Comintern

The Communist International, founded by Lenin in Moscow in 1919 to coordinate and direct communist parties worldwide in the pursuit of global revolution. It was dissolved by Stalin in 1943 as a concession to his wartime allies.

The Third International, universally known as the Comintern, was Lenin’s answer to the failure of socialist parties in Germany and France to oppose the First World War. If national socialist parties would not act as the vanguard of revolution, a Moscow-directed international organisation would supply both the ideology and the discipline. The Comintern’s founding congress in 1919 took place amid a wave of revolutionary activity across Europe — the Hungarian Soviet Republic, the Bavarian Soviet Republic, the revolutionary unrest in Germany — that seemed to confirm that the Russian Revolution was the opening act of a worldwide transformation. As these revolutions failed, the Comintern’s character shifted from a coordinating body for genuine revolutionary movements to an instrument of Soviet foreign policy, directing the strategies of communist parties in dozens of countries according to Soviet priorities rather than local conditions. This reached its most destructive expression in the early 1930s, when Comintern doctrine declared social democratic parties to be ‘social fascists’ — as dangerous as actual fascists — and prohibited cooperation with them, contributing directly to the failure to build an effective anti-Nazi coalition in Germany. The 1935 shift to the Popular Front strategy reversed this position but could not recover the lost ground.

The Comintern represents the fatal contradiction within the international communist movement: the tension between the claim to represent universal human emancipation and the reality of subordination to Soviet state interests. Party members who joined out of genuine idealism were frequently ordered to implement policies designed in Moscow with no knowledge of local conditions and no accountability for their consequences. The betrayals were systematic: the abandonment of the Chinese communists to Chiang Kai-shek’s massacre in 1927; the destruction of the Spanish Republic’s non-communist left during the Civil War; the forced reversal of anti-fascist alliances after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The Comintern was dissolved not because it had outlived its usefulness as an instrument of revolution but because Stalin needed to reassure Churchill and Roosevelt that the Soviet Union was not planning to export revolution to their countries. It was a transaction, not a principle.