The founding of the Comintern

On 2 March 1919, in a hall of the Senate building in the Kremlin, Vladimir Lenin opened a gathering of several dozen communists from Russia, Europe, America and Asia. He began by asking those present to rise in memory of “the best representatives of the Third International”, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, murdered in Berlin six weeks earlier. The gathering opened as a preparatory conference, but on 4 March its participants, with one abstention, proclaimed the founding of the Communist International, known as the Third International or, for short, the Comintern. The proceedings lasted until 6 March. The new organisation was to be a world party of revolution with its headquarters in Moscow, and its aim, as Lenin said in his speech closing the congress, was an “international Soviet republic”. For the next twenty-four years the Comintern subordinated the communists of the whole world to Moscow’s policy, and fear of it became one of the driving forces of the European and Japanese right.

A bankrupt International

Since 1889 the socialist workers’ parties had been united in the Second International. At its congresses the socialists had repeatedly declared that in the event of a war between the great powers they would do everything to prevent it, and that if it broke out they would use the crisis to overthrow capitalism. In August 1914, however, the great socialist parties of Germany, France, Austria and Britain backed their governments. The German Social Democrats voted for war credits in the Reichstag, and the French socialists joined a government of national unity. Lenin, then an émigré in Switzerland, concluded that the Second International was bankrupt, and as early as the autumn of 1914 he called for the building of a new, third International, free of “social chauvinists”.

During the war opponents of the war met at conferences at Zimmerwald (1915) and Kienthal (1916). Most participants wanted only a peace without annexations, while Lenin gathered around him a small “Zimmerwald Left” that demanded the war between states be turned into a civil war between classes. After the October Revolution this minority suddenly had a state at its disposal. In March 1918 the Bolsheviks renamed their party the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), breaking with the Social Democratic tradition.

The Bolsheviks did not believe that their rule in backward, war-ravaged Russia could survive on its own. They were counting on revolution in the developed countries, above all in Germany. In the autumn of 1918 that revolution seemed to be coming: in Germany a sailors’ mutiny brought down the empire, Austria-Hungary fell apart, and in Hungary Mihály Károlyi took power after the Aster Revolution. Workers’ and soldiers’ councils were springing up all over Europe. In those same weeks the moderate socialists were preparing to rebuild the old International: they called a conference in Bern for February 1919. The Bolsheviks wanted to forestall them.

An invitation from Moscow

In January 1919, in Moscow, representatives of the Russian communists and of several small parties of foreigners living in Russia agreed the text of an invitation to the founding congress of a new International. It was broadcast by radio on 24 January. It was signed by Lenin and Leon Trotsky on behalf of the Central Committee of the Russian party, and also by representatives of the Polish communists (Julian Marchlewski signed under the pseudonym Karski), the Hungarian, German-Austrian, Latvian and Finnish communists, the Balkan Revolutionary Social Democratic Federation (Christian Rakovsky) and the American Socialist Labor Party. The invitation listed 39 parties, groups and tendencies with which Moscow wished to work, from the German Spartacists to the left wings of the socialist parties in America and the socialists of Tokyo and Yokohama. The gathering was to take the name of the “first congress of the Communist International” and set up its centre, to which the national parties were to subordinate themselves in the name of “the common interest of the international revolution”. It was originally to meet on 15 February, but the date was postponed because Russia, cut off by the fronts of the civil war and the Entente blockade, was hard to reach.

The invitation’s most important addressee, the Communist Party of Germany, founded at the turn of 1918 and 1919 by the Spartacus League, was in no hurry. Rosa Luxemburg believed that a new International should be founded only once mass communist parties had grown up in the countries of Europe. According to some historians she also feared that an organisation founded in Moscow by a handful of groups would become a tool of the Bolsheviks. After the Spartacist uprising in Berlin in January and the murder of Luxemburg and Liebknecht on 15 January, the KPD leadership upheld her position. The party’s only delegate to travel to Moscow was Hugo Eberlein, using the pseudonym Max Albert, with instructions to oppose the immediate founding of the International. The second appointed delegate, Eugen Leviné, was, according to Eberlein’s recollections, stopped at the border.

From 3 to 10 February 1919 socialists from more than a dozen countries met in Bern in an attempt to revive the Second International. In Paris the peace conference had been sitting for several weeks, with the victors considering how to halt Bolshevism. In Poland’s east, from mid-February, there were clashes with the Red Army. It was in this atmosphere that the delegates gathered in Moscow.

A congress in the Kremlin

The gathering was small and largely unrepresentative. According to the lists published in the Comintern’s documents, it was attended by 35 voting delegates representing 19 parties and organisations, and by a dozen or so with a consultative voice. Other sources give a total of 51 or 52 delegates. Only a few of them had come specially from abroad: Eberlein from Germany, Karl Steinhardt (pseudonym Gruber) from Austria, Otto Grimlund from Sweden, a delegate from Norway and Sebald Rutgers from the Netherlands. The rest were already living in Russia. They included communists from the former lands of the Russian Empire, prisoners of war, émigrés and foreigners who had stayed in Russia after the revolution, such as the Swiss socialist Fritz Platten, the French officer Jacques Sadoul and Gustav Klinger, representing the Volga Germans. The Polish communists were represented by Józef Unszlicht. The Russian party was represented by Lenin, Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev, Nikolai Bukharin and the Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Georgy Chicherin. Joseph Stalin was also on the list, but there is nothing to suggest that he took part in the proceedings. Karl Radek, the Bolsheviks’ foremost expert on German affairs, was at the time sitting in a Berlin prison. The language of the proceedings was German. The press did not report on the gathering until 6 March.

As early as 1 March, at a meeting before the opening, Lenin tried to persuade Eberlein to agree to the immediate founding of the International, but without success. Given the importance of the German party, it was decided that the gathering would be only a conference, which would adopt a platform and elect a committee to prepare a proper congress. Much of the proceedings was taken up with reports from individual countries. Eberlein spoke about the founding of the KPD and the fighting in Germany; Zinoviev assured the delegates that Soviet Russia considered it its duty to give material help to every workers’ movement that accepted the principles of communism. Over the following days Bukharin presented a draft platform, and Lenin his theses on “bourgeois democracy and the dictatorship of the proletariat”, in which he set the power of the soviets against parliamentarism as a higher form of democracy.

The mood was changed by Steinhardt’s arrival. The Austrian had spent seventeen days making his way to Moscow in goods wagons, on coal trucks and on locomotives, through war-torn territory. At the congress he spoke with enormous optimism about the progress of revolution in Central Europe. The question of founding the International was raised anew. The motion was tabled by representatives of the Austrian and Hungarian communists, the Swedish Left Social Democrats and the Balkan federation. They argued that an “opportunist” International was being rebuilt in Bern, and that if the Moscow conference did not create one of its own, the world would conclude that the communists were divided.

Eberlein repeated his party’s reservations. He said the KPD was not opposed to a new International in principle, but the whole of Western Europe was missing from the hall, and in many countries communist parties did not yet exist. Zinoviev answered him by asking whether delay was permissible when the revolution had already triumphed in one great country and was nearing victory in two others. “Our slogan is an international Soviet republic, and no one can call that a utopia,” he said, arguing that the German party would take power within a few months. On 4 March the gathering voted unanimously to found the Communist International. Eberlein, who did not want to vote against, abstained. The same day the platform and Lenin’s theses were adopted, and the former leaders of the Zimmerwald Left announced that they considered the Zimmerwald movement dissolved, since everything revolutionary in it had passed to the new International.

On the last day, 6 March, the congress adopted a manifesto “to the proletarians of the whole world”, written by Trotsky, who had come briefly from the front, as Admiral Alexander Kolchak’s offensive was beginning in the east. The manifesto harked back to Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto of 72 years earlier and proclaimed the Third International an “International of action” whose task was the overthrow of the bourgeois order. The text was signed by representatives of more than a dozen parties, first among them “Max Albert” for Germany. The congress set up an Executive Committee based in Moscow, on which the parties of the most important countries were to sit; until their representatives arrived, the Russians were to carry on the work. Zinoviev became chairman of the Executive Committee, and the Italian-Russian socialist Angelica Balabanoff its secretary.

“An international Soviet republic”

From the outset the Comintern stated its aim openly. Closing the congress, Lenin said that the victory of the proletarian revolution on a world scale was assured and that “the founding of an international Soviet republic is on the way”. In its appeal for 1 May 1919 the Executive Committee wrote that the great Communist International had been born in 1919 and that in 1920 “the great international Soviet republic” would be born. The statutes adopted at the Second Congress in 1920 laid down that the Comintern would fight by all means, including armed force, for the overthrow of the international bourgeoisie and the creation of an international Soviet republic as a transitional stage to the abolition of the state.

This was not mere rhetoric. The Comintern was not meant to be a loose association of parties, like its predecessor, but a centralised “world party” in which the national parties were sections subordinate to the Executive Committee. Since the Committee worked in Moscow, and the money, couriers and instructions came from the Soviet state, from its very first months the Comintern combined revolutionary aims with the interests of the Bolshevik government.

A spring of hope, and 1920

For a few months it seemed that the predictions might come true. On 21 March 1919 a Soviet Republic was proclaimed in Hungary under the de facto leadership of Béla Kun, and in April the Bavarian Soviet Republic in Munich, in which Leviné took power. Both fell before the year was out. More parties joined the Comintern, and its Second Congress, held from 19 July to 7 August 1920 in Petrograd and Moscow, met as the Red Army was marching on Warsaw. The delegates followed the progress of the front on a map. In the war with Poland the Bolsheviks saw a chance to carry the revolution into Germany, and in captured Białystok a Provisional Polish Revolutionary Committee was set up, with Marchlewski and Felix Dzerzhinsky, to take power in Poland. The defeat at Warsaw in August 1920 closed that road.

The Second Congress also adopted the so-called Twenty-One Conditions for admission to the Comintern: member parties had to break with the moderate socialists, expel “reformists”, call themselves communist, build an illegal apparatus alongside their legal structures and carry out the decisions of the Executive Committee without question. The conditions split the European left. In the autumn of 1920 the majority of the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany went over to the KPD, which became a mass party, and in December, at the congress of Tours, the majority of the French socialists formed a communist party. Poland’s Communist Workers’ Party of Poland, founded in December 1918 and soon driven underground, had been a section of the Comintern since 1919. In 1920, obedient to Moscow’s line, it sided with the Red Army, which cost the communists support in Poland for a long time to come.

The long shadow of the Comintern

The Comintern was founded in the belief that world revolution was a matter of months. When it did not come, the organisation became an instrument of Soviet foreign policy, and its shifts of line weighed on the fate of Europe and Asia in the years leading up to the Second World War.

Germany proved the most fateful case. From the outset the Comintern fought the Social Democrats as “traitors to the working class”, and in Germany they were divided from the communists by the memory of January 1919, when a Social Democratic government had crushed the Spartacist uprising. From the Sixth Congress in 1928 the line of the so-called “Third Period” applied: social democracy was declared to be “social fascism” – the moderate wing of fascism – and the main enemy. The KPD under Ernst Thälmann fought the SPD ferociously; in August 1931, on Moscow’s orders, it even backed a referendum, initiated by the nationalist right and the Nazis, on dissolving the Prussian Landtag, which was meant to bring down the coalition government of the Social Democrat Otto Braun. The divided left could not stand together against Adolf Hitler. After taking power in 1933 the Nazis smashed both parties, and the spectre of communist revolution, which the Comintern openly proclaimed, was one of the arguments Hitler used to win over the German elites.

Only when Hitler turned out to be a threat to the Soviet Union itself did the Comintern change course. The Seventh Congress in 1935, led by the new general secretary, Georgi Dimitrov, proclaimed the policy of popular fronts: alliances of communists with socialists and liberals against fascism. In 1936 popular fronts won elections in Spain and France, and after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War the Comintern organised the International Brigades, in which tens of thousands of volunteers fought, Poles among them. In Asia the Comintern had been helping the Chinese Communist Party since 1921 and pressed for its alliance with the Kuomintang, and after 1936 for a united front against Japan.

The very existence of the Comintern also gave its name to the agreement that linked the future aggressors. On 25 November 1936 Germany and Japan concluded the Anti-Comintern Pact, formally directed against the Communist International and, in a secret protocol, against the Soviet Union. Italy joined it in 1937, and later Hungary, Manchukuo and Spain. The pact was the first step towards the alliance of the Axis powers.

At the same time Stalin was destroying the Comintern’s own people. In the Great Purge the Comintern’s co-founders Zinoviev and Bukharin perished, and the NKVD arrested hundreds of foreign communists living in the Soviet Union. Many of them were shot, among them Béla Kun and Hugo Eberlein – the same man who in 1919 had been the only one not to support the founding of the International. The Poles were hit hardest: in 1937–1939 most of the leadership of the Communist Party of Poland perished, and in August 1938 the Comintern dissolved the entire party on the charge that it had been taken over by agents of Polish intelligence. A year later, after the conclusion of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, the Comintern ordered communists throughout the world to regard the war with Germany as “imperialist” and not to support their own governments in fighting Hitler.

When the Soviet Union needed the trust of Britain and the United States, Stalin decided the Comintern was dispensable. On 15 May 1943 the Presidium of the Executive Committee resolved to dissolve the International, and the decision took effect in June. Its apparatus passed to a department of the Soviet party’s Central Committee, still headed by Dimitrov. It was men trained in the Comintern who in 1942 founded the Polish Workers’ Party in occupied Poland and after the war took power in the countries of Central Europe. In 1947 Stalin set up the Comintern’s successor, the Cominform. The world republic of soviets announced in March 1919 never came, but for twenty years the organisation founded in the Kremlin by a few dozen people was part of European politics – a source of hope for some and of fear for others.