Politics

Comintern

Communist International (Third International)

The Communist International: the organisation of the world's communist parties founded in Moscow in March 1919. It subordinated them to Soviet policy; Stalin dissolved it in 1943.

The founding congress met in the Kremlin on 2–6 March 1919 on Lenin's initiative. The Comintern was to be a centralised "world party" of revolution in which national parties were sections subordinate to the Executive Committee in Moscow; money and instructions came from the Soviet state. Its Polish section was the Communist Workers' Party of Poland, later the Communist Party of Poland.

In 1935 the Seventh Congress proclaimed the Popular Front tactic against fascism, and during the Great Purge many Comintern officials perished in the USSR. Fear of the Comintern drove much of the European and Japanese right and gave its name to the Anti-Comintern Pact. In May 1943 Stalin dissolved the organisation, a gesture meant to reassure the Western Allies.