Communist International: Documents

511 Pages·18.451 MB·English

by  Communist International, Jane Tabrisky Degras

THE COMMUNIST INTERNATIONAL
1919-1943
DOCUMENTS
VOLUME III

THE COMMUNIST
INTERN A TION AL
1919-1943
DOCUMENTS
SELECTED AND EDITED BY
JANE DEGRAS
THREE VOLUMES
VOLUME III
1929-1943
Originally issued under the auspices of the
Royal Institute of International Affairs
I~ ~~o~;~:n~R~up
LONDON AND NEW YORK
Published by
Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
All rights reserved
First edition 1965
New impression 1971
Transferred to Digital Printing 2007
The Royal Institute of International Affairs is an unofficial
body which promotes the scientific study of international
questions and does not express opinions of its own. The
opinions expressed in this publication are the responsibility
of the author.
ISBN 0 714615552 (hbk)
Publisher's Note
The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint
but points out that some imperfections in the original may be apparent
PREFACE
THIS third and last volume of Communist International documents covers
a period (1929-43) longer than the two previous volumes combined. Only
one congress was held in the fifteen years after 1928, and the proceedings
of the four plenary sessions of the Executive Committee were not pub
lished in full. Little of the correspondence between the Executive and the
sections was made public. There was no public Comintern statement
directly concerned with the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, the
incorporation of Austria in Germany, the anti-Comintern pact, the
Munich agreement, or the outbreak of war in 1939. Volume VI of
the series /z istorii mezhdunarodnoi proletarskoi solidarnosti, covering the years
1938-45, which has a total of 597 documents (in full or in part), include~
four emanating from the Comintern, one of which is the resolution on its
dissolution.
In the first six of the years covered here, known in the Comintern
jargon of the time as 'the third period', the national parties, operating
the 'class against class' policy introduced in 1928, found themselves in
sharp conflict with the organized labour movement and increasingly
isolated within their own countries. They had for the most part adopted
the new policy only reluctantly, and with the loss of many of their more
moderate leaders who were unwilling to break completely with the socialist
movement in which they had grown up. Although largely dictated by the
struggles within the CPSU which accompanied the decision to proceed to
forced industrialization and collectivization, the policy was also the out
come of disappointment at the failure of the united front policy which
preceded it, just as the united front policy itself implied a recognition
of the unsoundness of the assumptions on which Comintern policy in the
first two years of its existence was based.
It can indeed be argued that with the adoption of the united front
policy the Comintern abandoned not only its original strategy but the very
principles underlying its existence, formulated in the belief that other
countries besides Russia were ripe for revolution. The miseries of the
war, the disorientation following defeat and the collapse of empires, the
hopes and illusions cherished by millions amidst the subsequent chaos
and nourished by events in Russia, were reason enough for this belie£
Nor was it only the bolsheviks who held it; the same miscalculation was
made by many eminent statesmen of the time; the spectre of revolution
haunted the Versailles peace conference.
Within the Comintern, the failure of the revolution to spread beyond
VI THE COMMUNIST INTERNATIONAL
Russia's borders gave even greater prominence to the position of the
bolsheviks, already too powerful for the health of an international body.
The national party leaders, seeing that only the Russians had been
successful, were, by and large, willing to obey advice and instructions
coming from Moscow, and having once abandoned their independence,
were never successful enough in their proclaimed task to regain it. Unable
to establish their revolutionary reality in their own right, they could
assume a borrowed legitimacy by attaching themselves as willing and
devoted auxiliaries to a regime which seemed to embody their aspirations
and could therefore command their loyalty. Those who disputed the
instructions and rejected the advice either resigned or were expelled, but
no secessionist group ever managed to establish and maintain a viable
opposition party. Quite apart from the material and organizational
support offered by Moscow to its chosen subordinates, it was the uncritical
and emotional allegiance of the rank and file that condemned the secession
ists to failure. Within the party they had been judged and sentenced, ifnot
tried; outside it they were isolated.
As the original vision faded, and the communist parties reshaped their
strategies, the Comintern lost any stable criterion by which to judge the
'correctness' of any particular policy. A policy became correct merely by
virtue of being adopted, and a 'deviation' was no longer a departure from
an accepted principle, but a label which could be applied as the occasion
demanded; thus there could be 'left-right' deviations, 'opportunist
adventurist' deviations, and 'Trotskyist-Bukharinist' deviations. That
these !::o.bels were endorsed by the sections indicates the decline in the
quality and stature of their leaders. The humiliations to which they were
subjected, and the ruthlessness with which they were discarded, reflected
both the loss of the original impulse and the irrelevance of their policies
to the situation in their countries. Even where it might be cogently argued
that the policy was related more nearly to domestic conditions, as in the
proposals to organize industry and the Army in Spain during the civil war,
its effectiveness and appeal were undermined by the 'Russian style' of
its application. This aspect of Comintern discipline is revealed most
clearly-ifleast harmfully-in the repetitiveness and rigidity of the verbal
formulations used in its literature, which give it its deadly dullness. Even
slight departures from the approved form of words could be and were
treated as deviations.
The change to 'class against class', however useful the Soviet leaders
may have found it for their own domestic purposes, had a crippling effect
on the Comintern sections because of its irrelevance to the situations facing
them. Once having eliminated those leaders who were bound in one way
or another to the defeated group within the USSR, the Russians no
PREFACE vii
longer needed to pay much attention to the International, preoccupied as
they were with the 'revolution from above' at home and the immense
strains and difficulties to which it gave rise. They assigned to work in the
ECCI figures of second or third rank. Public statements declined rapidly
and steadily in number, and it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the
Soviet leaders had lost interest in the Comintern long before they brought
it to an end. Moreover, debate and persuasion, which would have required
genuine intellectual capacities and might have put a severe strain on
discipline, were no longer essential. Moscow's authority sufficed. This was
shown most strikingly in the reversal of policy on the outbreak of war in
1939, which entailed the denial of everything the parties had been saying
for the previous five years. Even more telling in this respect was the
decision to dissolve the Comintern. This too was accepted without
challenge; the dissolution can indeed be regarded as the most extreme
expression of the control exercised by the Russians over the other parties.
If the 'class against class' policy was at best irrelevant, at worst, as in
Germany, fatal, its successor, the popular front, was very much in harmony
with Soviet interests at a time when Moscow was anxious to advance the
cause of collective security and to gain allies against the threat from
Nazi Germany. This aspect of Soviet policy has been extensively treated
in a number of studies, and does not require elaboration here. Even more
than previous policies, however, it marked a departure from principle.
All allies and supporters were welcome, provided they were hostile to
Hitler's government. Only 'renegades' were unwelcome (since heretics
remain dangerous, while the heathen can be converted), on the ground
that 'objectively' they acted as fascist agents. Otherwise, communists
found no difficulty in sharing their activities with 'bourgeois liberals',
'progressive churchmen', 'honest conservatives', and even the 'reformists'
whom they had earlier damned as traitors· to the working class.
For the first time in their history, communist parties, freed from restraint
and allowed, even encouraged, to shape their policies to suit the conditions
in their countries, found a place for themselves in political life and made
progress. To justifY the reversal it was argued that at times the critical
question of the day must take precedence over considerations of the long
term goal, that indeed the defeat of the Nazis, with whatever allies, was
essential to the attainment of that goal. In fact, the long-term struggle
that is, the struggle to overthrow capitalism-took second place throughout
the history of the Comintern to the struggle against the socialist parties,
and on the same reasoning, that unless and until the communists defeated
their socialist rivals and won for themselves the allegiance of the working
classes, no successful revolution was possible. If it is thought that too much
space is allocated in this volume to communist agitation against the
Vlll THE COMMUNIST INTERNATIONAL
socialists, the fact is that this reflects the emphasis of the Comintern
documents themselves.
The common belief that the International was little more than an
unofficial agency of the Soviet Foreign Commissariat needs correcting.
In the early years, when the parties believed in their independent revolu
tionary mission, the Foreign Commissar, Chicherin, was often annoyed
and handicapped by Zinoviev's activities; in later years the Comintern
and its sections were used in the interests of competing groups within the
Russian Communist Party rather than of Soviet interests as such. Indeed,
the 'third period' interlude might be regarded as positively injurious to the
Soviet Union. Mentally immobilized in the irrelevant economic categories
of class, hypnotized by the I 848 legacy of 'the revolution' and 'the reaction',
incapable of recognizing the intensity of the nationalist appeal or the
power of the fascist movement to captivate minds in spite of its irration
ality, the communist leaders completely failed to understand the nature
of the new phenomenon (although in a milder form it had triumphed
in Italy), which they defined as the instrument of the extreme terrorist
dictatorship of finance-capital. It was expediency, not theory, that dictated
a change of policy. The 'analysis' of fascism remained as inept and
misleading as before.
There is a growing literature on the Communist International and
its constituent parties, but as yet no complete history of the organization.
Granted that no fully documented and detailed account is possible with
out the use of the unpublished records of meetings of the Executive and its
commissions, of the political secretariat and presidium, the material
available is plentiful enough for an adequate study. Little that is useful
has been published by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, the repository
of Comintern archives; such articles and monographs as have from time
to time appeared are stereotyped and uninformative. Mr. E. H. Carr's
History of Soviet Russia deals comprehensively and brilliantly with Comin
tern activities in the early years, particularly as they interacted with Soviet
foreign policy, but even when he has completed his task the story will not
go beyond 1928. The late Franz Borkenau's Communist International is an
indispensable introduction to the subject, mature in political insight and
analysis, but it is a sketch, not a full-length portrait. Valuable contribu
tions have been made by the study of individual parties, notably Mr.
Rothschild's of the Bulgarian CP, Mr. Draper's of the American CP, and
the numerous more specialized works on the Chinese party (all, inciden
tally, undertaken in the United States), while the amount of work that has
been done on the Russian party itself is serious and comprehensive enough
for any study of the international organization which it controlled. The
PREFACE ix
great gap here is a history of the German Communist Party (useful as
Professor Flechtheim's short account is), for which much new material
is now available at the Berlin Document Centre and among the micro
filmed German Archives in Washington.
It may be asked, is it worth while? What, after all, did the Comintern
amount to? This is, I think, an irrelevant question. Its foundation was
based on a misreading of conditions, its unheralded end was ignominious.
In the twenty-four years between those two events it could claim no
positive victory in the terms of its original aims, even if the virtual destruc
tion of the socialist movement in continental Europe can be assigned in
part to its account. But the Russian Revolution was an epochal event, and
the history of the Comintern is inseparable from Soviet history. The
question whether on balance its activities were useful to the Russian
leaders cannot be answered with a simple yes or no; certainly Russia's
relations with other countries were prejudiced by its existence, and it is
possible that the bolsheviks might have retained the support of many of the
socialist parties which they had won at the outset had the Comintern
not spent so much of its energy and resources on the attempt to discredit
them and diminish their hold on organized labour. But in the circum
stances of Russia's internal political history a different policy was hardly
to be expected.
* * * * *
In this volume more documents than in the earlier two are reproduced
from an English text; it would of course have made the task of the editor
much easier if this practice could have been used more widely, but this
was found impracticable. (Reviews of the preceding volumes in this series
appearing in Soviet historical journals suggested that the documents had
been translated from the Russian or German in order to introduce
distortions into the text.) The editors of the English-language versions of
Comintern documents appear to have been in many cases both illiterate
and ill-informed. Where names were wrongly spelt (e.g. Chevenel for
Schevenels, Thores for Thorez, Udegeest for Oudegeest) these could be
corrected; minor grammatical errors and inappropriate punctuation
could also be corrected, but where the English text was unintelligible or
excessively clumsy, the document has been translated from the Russian,
German, or French text. Even so, a good deal of extremely bad writing
remains (this was, after all, the form in which Comintern publications
and propaganda were made available to the English-speaking reader),
substantiating the complaints frequently made within the Comintern
itself that the language of the parties lacked popular appeal. This was not
entirely the fault of the translators. The language of the earlier years,
which had its share of genuine passion, had degenerated into one of
platitudinous reiterations and mechanical violence (so that the withdrawal