist and anti-colonial cultural production during the 1960s and 1970s, which was targeted by an anti-communist West. These experiences were formative for Kanafani’s intellectual project, which sees literary criticism as a revolutionary tool and a direct extension of armed resistance, whereby a cultural reconstitution can be used in service of liberating both Palestinian land and people. Kanafani’s study suggests that the “weapons” of literary production will be most effectively brandished by the Arab youth who lead the struggle against Zionism.

Evolution of Ivorian Popular Front in the Political System of Côte d’Ivoire

The matter of political leadership in West African countries affected by conflicts and instability is significant in terms of its institutionalisation through political parties and organisations. The article seeks to examine the extent to which the formal political structure and functioning of a party reflect the actual political organisation mechanisms enacted in the fragile institutional environment in the context of civil wars, interethnic violence based on the case of Côte d’Ivoire, especially in the wake of the Ivorian Civil War of 2002-2011. A particular political organisation under examination is the Ivorian Popular Front, created by the former Ivorian President Laurent Gbagbo and the ruling party in Côte d’Ivoire in 2000-2011. A special attention in the framework of this analysis is drawn to the issue of the ethnic and tribal basis of the political party emergence and the significance of this ethnic (religious, regional or any other identity-based) agenda for further development of the political force and its practical operations. Further analysis is devoted to the role of a leader, in this case, Laurent Gbagbo, and the formal and informal patronage networks that emerge surrounding him, the way his political choices reflect identity-based agenda or his personalised interests. Limitations imposed by a political force in a conflict-ridden West African environment are examined both in conditions of control of power over the state and after its loss. A separate question addressed is the matter of a party’s ability to exist without being a dominant political force and a strong connection to the person of its founder and is there an opportunity for a political force that suffered a severe military defeat to return to prominence.