Communist International

The Communist International was threefold: an organizational part of the workers’ movement, a global-politico-cultural intermediate community, and a tool of the Bolsheviks and international communists for globalizing the Russian Revolution as part of what they thought would be the imminent European and world revolution. Reflecting an ambiguous picture of both universal brotherhood and bureaucratic Babylon, the Communist International (known as the Comintern) directly opposed the League of Nations, the Versailles System, and the new world order arrangements in consequence of World War I. It lasted from 1919 to 1943.

As a high number of documents of the Comintern archives have been released, the historical contextualization of the Comintern is now possible, helping to elucidate the following issues: center-periphery relations or (relative) independence of the communist parties, ties with Soviet foreign policy, the stress of Stalinism and terror, and the (dis-)continuity from the Leninist to Stalinist epochs. As a transnational vertical and horizontal institutional network, the Comintern was not a state organization and not completely beyond the purview of states. Not only through its leading figures Grigori Zinoviev and Nikolai Bukharin—both fired by Joseph Stalin—as well as Viacheslav Molotov, Dimitri Manuilsky, and Georgi Dimitrov but also through its Russian delegation, it was linked with the Soviet Politburo.

The Comintern's institution building evolved to a transnational grid, composed by seven world congresses (1919, 1920, 1921, 1922, 1924, 1928, and 1935) and 13 plenary sessions, the governing and auxiliary bodies of its executive committee in Moscow (ECCI), and its apparatus with functional departments, country secretariats, bodies for budget, support, archives, cadre control, regional bodies, foreign bureaus, international mass and sympathizing organizations, and editorial and knowledge bodies (International Lenin School for cadres, the communist universities). Its progressive media empire for mass propaganda comprised publishing houses, journals, press agencies, and broadcasting stations. The Department of International Relations, the Comintern's nerve center, maintained another global network of bureaus.

Despite ideological defeats and increasing bureaucratic rulings, think tanks and specialized bodies for world continents, prior to Stalinization, acted as laboratories for global change and analysis of capitalism integrating ethnic differences. Comintern sections included 60–80 (legal and illegal) communist parties in all core and many (semi) peripheral or (semi)colonial countries, formally obeying Democratic Centralism and maintaining themselves as another multifunctional political, cultural, and sociopolitical network. Total membership (without Russia) decreased dramatically from 900,000 in 1921 to 328,000 in 1934 (excepting Germany), increasing again to an estimated 1,200,000 in 1939. With Germany as epicenter (until 1933) and extending to Asia (China and India) and Latin America, communist movements were also active social movements in Czechoslovakia and Norway, and politically relevant in France and Greece. Nevertheless, these parties still represented a minority in relation to Social Democrats and sometimes Syndicalists. In the 1930s, relative growth was achieved in France, Spain, Chile, and (semi)colonial countries in Asia, Latin America, and Africa, supported by peripheral bodies such as the League Against Imperialism or the Red International of Labour Unions. Beyond these mobilizations, a notable tradition of Marxism as cultural code existed in countries like the United Kingdom, Austria, Poland, and the Netherlands.

...