The First Foreign Relations of Proletarian Internationalism

From 1920 to 1928, relations between those who had made the October Revolution in Russia and those who led the Comintern-affiliated national Communist parties of Europe and Asia developed in three phases. First, during the summer and autumn of 1920, hopes of promoting proletarian revolution throughout the world, and the influence, authority, and repute of the Comintern among revolutionary socialists were as great as they would ever be. In this situation acceptance of the "Twenty-one Conditions" represented independent commitments made by national Communist parties to a unified revolutionary offensive and to common Leninist principles, aims, organization, and strategies.

Second, when the Third Congress in June-July 1921 acknowledged that European-wide revolution was a matter of years rather than of months, the terms of international Communist solidarity changed accordingly. By the time of the Fourth Congress in November-December 1922, the unifying principle of proletarian internationalism became support for the Soviet Union as the source of international proletarian revolution and as the bastion from which the struggle waged by the proletariat of the more advanced countries of Europe was supported.^[12] Soviet Russia no longer depended on "world revolution"; "world revolution" depended on the Soviet Union. The definitive failure of proletarian insurrection in Germany in November 1923 finalized this transformation. Thereafter, at least until the victory of the Chinese Revolution in 1949, the defeat of revolutionary socialism everywhere was assured if it were extinguished in the USSR. The

task of the parties of the Communist International was therefore to support the consolidation of "the dictatorship of the proletariat" in Russia.

Third, in the months following the Fifth Congress in June-July 1924, the construction of "socialism in one country" became "the essential determining factor of the 'world revolution.'"^[13] By 1926 the purposes of international proletarian solidarity were redirected once again, this time to the defense of the security of Soviet Russia from the military attacks allegedly being planned within the ruling circles of European imperialism. These shifts in the doctrine of proletarian internationalism thus corresponded with changes in the political relations between the RCP(B) and the other parties of the Comintern.^[14] And each of them indicated the increasing predominance of the Russian party within the international movement.

When the Comintern was founded and the conditions of admission defined, it was not intended as an organization through which the RCP(B) would exercise dictatorship over the international movement. Although the Bolsheviks held a dominant position, gained from having actually executed a proletarian revolution, the Communist International might have developed as a forum in which non-Russian Communists could have challenged the notion that the leaders of the Russian party had a monopoly on determining what was in the best interests of international revolution.^[15] Instead the CI became a place where Zinoviev criticized the organization and strategies of every Communist party except the Russian one.

The mechanisms through which the Russians exercised an ever-increasing predominance during the years 1921-1928 are known in general but not specifically.^[16] The Communist International took on permanent organizational form following the Fourth Congress in 1922, and by the time of the Fifth Congress in 1924 that organization was fully defined and implemented. Thereafter congresses met only twice (in 1928 and 1935); the Executive Committee (ECCI) carried on the work of the CI and met in plenary session at least once a year from 1919 to 1933. By statute, the Russian delegation on the ECCI was more than twice the size of any other. The Executive Committee began with nine members; after the 1928 congress it had fifty-seven. Immediate control over actual situations—and the supervision of clandestine activities in particular—was concentrated in what began as the Small Bureau and became the Presidium (of the ECCI). The membership of this body was selected by the ECCI and was dominated by the RCP(B) leadership and representatives of illegal Communist parties based in Moscow.^[17] Between 1919 and 1928 Grigorii Zinoviev, Nikolai Bukharin, Karl Radek, Leon Trotsky, and Josef Stalin—all prominent members of the RCP(B) since before the revolution—were members, although not all at the same time. It pronounced and conducted policy until 1926,

when some executive functions were shifted to a new body created by the ECCI and elected by the Presidium—the Political Secretariat (of the ECCI). It was initially a group of eight with three candidates, its most prominent members being Bukharin and a number of permanent, career Comintern officials—Iosif Piatnitskii, Otto Kuusinen, Dmitrii Manuilskii, and Jules Humbert-Droz. From 1919 to 1926 Zinoviev was president of the Communist International and the ECCI, and during that period both Trotsky and Radek played important roles in it too. All three became involved in the "United Opposition" within the RCP(B) leadership, and when they were initially defeated in late 1926, Bukharin became titular leader of the CI. Neither he nor any of his successors assumed the title of president, however. When Bukharin was forced out of this position in 1929, with the defeat of the "Right Opposition," his place was taken over first by Viacheslav Molotov, a close associate of Stalin and subsequently minister of foreign affairs (1939-49, 1953-56), and then by Manuilskii, who acted on Stalin's behalf.

Why did this growing Russian predominance become acceptable to the leaders of the other national Communist parties? Certainly the status the Bolsheviks enjoyed as successful revolutionaries was the most important reason. When strategies and organization were discussed in the ECCI, national Communists found it difficult to oppose those who had participated in the revolution of 1905 and the revolutions of February and October 1917. The historic significance of the Bolshevik achievement, and consequently the level of their prestige within the international Communist movement, increased over the years, particularly after the failure of the German Communist Party to seize power in November 1923. As it became increasingly apparent that a revolution would not quickly transform Europe into one socialist republic, the international Communist movement took on a permanent apparatus to maintain a regular flow of instructions and subsidies to the separate national parties. Within this permanent organization, the RCP(B) held a logistical advantage over the other parties because the CI was headquartered in Moscow where the Russian party controlled the resources of a state.

Increasingly, the Bolsheviks controlled decision making, the apparatchiki implemented their decisions, and the national Communists found themselves unwilling to oppose what they regarded as legitimate international socialist discipline, something never attained by the Second International.^[18] Russian delegates and Comintern emissaries were able to impose their notions of organization, their analyses of revolutionary situations, and their designated strategies on often-divided and hesitant "section" leaders. Persistently the Presidium encouraged those foreign Communists

who were most consistently loyal to the ECCI, people who were referred to in public declarations as "the best representatives of the working class,"^[19] and whom Kuusinen privately called "the best friends of the Russian party."^[20]

There remains much to learn about the history of the Comintern—about the apparatus and the operations by which diverse revolutionary initiatives were channeled into a single international "general line," by which national parties became subordinated to a centralized organization, and by which the concerns of the RCP(B) leadership came to prevail over all others. The history of the Comintern that was constructed out of the documentation available prior to the years 1987-1991—largely theses, resolutions, and manifestos published at the time they were issued^[21] —is a story of revolutionary strategy, Marxist ideology, and prescriptions for political organization. Much of it revolves around discussion of "united fronts" from "above" and "below," of "Right deviations" and "Left oppositions," of an ideology-infused struggle among the leadership of the Russian party, and of loyalty and orthodoxy enforced under the slogan of "bolshevization." Research into the actualities of intracommunist politics, as opposed to the rhetoric of resolutions, depends on access to internal documents.^[22] It would seem, therefore, that the study of the apparatus and operations of the Communist International should be near the top of the agenda for scholars as access to archival sources is extended.^[23]