Communist International in Lenins Time

The Communist
International in
Lenin’s Time
John Riddell
2 The Communist International in Lenin’s Time
Contents
Introduction ........................................................................................................................ 3
1. Socialism’s Great Divide ..................................................................................... 5
2. From Zimmerwald to Moscow .......................................................................... 8
3. Building Revolutionary Parties .................................................................. 11
4. Colonised Peoples Take the Lead ........................................................... 14
5. Reaching Out to the Peasantry .................................................................. 17
6. For Women’s Emancipation ........................................................................... 20
7. For Class-Struggle Trade Unions ............................................................. 23
8. Initiatives for Unity in Struggle ................................................................... 26
9. From Lenin to Stalin ............................................................................................ 29
Appendix: The Russian Revolution & National Freedom .............. 32
Sources & Further Reading ................................................................................ 41
These articles were first published in the British journal Socialist Worker
(www.socialistworker.co.uk) in the summer and autumn of 2007. The article in the
appendix was first published in the online Canadian journal Socialist Voice
(www.socialistvoice.ca) in November 2006.
Resistance Books 2008

ISBN 978-1-876646-48-6
Published by Resistance Books, resistancebooks.com
Introduction
By John Riddell
The first years of the 21st century have seen coordinated worldwide actions and
international collaboration by progressive movements on a scale not seen for many
decades.
Massive actions against capitalist globalisation in 1999-2001, the rise of the World
Social Forum, coordinated protests by tens of millions against the US-led war in Iraq
in 2003, and world days of action to protect the environment have all testified to
awareness that the great problems before us can be resolved only on a world scale.
Meanwhile, the stubborn resistance to imperialist wars in the Middle East and the
rise of popular struggles in Latin America have thrown the US empire onto the defensive.
The government of Venezuela, together with Cuba, has built an international alliance
for sovereignty and against neo-liberalism, called the Bolivarian Alternative for the
Americas (ALBA). Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez has pointed to the need for
progressive and anti-capitalist movements to unite in international association.
Such recent initiatives continue the tradition of the workers’ movement since the
mid-19th century. The Communist League (1847-52), whose leaders included Karl
Marx and Frederick Engels, published a world program, the Manifesto of the
Communist Party, which still serves as the foundation of revolutionary socialism and
concludes with the words, “Working people of all countries, unite!”
Marx and Engels were among the central leaders of the International Working
Men’s Association (1864-76). Engels took part in the formation in 1889 of the Socialist
(Second) International, which came to include mass socialist parties in most of the
main developed capitalist states.
John Riddell, co-editor of Socialist Voice, has been a leading figure in the the socialist movement
in North America and Europe since the 1960s. He is the editor of The Communist International
in Lenin’s Time, a groundbreaking six-volume anthology of documents, speeches, manifestos
and commentary, published by Pathfinder Press between 1984 and 1993.
A conservative wing developed within the Second International, which led to its
collapse at the outbreak of World War I in 1914. The International’s most authoritative
parties abandoned the interests of working people in order to rally behind their
respective imperialist rulers in prosecuting the war effort. The conflict in the Second
International is described in the first article of this collection, “Socialism’s Great Divide”.
Amid the wreckage of the Second International, revolutionary opponents of the
imperialist war organised in the Zimmerwald Movement, named for the town in
Switzerland where they met in 1915 (see “From Zimmerwald to Moscow”). That
current included the leaders of the revolution that brought Russian workers and
peasants to power in October 1917.
The Communist International or “Comintern” was founded in March 1919 on the
initiative of the Bolshevik Party of Russia. It united revolutionary opponents of capitalism
from diverse origins and with a wide range of viewpoints: Marxists of different hues,
revolutionary anarchists, pioneer fighters against colonial domination.
Lenin declared that the Comintern’s foundation “heralds the international republic
of soviets, the international victory of communism”.
These hopes were not realised. The upsurge of workers’ struggles following the
First World War was defeated everywhere outside Russia. In Russia itself, the Bolshevik
Party and Comintern soon fell into the grip of a bureaucratic faction headed by Joseph
Stalin. The Comintern ceased to be a revolutionary force. Most of the Comintern’s
founding leaders in Soviet territory fell victim to Stalin’s murderous purges. The
International was dissolved in 1943.
However, during its first five years, while still led by Lenin and his closest
collaborators, the Communist International elaborated a program and strategy that
incorporate the lessons of the revolutionary era whose climax was the Russian
revolution.
The purpose of this pamphlet is to introduce that program.
December 2007
1. Socialism’s Great Divide
For socialists, 2007 marks a significant anniversary.

One hundred years ago, a congress of the Second — or Socialist — International
took a bold stand in the struggle against capitalist war. The congress pointed the way
toward the Russian revolution of 1917 and provided an enduring guide for socialists’
anti-war activity.
Founded in 1889, the Second International united mass socialist and labour parties,
mostly in Europe.
The 1907 congress, which met in Stuttgart, Germany, on August 18-24, revealed a
divide in the International between those aiming for capitalism’s overthrow and the
“opportunists” — those who sought to adapt to the existing order.
The congress took place at the dawn of the epoch of modern imperialism. Europe
was teetering on the edge of war between rival great-power alliances. A revolutionary
upsurge in Russia in 1905 had inspired mass strikes and demonstrations across Europe.
In such conditions, how was the International’s longstanding opposition to militarism
and colonialism to be applied?
As the 884 congress delegates from 25 countries began their work, the International’s
principles were challenged from within. A majority of the congress’s Commission on
Colonialism asked the congress not to “reject in principle every colonial policy” as
colonisation “could be a force for civilisation”.
Defenders of this resolution claimed that Europe needed colonial possessions for
prosperity. When German Marxist Karl Kautsky proposed that “backward peoples”
be approached in a “friendly manner”, with an offer of tools and assistance, he was
mocked by Netherlands delegate Hendrick Van Kol, speaking for the commission
majority.
“They will kill us or even eat us”, Van Kol said. “Therefore we must go there with
weapons in hand, even if Kautsky calls that imperialism.”
After heated debate, the congress rejected this racist position, resolving instead
that “the civilising mission that capitalist society claims to serve is no more than a veil
for its lust for conquest and exploitation”. But the close vote (127 to 108) showed that
imperialism was, in Lenin’s words, “infecting the proletariat with colonial chauvinism.”
There was a similar debate on immigration. Some US delegates wanted the
International to endorse bans against immigration of workers from China and Japan,
who were, they said, acting as “unconscious strikebreakers.” US delegate Morris Hillquit
said that Chinese and other workers of the “yellow race” have “lagged too far behind
to be organised [in unions]”.
Kato Tokijiro of Japan commented acidly that US delegates were “clearly being
influenced by the so-called Yellow Peril” — the racist fear of Asian domination.
US socialist Julius Hammer noted that Japanese and Chinese workers were learning
fast how to fight capitalism and “could be very effectively organised”. He argued, “All
legal restrictions on immigration must be rejected.”
The congress made no concessions to Hillquit’s racism, but neither did it adopt
Hammer’s call for open borders.
Similar debates cropped up regarding women’s oppression. In the women’s
suffrage commission, an influential current favoured giving priority to winning the
right to vote for men. Rejecting this view, the congress insisted that the right-to-vote
campaign must be “simultaneous” (for both genders) and “universal”.
On the decisive question of the great powers’ drive to war, a tense debate extended
through six days.
All agreed to condemn war as “part of the very nature of capitalism”, oppose
“naval and land armaments”, and, if war seems imminent, exert “every effort in order
to prevent its outbreak”.
But what did “every effort” mean, concretely? Delegates from France, led by Jean
Jaurès, pressed the congress to commit to mass strikes and insurrections against a
threatened war. German socialists, led by August Bebel, said such a stand would
endanger their party’s legal status, and, anyway, tactics could not be dictated in advance.
An acrimonious deadlock was broken thanks to an initiative of a small group of
revolutionary socialists, led by Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin.
Luxemburg called on delegates to learn from the lesson of the 1905 Russian
revolution. This upsurge “did not merely result from the Russo-Japanese war, it has
also served to put an end to it”. The anti-war resolution must project a struggle not
merely to prevent war but to utilise the war crisis to promote revolution, she said.
Luxemburg’s proposal projected radical action, pleasing Jaurès, while obeying
Bebel’s injunction not to decree tactics. And a wording was found that did not endanger
the German party’s legality.
“In case war should break out”, the unanimously adopted resolution read, it is
Socialism’s Great Divide 7
socialists’ duty “to intervene for its speedy termination and to strive with all their
power to utilise the economic and political crisis created by the war to rouse the
masses and thereby hasten the downfall of capitalist class rule.”
Yet as the Bolsheviks later noted, the International’s stand was “ambiguous and
contradictory” on a key point. Both Bebel and Jaurès were pledged to loyalty to the
homeland in “defensive” wars — a valid position in countries fighting for national
liberation, but not for the imperialist powers like France and Germany. The resolution
neither supported nor condemned this concept. The “defensive war” excuse was used
by socialist leaderships, in 1914, to rally support behind the war efforts of their respective
capitalist rulers — with disastrous results.
Lenin hailed the resolution for its “firm determination to fight to the end”. But he
also warned that the congress as a whole “brought into sharp contrast the opportunist
and revolutionary wings within the International”.
Over the following decade, war and revolution led to a decisive break between
these the two wings, whose divergent courses still represent alternative roads for
progressive struggles today.
The revolutionary wing led by Luxemburg, Lenin, and their co-thinkers held to
the anti-war policy of Stuttgart until revolutions in Russia in 1917 and Germany in 1918
brought the First World War to an abrupt end.
A century after the 1907 congress, the socialist positions voiced there on war,
colonialism, and oppression retain their importance, and provide a basis for building
many fronts of resistance around the world.
2. From Zimmerwald to Moscow
During the upsurge of working class and liberation struggles that followed the 1917
Russian revolution, socialists from all continents joined in founding a world party, the
Communist International, or “Comintern”.
The new International gave living expression to socialism’s guiding concept,
“Working people of all countries, unite.”
After Lenin’s death, the International was effectively destroyed by the rise of
Stalinism. But the International’s early congresses adopted the programmatic
foundation on which revolutionary socialism stands today: on the united front, work
in trade unions, liberation struggles of the oppressed, the nature of workers’ rule, and
more.
The Comintern was born from the ashes of the previous, “Second” International,
which collapsed at the outbreak of the First World War in 1914.
Abandoning their pledges of anti-war resistance, leaders of socialist parties in
most warring states rushed to support the war efforts of their respective ruling classes,
promoting a slaughter that was to claim 20 million lives.
Only a small minority held to the Second International’s anti-war stance. But as
the war progressed this minority drew strength from strikes, soldiers’ and sailors’
protests, and demonstrations in all warring countries.
In 1915, 42 antiwar socialists from 12 countries, meeting in Zimmerwald, Switzerland,
adopted a historic statement that was to inspire anti-war protests in all the warring
countries. The Zimmerwald Manifesto called for an international fight for peace,
based on self-determination of nations and without annexations or indemnities.
A minority current at Zimmerwald, led by the Bolshevik Party of Russia, asked the
conference to go further. Noting that the war was plunging European society into a
deep crisis, it called for revolutionary struggle against the capitalist governments under
the banner of socialism.
This current also favoured a “ruthless struggle” against opportunist forces in socialist
parties whose pro-war stand had betrayed the workers’ movement. Known as the
From Zimmerwald to Moscow 9
Zimmerwald Left, it was the embryo of the future Communist International.

The Zimmerwald Left’s strategy was soon vindicated. Worker-soldier revolutions
in Russia in 1917 and Germany in 1918 overthrew their governments and forced an
end to the war. In Russia, workers, soldiers, and peasants formed a revolutionary
government based on their councils, or “soviets”.
Across much of Europe, masses of workers turned away from their opportunist
leaders and sought to follow the Russian example.
Lenin captured the spirit of the moment in his April 1919 assessment of the
Comintern’s foundation: “A new era in world history has begun. Mankind is throwing
off … capitalist, or wage, slavery … Man is for the first time advancing to real freedom.”
It was not easy for the revolutionary wing of world socialism to meet. A capitalist
blockade barred travel to the young soviet republic. But after the German revolution,
and formation of the German Communist Party under the leadership of Rosa
Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in December 1918, Bolshevik leaders felt it was urgent
to convene an international congress, even if it was small.
Fifty-one delegates — only nine from outside Russia — met in Moscow March 2-
6. They represented 22 countries. Two-thirds of the delegates were under 40 years
old, and one-fifth of them represented Asian peoples. Against objections by the German
delegate, who considered the move premature, the congress launched the Communist
or Third International.
The central challenge before the congress was to clarify the example represented
by the soviet government in Russia. At a moment when invading imperialist and
counter-revolutionary armies placed the soviets’ very survival in question, Lenin
proposed to the congress some theses explaining the nature and potential of soviet
power.
Its substance, he said, “is that the permanent and only foundation of state power,
the entire machinery of state, is the mass-scale organisation of the classes oppressed
by capitalism”.
Soviet power “is so organised as to bring the working people close to the machinery
of government”. That is why the component councils are based on the workplace, not
a territory. Working people’s mass organisations are enlisted in “constant and unfailing
participation in the administration of the state”. Barriers to democracy such as the
capitalist military, bureaucratic and judicial machinery are broken up.
Enemies of the soviet regime attacked it as dictatorial. It is indeed a dictatorship,
Lenin affirmed, a temporary one against the forcible resistance of the exploiting class,
which is “desperate”, “furious”, and “stops at nothing”. To the masses oppressed by
capitalism, however, it “provides an unparalleled extension of the actual enjoyment of
democracy”.
Capitalist “democracy”, by contrast, “is no more than a machine … for the
suppression of the working people by a handful of capitalists”.
Reality in the besieged soviet republic necessarily fell short of the soviets’ potential,
and the Bolsheviks recognised, as Lenin stated in July 1918, that victory over capitalism
required “the joint effort of the workers of the world”.
The purpose of the new International was to “facilitate and hasten” that world
victory, a task in which working people inside and outside soviet territory had an equal
stake.
This victory required breaking from and exposing the “social-chauvinist current”
— social-democrats who had supported the imperialist war and, after the war, helped
repress workers in order to rebuild the capitalist state.
The International also criticised those who favoured reuniting chauvinists and
revolutionaries in a single movement.
However, the congress proposed a bloc with revolutionary forces that previously
stood outside the socialist movement but now had been won to the banner of soviet
power.
The resolutions of the Communist International’s founding congress were far
from comprehensive. Very little was said on colonial liberation, for example, and only
a few brief paragraphs on the oppression of women.
Its main achievement lay in hoisting the banner of the new movement. This action
was swiftly vindicated. In the three months following the founding congress, mass
workers’ parties in Italy, Norway, Sweden, and Bulgaria joined the International, while
parties in Germany, France, and Britain opened negotiations to join.
On the International’s first anniversary, in March 1920, Lenin was able to say, “The
Communist International has been successful beyond all expectation.”
3. Building Revolutionary Parties
In March 1919, the founding congress of the Communist International called on workers
of the world to unite “under the banner of workers’ councils and the revolutionary
struggle for power”.
The appeal succeeded beyond its founders’ expectations. During the year that
followed, organisations representing millions of workers on several continents declared
support for the new International.
Indeed, the International noted in August 1920 that the statements of support it
was receiving had become “rather fashionable”. In conditions of capitalist collapse and
near civil war across most of Europe, some working class leaders whose course was far
from revolutionary felt compelled to pay lip service to the new International. Many
figures who had betrayed the working class during the First World War were knocking
at the International’s doors.
But little progress had been made in organising revolutionary-minded working
people outside Russia to contest the power of the employing class.
Events in Germany where a workers’ and soldiers’ revolution had overthrown the
monarchy in November 1918, were instructive. In the early months of 1919, Germany’s
capitalist rulers, aided by the German Social Democratic Party, had been able to
provoke workers into premature armed conflicts, one city at a time, with no concerted
national response. Capitalist terror claimed the lives of hundreds of working class
fighters, including the central leaders of the German Communist Party.
In Hungary, the unreadiness of local communists contributed to the overthrow of
a revolutionary government in 1919 by invading armies, after four months’ rule.
The challenge before the International’s Second Congress, held in Moscow from
July 19 to August 7,1920, was to explain how revolutionary forces could unite worldwide
in building organisations with a leadership capacity comparable to that of the Bolshevik
Party, which had headed the struggle for soviet power in Russia.
Delegates came from 37 countries, representing not only small groupings but also
several parties with tens of thousands of members and strong ties with the broad
working-class movement. Currents with many contrasting viewpoints attended,

including representatives of left-wing social-democratic parties in France, Germany,
and Italy that were wavering between a revolutionary and a pro-capitalist course.
In the free-wheeling congress debate, some of these figures tried to paint up their
credentials by raising “leftist” criticisms of Bolshevik policy, chiding them for encouraging
Russian peasants to divide up great estates, or for supporting national liberation
movements in the British, French, and other colonies.
The congress began by explaining the need for all the revolutionary forces in each
country to unite in a party. “Every class struggle is a political struggle” that “has as its
goal the conquest of political power”, the congress theses stated. And power “cannot
be seized, organised, and directed other than by some kind of political party” that
serves as a “unifying and leading centre” for all aspects of working-class struggle.
Such a party represents the most revolutionary part of the working class, the
theses stated. But the communist party “has no interests different from those of the
working class as a whole” and is active in all broad organisations of working people,
including in the rural villages.
The party must be governed by “democratic centralism”, exemplified by the
Bolshevik Party of the time, which assured full internal democracy in reaching decisions,
but demanded unity in applying them.
The Bolsheviks insisted that the revolutionary movement must be cleansed of the
pro-capitalist current that had led the Socialist International to disaster in 1914. In line
with this thinking, the congress took special measures to fend off opportunist leaders
seeking to find a niche in the new International.
Delegates adopted 21 conditions for admission to the International. These theses
restated principles of revolutionary functioning that had proven crucial in post-1914
experience, such as:
l Control by the party in each country over its publications and its parliamentary
representatives.
l Commitment to revolutionary work among peasants and in the army.
l Active support for liberation movements in the colonies.
l Readiness to resist repression through underground activity.
The theses also insisted on a clear organisational break with forces “who reject on
principle the [21] conditions”.
Revolutionary socialists held that the flouting of International congress decisions
by national leaderships had been a key factor in the Socialist International’s collapse in
1914. The 1920 congress agreed that the new International must be centralised, and
that the International’s decisions must be binding on its member parties.
Building Revolutionary Parties 13
But the congress also resolved not to infringe member parties’ autonomy in the
day-to-day struggle. Given “the diverse conditions under which each party has to
struggle and work”, the congress stated, “universally binding decisions” would be
adopted “only on questions in which such decisions are possible”.
International centralism was expressed through Comintern decisions on world
issues of broad principle and strategy, backed up with prudent advice to and loyal
collaboration with elected national leaderships.
The Comintern was not free from harmful interference in national party affairs by
some of its international representatives. But Lenin and Trotsky, its most authoritative
leaders, held to a policy of patient and non-intrusive education. Their approach won
ground during the International’s first four years.
In 1921, the Comintern adopted detailed instructions on the organisational structure
of a communist party. Yet the following year, Lenin noted that this “excellently drafted”
and accurate resolution “has remained a dead letter” because “everything in it is based
on Russian conditions”.
Communists abroad “must assimilate part of the Russian experience” through
study and through traversing similar experiences on their own.
Following the Second Congress, the left social-democratic currents split: hundreds
of thousands of members were won to the new International, while others retreated
to pro-capitalist reformism.
This process helped open the doors of the International to a new generation
attracted to the example of the Russian revolution, many of whom, initially at least,
stood outside the socialist movement.
Two such non-socialist currents were of particular importance:
l Syndicalists — that is, revolutionaries influenced by anarchism, who rejected the
need for a party and a workers’ government.
l Revolutionary nationalists in countries oppressed by imperialism.
Each of these viewpoints has support today among many young activists around the
world. Subsequent instalments of this series will consider how the new International
undertook to win such non-socialist revolutionaries.
4. Colonised Peoples Take the

Lead
The prominent role of revolutionists from Asia in the Communist International

marked a breakthrough for the world socialist movement.
At the International’s Second Congress in 1920, 11 countries from Asia were
represented. A delegate from India, M.N. Roy, later wrote “for the first time, brown
and yellow men met with white men who were no overbearing imperialists but friends
and comrades.”
The pre-1914 Socialist International had largely failed to embrace struggles of
colonial peoples. The Comintern’s founders, by contrast, had hailed the new leading
role of oppressed peoples.
In his 1913 article, “Backward Europe and Advanced Asia” Lenin wrote that in Asia
“hundreds of millions of people are awakening to life, light and freedom. What delight
this world movement is arousing in the hearts of all class-conscious workers.”
When the First World War ended, freedom struggles broke out across Asia,
impelled by the victors’ denial of colonial self-determination.
Addressing the Second Congress, Lenin noted that 70% of the world’s population
“are either in a state of direct colonial dependence or are semi-colonies”. The “cardinal
idea” underlying the Second Congress theses on the national and colonial questions,
he said, was “the distinction between oppressed and oppressor nations”.
According to these theses, the Comintern’s goal lay in “uniting the proletarians
and toiling masses of all nations” in a common struggle “to overthrow the landowners
and the bourgeoisie”. But to achieve that goal, the theses stated, “all communist parties
must directly support the revolutionary movement among the nations that are
dependent … and in the colonies.”
Introducing the theses, Lenin insisted on the need to distinguish reformist currents
that accept the colonial framework and “national-revolutionary movements”, even
though the program of the latter remains “bourgeois-democratic” rather than socialist.
Colonised Peoples Take the Lead 15
The theses called for support for peasant movements in dependent countries
“against the landowners and all forms and vestiges of feudalism”, and the organising
of the peasants into soviets (revolutionary councils).
Yet communist forces cannot dissolve into the national-revolutionary movement,
the theses cautioned. They “absolutely must maintain the independent character of
the proletarian movement, even in its embryonic stage”, in order to defend workers’
historic interests.
The Comintern’s defence of colonial peoples extended to Asian immigrants in the
US, Canada and Australia who faced discrimination and exclusion not only by
governments but also by some trade unions.
The Comintern called for “a vigorous campaign against restrictive immigration
laws”, equal wages for non-white workers, and their organisation into the unions.
The Dutch communist Henk Sneevliet, representing what is now Indonesia, told
delegates that “no question on the entire agenda has such great importance” as the
national and colonial questions. Lenin delivered the main report on this question, and
drafted the theses.
Some delegates did not share this view. Giacinto Serrati, leader of the Italian
Socialist Party, deplored the 10 minutes that had been spent discussing black oppression
in the US.
His compatriot Antonio Graziadei moved an amendment to weaken “support” of
liberation movements down to merely taking “an active interest in” them.
Two years later, the Comintern’s Fourth Congress chastised the French party
because its Algiers section advanced “a purely slaveholder’s point of view” with respect
to the Algerian struggle for self-determination.
But most communist leaders in advanced countries rallied in support of colonial
liberation struggles. Among them was US communist John Reed, who told Asian
delegates assembled in 1920 in Baku in petroleum-rich Azerbaijan, “Do you know
how ‘Baku’ is pronounced in American? It is pronounced ‘oil’! And American capitalism
is striving to establish a world monopoly of oil … The American bankers and the
American capitalists attempt everywhere to conquer the places and enslave the peoples
where oil is found … The East will help us overthrow capitalism in Western Europe
and America.”
The acid test of Comintern policy was, of course, the conduct of its Russian
component, the Bolshevik party, toward the subject peoples that accounted for half
the former Russian empire’s population. When workers and peasants took power in
1917, one of the soviet government’s first actions was to proclaim the right of all
subject peoples within the former Russian empire to “free self-determination up to
and including the right to secede”.

Peoples who opted to remain in Soviet Russia were offered autonomy within the
soviet federation, including authority over language, education, and culture. An early
soviet appeal pledged to Muslim workers and farmers — a majority in vast reaches of
Russia’s Asian territories — that “henceforth your beliefs and customs, your national
and cultural institutions are declared free and inviolable”. The appeal urged them to
“build your national life freely and without hindrance”.
Substantial resources were allocated to enable peoples still at the dawn of national
consciousness to develop their language, culture, and educational system. Their religious
customs and traditions were recognised, as was their right to land recently seized by
Russian colonists, while their nationals received preference in administrative
appointments.
These policies inspired thousands of nationalist revolutionaries from the oppressed
peoples to join the Bolshevik party and help shape and implement its nationalities
policy. (See appendix.)
This process of revolutionary fusion was extended across much of Asia by the
Congress of Peoples of the East organised by the Comintern in Baku in 1920.
The 1900 congress delegates called for “a holy war for the liberation of the peoples
of the East … To end the division of countries into advanced and backward, dependent
and independent, metropolitan and colonial!” The magazine established by the
congress was published under the title, endorsed by Lenin, “Workers of all countries
and all oppressed peoples, unite!”
Communist Parties were formed that year in Turkey, Egypt, Iran, India (in exile),
Korea, and Indonesia, and the following year in China. East Asian revolutionists met
in a separate congress held in 1922. That same year, a massive rise of workers’ struggles
in China confirmed that the peoples of the East, as Lenin had declared nine years
earlier, were taking their place in the vanguard of the world’s freedom struggles.
5. Reaching Out to the Peasantry
The agrarian reform enacted by the Russian soviet government in 1917 challenged the
thinking of the world Marxist movement.
Previously, socialist commentary on agricultural policy had mostly been limited to
describing the inevitable decline of small-holding peasantry under capitalism and the
merits of large-scale cooperative production. Poor peasants’ struggle for land was
often described as running counter to the movement for socialism.
Yet the Decree on Land proposed by Lenin and adopted by a November 1917
soviet congress in Russia, while nationalising the land and favouring maintenance of
“high-level scientific farming” enterprises under state or local control, left the vast
majority of rural land to be distributed “on an equality basis” by the peasants themselves
through their local soviets.
The decree, which Lenin noted had been “copied word for word” from ordinances
compiled by peasant soviets, launched a transformation of rural social relations in
Russia, in which large-scale private land ownership disappeared and economic
differentiation among peasants was reduced.
This land reform sealed an alliance between workers and peasants (smychka) that
endured through all the strains of civil war, enabling soviet power to survive.
Of course, socialists worldwide could not simply copy the Russian land reform.
Agrarian conditions varied enormously around the world. Farmers made up almost
the entire working population in some countries and only a small minority in others.
When the Communist International was formed in 1919, many of its member
parties remained hostile to poor peasants’ struggle for land. During the months of
soviet power in Hungary that year, communists in that country applied a land policy
that they considered superior to that of the Bolsheviks — expropriated estates were
operated without change.
Lenin commented that Hungarian “day labourers saw no changes and the small
peasants got nothing” and thus had no reason to defend the revolutionary government.
Similar policies produced equally bad results during struggles for power in Finland,
Poland, Italy, and other countries.

Lenin’s draft theses on the peasant question at the International’s 1920 congress
were criticised by some delegates for “left opportunism” and “concessions to the
agricultural petty bourgeoisie”. The theses, adopted only after much debate, stressed
that industrial workers cannot defeat capitalism “if they confine themselves to … their
narrow, trade union interests”. Victory depends on “carrying the class struggle into
the countryside” and “rallying the rural toiling masses”.
In the countryside, “the poor working peasants and the small tenants are the
natural fighting allies of the agricultural and industrial proletariat”, a 1922 Comintern
resolution stated.
The Comintern focused its attention not on the long-term merits of cooperative
production but on the immediate task of forming alliances with the peasantry. Its
starting point was that rural producers are class-divided. Its 1920 theses identified six
layers, of which two — rural wage-workers who are landless and those who own tiny
plots — will gain “significant and immediately effective” benefits from soviet power.
A third layer, the poor or “small” peasants, who own or rent lands barely sufficient
to cover their families’ needs, will be freed by a working-class victory from many
forms of capitalist exploitation, such as paying rent or sharecropping or mortgages on
their land, the theses stated. In addition, the workers’ state will provide them with
material assistance (such as equipment or seeds) and “a portion of the lands of large
capitalist enterprises”.
Even though small peasants have been “corrupted by speculation and the habits of
proprietorship” they will be drawn to the side of the working class by the revolution’s
“decisive settling of accounts” with large landowners, the theses stated.
At the other end of the scale, the theses viewed large estate owners and peasants
relying on hired labour as enemies of the working class, although they argued that
such rich peasants should be left in possession of the lands they work, at least initially.
In advanced countries, Lenin’s theses said, large agricultural enterprises should be
preserved under state ownership, but even there, in many situations, “distributing the
large landowners’ land will prove to be the surest method of winning the peasantry”
even if it entails “a temporary decrease in production”.
Communist parties “fight against all forms of capitalist exploitation against the
poor and middle peasants” and strive to lead “every struggle waged by the rural
working masses against the ruling class” the Comintern’s 1922 resolution stated.
Through such struggle, agricultural workers and poor peasants will learn “that a real
and lasting improvement” in their position “is impossible under the capitalist system”.
In colonial and semi-colonial countries, the Comintern viewed the peasantry as “a
Reaching Out to the Peasantry 19
key factor in the struggle against imperialism”. But for the peasants, this struggle
embraced social goals. “Only an agrarian revolution can arouse the vast peasant
masses.” It also cautioned that peasants’ liberation “will not be achieved merely by
winning political independence”. They must “overthrow the rule of their landlords
and bourgeoisie”.
The International applied a similar policy of alliances to middle layers in the cities
— independent tradespeople, merchants and “the so-called middle class” including
“technicians, white-collar workers, the middle and lower-ranking civil servants and
the intelligentsia”.
In conditions of capitalist crisis, these layers face “deteriorating standards of living”
and “insecurity” stated the Comintern’s Theses on Tactics, adopted in 1921.
They are driven “either into the camp of open counter-revolution or into the
camp of revolution.” Communists need to win such forces and “draw [them] into the
proletarian front”.
The International acknowledged the economic ties linking peasants and other
independent producers to capitalism. Yet as Lenin noted in 1913, “Petty production
keeps going under capitalism only by squeezing out of the [independent] worker a
larger amount of work than is squeezed out of the worker in large-scale production.”
The peasant “must work (for capital) harder than the wage-worker”. And this
burden falls heaviest on the peasant woman, who “must exert herself ever so much
more … to the detriment of her health and the health of her children”.
6. For Women’s Emancipation
It was socialist women who made the first international appeal against the First World
War, at a March 1915 conference organised by German revolutionist Clara Zetkin in
Switzerland.
Two years later, a socialist women’s celebration of International Women’s Day in
St Petersburg set in motion the mass movement that overthrew the Russian tsar.
Yet despite their key role, women were few in number and weak in influence in the
socialist movement of the time. Even in the Bolshevik party, they made up only 8% of
the membership in 1922.
Not only did women in 1917 lack the vote in all major countries, they were chained
in servitude by a thick web of discriminatory laws and by sexist oppression.
The soviet government established in November 1917 took swift action to counter
women’s oppression, and its achievements defined the Communist International’s
program on this question.
Women in Soviet Russia achieved full legal and political rights, including the right
to hold property, act as head of the household, leave the husband’s home, and obtain
a divorce on request.
Soviet law guaranteed women equal pay for equal work, while also providing
protection for women on the job. Other laws aimed to protect and assist mothers,
while assuring full rights for children born outside marriage. Abortion became legal
and free in 1920.
Women’s freedom of choice was also strengthened by the soviet law, adopted in
1922, legalising homosexual relations among consenting adults.
Europe’s most backward country had achieved more in two years than the advanced
capitalist countries accomplished in the previous century — or the half-century that
was to follow. But for the Bolsheviks, these measures were but an initial step. New
laws had to be translated into social reality, and that could be done only under leadership
of women themselves.
In 1919, the Bolshevik party created the Zhenotdel (women’s department), an
For Women’s Emancipation 21
organisation that united women in struggle to affirm their new legal rights. Thousands
of Zhenotdel workers went to workers’ districts and rural villages. They organised
“women’s clubs” and the election of tens of thousands of women delegates who
received several months’ training, served as judges, and helped organise institutions
serving women.
Large numbers of women enlisted in the soviet Red Army. Nearly 2000 were killed
during the Civil War, and 55 were awarded the soviet Order of the Red Banner for
valour in combat.
“Notwithstanding all the laws emancipating woman”, Lenin wrote in 1919, “she
continues to be a domestic slave, because petty housework crushes, strangles, stultifies
and degrades her, chains her to the kitchen and the nursery, and she wastes her labour
on barbarously unproductive, petty, nerve-racking, stultifying and crushing drudgery.”
The real emancipation of women, Lenin continued, begins with the “wholesale
transformation [of housekeeping] into a large-scale socialist economy”, beginning
with “public catering establishments, nurseries, kindergartens”. Communal kitchens
became widespread during the first years of soviet rule.
The early congresses of the Communist International found little time to discuss
women’s emancipation. Still, a great deal was achieved, in terms of both program and
activity.
“Theses for the Communist Women’s Movement” written in 1920 by Clara Zetkin,
acknowledged that the pre-1914 Second International had taken a clear stand for
women’s “full social liberation and full equal rights”, but noted a flagrant “gulf between
theory and practice”.
The Second International, Zetkin said, had permitted member parties to ignore
the resolution of its 1907 congress in Stuttgart requiring all parties to campaign for the
right to vote for all women.
The Comintern sought to ensure action on issues affecting women by establishing
in 1920 a women’s secretariat, headed by Zetkin and based in Moscow. In order to
lead member parties in recruiting and educating women and fighting for women’s
rights, the secretariat published a monthly magazine, The Communist Women’s
International, and collaborated with women’s committees organised at various levels
in the International’s member parties.
The socialist movement of the time had a critical stance toward “bourgeois
feminists” and sought to win women to the working-class movement.
A 1921 resolution of the International affirms that “there is no special women’s
question, nor should there be a special women’s movement”. Communism will be
won “not by the united efforts of women of different classes, but by the united struggle
of all the exploited”.

However, the same resolution confirmed the need for commissions for work
among women in all member parties, pointing to the example of Zhenotdel — a
movement of worker and peasant women committed to women’s emancipation.
With the rise of Stalinism, these moves were reversed. The international women’s
monthly magazine was closed in 1925, the women’s secretariat in 1926, and the
Zhenotdel in 1930.
The Comintern linked women’s emancipation with working-class struggle because
it believed women’s oppression is rooted in private ownership of the productive
economy and in class-divided society.
Zetkin’s 1920 theses, written together with Zhenotdel leaders, stressed that male
supremacy had originated with the arrival of private property, through which the wife,
like the slave, had “become the property of the man” with “pariah status in the family
and in public life”. To achieve women’s full social equality, “private property must be
uprooted”, and “women must be integrated into the social production of a new order
free of exploitation and subjugation”.
Achieving women’s equal rights in law, while significant, will leave working women
— the vast majority — “still unfree and exploited … their humanity stunted, and their
rights and interests neglected”.
For women, “full political equality” is a means to struggle for “a social order
cleansed of the domination of private property over human beings”.
“Communism”, the 1921 resolution added, “creates conditions whereby the conflict
between the natural function of woman — maternity — and her social obligations,
which hinder her creative work for the collective, will disappear.”
Women “will become co-owners of the means of production and distribution and
will take part in administering them … on an equal footing.”
7. For Class-Struggle Trade
Unions
The revolutionary upsurge in Europe during and after the First World War threw the
trade union movement across the continent into a profound upheaval.
Communist workers were challenged to unite revolutionary unionists with diverse
ideological backgrounds, while deepening their roots in unions with right-wing
leaderships.
When war broke out in 1914, pro-capitalist labour officials had harnessed the
unions to the bourgeoisie’s war machine. Workers’ protest had found expression in
new channels, such as organisations of left-wing shop stewards and newly formed
factory committees. As Communist International leader Karl Radek commented in
1920, “Many of us thought that the trade union movement was finished”.
During the Russian revolution, revolutionaries won the leadership of Russia’s
unions, which became a pillar of the new workers’ and peasants’ republic.
But when the German revolution broke out in November 1918, pro-capitalist
labour officials moved quickly to negotiate economic gains for workers. Frightened
bosses conceded the eight-hour day. Workers poured into the revived unions, whose
membership tripled in a single year. The union officialdom provided a pro-capitalist
buttress against revolution.
Meanwhile, most German communists were calling on workers to “get out of the
trade unions”. Many favoured building new “unitary organisations” that would combine
the functions of a trade union and a political party.
Such views were widespread in the Communist International. US communists
proclaimed their task to be “the destruction of the existing trades union organisations”.
And Italian leader Nicola Bombacci told the International’s Second Congress that “I
absolutely deny that trade unions have any revolutionary function whatever.”
In Lenin’s view, such a stand was “the greatest service communists could render
the bourgeoisie”. In his pamphlet Left-Wing Communism: an Infantile Disorder, written
in 1920, he stated that quitting the unions would leave workers under the influence of
the “labour lieutenants of the capitalist class”.
Instead, communists “must absolutely work wherever the masses are to be found”
even if repressive conditions required a “resort to various stratagems, artifices, and
illegal methods”.
The trade union theses adopted by the International’s Second Congress, in 1920,
called for communists to join unions “in order to turn them into instruments of
conscious struggle for the overthrow of capitalism” and to “take the initiative in forming
trade unions where none exist”.
Only by becoming “the most resolute leaders” of the struggle for decent living
conditions, the theses stated, can communists prepare “to remove the opportunist
leaders from the unions”.
The International advanced an “action program” of demands for unions’ daily
struggle. In 1921, a time of sharp attacks from the bosses, these included:
l Fight factory closures and demand the right to investigate the causes; open the
employers’ books.
l Organise the unemployed; force bosses to pay full wages to laid-off workers.
l When bosses demand wage cuts, unite workers across each industry to defend
threatened workers.
l Against profit-sharing schemes, for workers’ control of production.
The International cautioned that “in the epoch of capitalism’s decline, the proletariat’s
economic struggle turns into political struggle much more rapidly”. Communists must
explain that labour’s economic struggle can be won only through workers’ rule and
the construction of socialism.
While building class-struggle currents in the reformist-led unions, the Communist
International was also seeking to merge with a union current that came from outside
the socialist movement — revolutionary syndicalism.
Historically, the syndicalists shared communists’ commitment to class-struggle
unionism and to the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. But influenced by anarchist
conceptions, they opposed building a revolutionary political party and struggling to
establish a workers’ state.
Syndicalist labour federations comprised the majority of the union movement in
France and Spain, and the US-based Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) had
won respect. A wide range of syndicalist forces resisted the First World War and
hailed the 1917 soviet revolution in Russia.
Despite major differences in ideology and program, the new International’s
founders invited syndicalist currents to join its ranks. Since many syndicalist currents
For Class-Struggle Trade Unions 25
rejected links with political parties, a separate organisation was launched — the Red
International of Labour Unions or Profintern — to unite both Marxist and syndicalist
unionists.
At the Second Congress, the proposal to work in reformist-led unions provoked
what Comintern President Gregory Zinoviev later called “a most vexatious resistance”
from delegates influenced by syndicalism. Debate lasted 40 hours. But congress theses
pledged communists to “support [syndicalist] revolutionary unions,” and Lenin
proposed concessions to syndicalist currents, including agreement that the capacity of
the International’s affiliated parties to lead revolutionary union work must be put to
“a practical test”.
Although some syndicalist currents, like the IWW, turned away from the new
International, a significant layer of syndicalists were integrated into the International.
They were prominent among those who later supported Leon Trotsky and the Left
Opposition against Stalinism.
The Profintern was built as an alternative to pro-capitalist labour officials’ drive to
yoke unions together in a pro-imperialist world labour federation, known as the
Amsterdam International.
The pro-capitalist officials seized on the Profintern’s existence as a pretext for
expulsions of many Comintern supporters from their national and industry-wide
federations.
In 1924, Zinoviev noted that the Profintern had been “founded at a moment when
it seemed that we should break through the enemy front in a frontal attack and quickly
conquer the trade unions.” But the decline of working-class struggles in Europe after
1920 enabled the “Amsterdam” leaders to fend off this challenge.
Nonetheless, in the early 1920s, the Communist International won influence in
reformist-led unions in several European countries, while beginning to gain a foothold
in the labour movement of colonial and semi-colonial countries.
And perhaps the Red International of Labour Unions’ most important legacy was
its example in reaching out to encompass revolutionary fighters from outside the
Marxist tradition.
8. Initiatives for Unity in Struggle
On January 7, 1921, the German Communist Party addressed an unprecedented appeal

to the country’s working class political parties and trade unions.
The communists’ Open Letter, modelled on an initiative by the party’s rank and
file in Stuttgart, called for united action to defend workers’ living standards, organise
self-defence against right-wing gangs, free political prisoners, and promote open trade
with the Russian soviet republic.
The main target of this challenge was the German Social Democratic Party (SPD),
whose leadership had since 1918 led the reconstruction of Germany’s capitalist state
and helped organise a murderous assault on the working class.
Yet the Open Letter’s proposal spoke to an urgent problem. Although the
Communist Party numbered in the hundreds of thousands, most workers still backed
the SPD. How could the communists win their support? The Communist
International’s Third Congress, held later in 1921, witnessed a vigorous debate over
this question.
Its Theses on Tactics stated that the task “is not to establish small communist sects
aiming to influence the working masses purely through agitation and propaganda, but
to participate directly in the struggle of the working masses” and win leadership of the
struggle.
Social-democrats are “daily demonstrating” their “inability to fight even for the
most modest demands”, the theses stated. Communists, by contrast, raise demands
reflecting “the immediate needs of the broad proletarian masses”. These demands “in
their totality, challenge the power of the bourgeoisie” and “organise the proletariat in
the struggle for workers power”.
To put this approach into action, over the next year the International developed a
policy — modelled on the Open Letter initiative — that called for a “united front” of
workers’ organisations.
“The working masses sense the need of unity in action” whether in “resisting the
onslaught of capitalism” or in “taking the offensive against it” Comintern leader Leon
Initiatives for Unity in Struggle 27
Trotsky explained in March 1922. Therefore, the communist parties “must assume
the initiative in securing unity in these current struggles”.
The united front policy consists of specific initiatives aimed at winning the working
class to support unity in struggle. But to that end, communists are “prepared to
negotiate with the scab leaders” and, in Trotsky’s words, “correlate in practice our
actions with those of the reformist organisations” and “obligate ourselves to a certain
discipline in action”.
A united front is possible only when based on the communist parties’ independence,
which had been achieved in the period of the International’s foundation. Communists
participating in a united front retained this independence and freedom to act and
present their views.
Negotiations with reformist leaders must be fully reported to the ranks, whose
pressure is decisive in bringing a united front into existence, the International stated.
This orientation came under heavy fire from ultra-left currents in the International,
who were so strong at the Third Congress that Lenin stood, as he later commented,
“on the extreme right flank”. But the united front policy was also opposed by right-
wing leaders, who — as Trotsky noted — struck a pose of intransigence as a cover for
their passivity.
Parties in France, Spain, and Italy rejected the united front, and in Italy this led to
a historic tragedy. As the fascists’ violent attacks began in 1921-22 to destroy the
workers’ movement, the Italian Communist Party rejected anti-fascist unity with other
working-class currents. Even when this unity surged up from below in the form of
united anti-fascist defence guards, the party held aloof. Fascism’s triumph in 1922
crushed the Italian workers’ movement for two decades.
In Germany, by contrast, the communists’ appeal for unity against right wing
violence won a broad response. When the capitalist politician Walter Rathenau was
murdered by right-wing army officers in 1922, communists drew the social-democratic
parties and trade unions into mass actions for a purge of right-wingers from the army,
an amnesty for jailed worker militants, and suppression of the violent right-wing
gangs.
Meanwhile, communists built united front action committees in many fields —
defence guards, unemployed committees, housewives’ committees, as well as factory
councils, which became an effective left-wing force in the labour movement.
Did the united front tactic relate in any way to the struggle for governmental
power? The communists called for a republic of workers’ councils (soviets), and the
councils that sprang up in Russia (1917) and Germany (1918) encompassed all workers’
parties. The demand “all power to the soviets” was thus set in a framework of working
class unity.
But in Germany in 1920 the question of power was posed in a context that demanded
a different response. A right-wing military coup (the “Kapp putsch”) sparked a massive
general strike. The rebel generals soon fled, but the strike continued. Most workers
did not call for a republic of workers’ councils, but they did demand action against
right-wing violence. To defuse the crisis, the head of Germany’s trade unions called
for a “workers’ government” made up of workers’ parties plus the unions.
The Communist Party responded that formation of such a government would
promote working-class mass action and progress toward workers’ power. It pledged
to tolerate such a government as a “loyal opposition” while freely advancing its
revolutionary program.
This statement evoked intense discussion in the International, drawing from Lenin
a comment that while poorly formulated, it was “quite correct both in its basic premise
and its practical conclusions”.
The “workers’ government” discussion that followed lacked precision. The core
idea, however, was expressed in a 1922 resolution of the International’s Fourth
Congress as an application of the united front tactic.
When the question of government is urgently posed for solution, the congress
stated, and reformists strive for “a bourgeois/social-democratic coalition”, communists
propose an alliance of all workers’ parties “around economic and political issues,
which will fight and finally overthrow bourgeois power”.
Such an alliance’s victory could lead to a “workers’ government” whose tasks are
“to arm the proletariat … bring in control over production, shift the burden of taxation
onto the propertied classes and break the resistance of the counter-revolutionary
bourgeoisie”.
Such a government, the theses concluded, can be “an important starting point” for
the establishment of full workers’ democracy.
9. From Lenin to Stalin
The Communist International was founded in 1919 by those who had stood firm
against imperialist war and utilised the war crisis to “hasten the downfall of capitalist
class rule” through revolution.
But when the next great imperialist war broke out in 1939, statements signed
“Communist International” sang a different tune.
Prior to this war, the Comintern had been calling for a united struggle for peace
embracing not only working people and oppressed nations but also “capitalist states
… concerned to maintain peace” such as Britain and France, while condemning the
Nazis as “chief instigators of war”.
But when war broke out in 1939, the Comintern focused attacks on Britain and
France, even saying that German workers preferred Hitler’s rule to a British victory.
Two years later, the Comintern reversed policy again, calling on the world’s peoples
to join in a war alliance with the US and Britain, whose victory would, in the words of
Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, clear the way for a “companionship of nations based on
their equality”.
With the goal of “aiding by every means the military efforts” of the Allied
governments, the Comintern itself dissolved in May 1943.
After each of these reversals — and there had been others in 1935 and 1928 — all
Comintern member parties did an instant about-face. Their politics switched from
ultra-left rejection of any alliance with other working class parties, toward a quest for
unity with elements in the capitalist class, and back again.
Through all these turnabouts, one element was consistent — a rejection of the
revolutionary program and strategy developed by the Communist International in its
congresses during Lenin’s lifetime between 1919 and 1922.
Instead, Comintern positions faithfully followed the shifts in soviet foreign policy
under Stalin — allied with France from 1935, then with Germany from 1939, then with
Britain and the US from 1941.
Soviet Russia had signed treaties with Germany in Lenin’s time, in 1918 and 1922.
But such pacts did not alter the Comintern’s efforts to lead workers in overthrowing
Germany’s imperialist government.
Leon Trotsky, who led the communist opposition to Stalin’s policies, pointed out
in 1937 that the Communist International had by then become a “submissive apparatus
in the service of soviet foreign policy, ready at any time for any zigzag whatever”.
But the strongest force defending the Soviet Union from abroad, Trotsky pointed
out, was the revolutionary working class movement — the very force that Stalinist
policy was undermining. Stalinist policy “has brought nothing but misfortunes to the
workers’ movement of the world”, including catastrophic setbacks such as the triumph
of fascism in Germany (1933) and Spain (1936-39) that led directly to war.
The Comintern’s demise was rooted in the rise in the Soviet Union of a conservative
and privileged bureaucratic layer, which under Stalin’s leadership seized control of the
Communist Party and the state.
Lenin sensed the danger. In 1921, he described the soviet state as a car that refuses
to obey its driver, “as if it were being driven by some mysterious, lawless hand”.
The revolutionary working class that had created the soviet state was now
demobilised and dispersed by the blows of civil war. In this context, Moscow’s 4700
communists staffing government departments “are not directing, they are being
directed”, Lenin said, by “that huge bureaucratic machine” — a state apparatus that “is
to a considerable extent a survival of the past”. The vanquished capitalist society
“imposes its culture upon the conqueror”, he warned, absorbing and corrupting
communist functionaries.
In 1922-23, during his final illness, Lenin sought to launch a struggle against this
peril.
After Lenin was incapacitated by a stroke in March 1923, Leon Trotsky led this
struggle. But the Left Opposition he headed was unable to prevent a bureaucratic
faction from securing their grip on the Communist Party of the USSR and the
Comintern.
The turn away from Lenin’s course was symbolised by Stalin’s concept that socialism
could be achieved within the USSR, without workers’ victory in other countries.
This ran counter to the Bolsheviks’ view, which had been restated by the
Comintern’s Fourth Congress in December 1922: “The proletarian revolution can
never triumph completely within a single country; rather must it triumph
internationally, as world revolution.”
Two years later, Stalin asserted “the possibility of building a complete socialist
society in a single country” as “indisputable truth”.
But this concept changed the Communist International’s function. The priority
From Lenin to Stalin 31
was no longer international revolution but merely, as Trotsky wrote in 1930, “to
protect the construction of socialism [in the USSR] from intervention, that is, in essence,
to play the role of frontier patrols”.
This appraisal was confirmed by the central slogan at the Comintern’s last congress,
in 1935: “The fight for peace and for the defence of the USSR.” Comintern leader
Palmiro Togliatti explained this as meaning, with regard to the Soviet Union, “We
defend concretely its whole policy and each of its acts.”
The campaign against Trotsky and the Left Opposition in 1923-24 aroused
widespread misgivings and opposition in the International. In response, Stalin and his
allies asserted their control of the International through a campaign misleadingly
called “Bolshevisation”.
In 1924, directives of the Comintern executive to member parties were defined as
“imperative”, to be applied “immediately”. Its emissaries were given wide powers to
act on its behalf. Moscow now hand picked national leaderships, Trotsky stated, on
the basis of “readiness to accept and approve the latest apparatus grouping” in the
party.
In the 1930s, the Stalinist regime executed the vast majority of Bolshevik leaders
from Lenin’s time, along with hundreds of prominent figures in other communist
parties who had taken refuge in the USSR.
During the decades following the Comintern’s dissolution in 1943, the immense
obstacle presented by world Stalinism to progressive struggles weakened and finally
shattered.
In our times, we see signs of a new rise of internationalism in the struggles of
workers and the oppressed. Since the turn of the century, the worldwide movement
against the Iraq war, the rise of popular struggles in Latin America, and other
movements have shown broad understanding that the great questions of our epoch
will be decided in the world arena.
In this context, the program and strategy hammered out by the Communist
International in Lenin’s time has new relevance.
Appendix
The Russian Revolution &
National Freedom
How the Early Soviet Government Defended
the Rights of Russia’s Oppressed Peoples
When Bolivian President Evo Morales formally opened his country’s Constituent
Assembly on August 6, 2006, he highlighted the aspirations of Bolivia’s indigenous
majority as the central challenge before the gathering. The convening of the Assembly,
he said, represented a “historic moment to refound our dearly beloved homeland
Bolivia”. When Bolivia was created, in 1825-26, “the originary indigenous movements”
who had fought for independence “were excluded”, and subsequently were
discriminated against and looked down upon. But the “great day has arrived today …
for the originary indigenous peoples”.1
During the preceding weeks, indigenous organisations had proposed sweeping
measures to assure their rights, including guarantees for their languages, autonomy
for indigenous regions, and respect for indigenous culture and political traditions.
This movement extends far beyond Bolivia. Massive struggles based on indigenous
peoples have shaken Ecuador and Peru, and the reverberations are felt across the
Western Hemisphere. Measures to empower indigenous minorities are among the
most prestigious achievements of the Bolivarian movement in Venezuela.
At first glance, these indigenous struggles bear characteristic features of national
movements, aimed at combating oppression, securing control of national communities,
and protecting national culture. Yet indigenous peoples in Bolivia and elsewhere may
not meet many of the objective criteria Marxists have often used to define a nation,
such as a common language and a national territory, and they are not demanding a
separate state. The response of Marxist currents to the national aspects of Latin
America’s indigenous struggles has been varied, ranging from enthusiasm to a studied
silence. Yet an ability to address the complexities of such struggles is surely the acid
The Russian Revolution and National Freedom 33
test of Marxism’s understanding of the national question today.

Such disarray among Marxists is all the more costly in today’s context of rising
struggles for national freedom across Latin America and the Middle East today. The
challenge is also posed in the imperialist heartlands, where we see a rise of struggles by
oppressed minorities that bear more than a trace of national consciousness. For
example, in 2006 the United States witnessed the strongest upsurge of working-class
struggle in 60 years in the form of demonstrations and strikes for immigrant rights
that were also, in part, an assertion of Latino identity. And the oppression of non-
white and Muslim minorities in France has given birth to the provocatively named
“Mouvement des Indigènes de la République”.2
The Marxist position on the national question was forged around well-
documented debates on the independence movement of long-constituted nations
such as Ireland and Poland. But the writings of Lenin and his contemporaries before
1917 have little to say about nationalities in emergence, that is, peoples in struggle who
lack as yet many characteristic features of a nation. But precisely this type of struggle
played a central role in the 1917 Russian revolution and the early years of the Soviet
republic. In the course of their encounter with such movements, the Bolshevik Party’s
policies toward national minorities evolved considerably. Sweeping practical measures
were taken to assure the rights of national minorities whose existence was barely
acknowledged prior to 1917.
The Bolsheviks’ policies do not indicate what course to adopt toward national
struggles today, each of which has a specific character and set of complexities.
Nonetheless, the Bolshevik experience is a useful reference point.
Pre-1917 positions
The initial position of Russian Marxists on the national question was clear and
sweeping. In 1903 the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP), adopted a
program specifying the right of all nations in the Russian state to self-determination.
The program also advocated regional self-rule based on the composition of the
population and the right of the population to receive education in its own language
and to use that language on the basis of equality in all local social and governmental
institutions.3
In the decade that followed, the Bolshevik wing of the RSDLP became the first
Marxist current internationally to recognise the importance of the liberation struggles
then taking shape across the colonial world. Lenin wrote in 1913, “Hundreds of millions
of people are awakening to life, light and freedom” in a movement that will “liberate
both the peoples of Europe and the peoples of Asia”.4
Lenin also insisted on the distinction between the advanced capitalist countries,
where “progressive bourgeois national movements came to an end long ago”, and the
oppressed nations of Eastern Europe and the semi-colonial and colonial world.5 In the
latter case, he called for defence of the right to self-determination and support of
national liberation movements, in order to create a political foundation for unification
in struggle of working people of all nationalities.
Limitations
In the test of the Russian revolution, these and many other aspects of the Bolshevik’s
pre-1917 positions proved to be a reliable guide. Some positions expressed before
1917, however, required modification.
For example, consider the definition of a nation provided in 1913 by Joseph Stalin:
“A nation is a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the
basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up
manifested in a common culture.”6 Stalin’s article was written in collaboration with
Lenin and was viewed at the time as an expression of the Bolshevik position. His
objective criteria are a good starting point for analysis, but they have sometimes been
misused to justify denying national rights to indigenous and other peoples that appear
not to pass the test.
In addition, Lenin stressed that his support for national self-determination “implies
exclusively the right to independence in the political sense”.7 In 1913, he stated, “Fight
against all national oppression? Yes, certainly. Fight for any kind of national
development, for ‘national culture’ in general? Certainly not.”8 Lenin is sometimes
quoted as being opposed to federalism as a form of state, although he also endorsed
federation as a stepping stone to democratic integration of nations.9
Such pre-1917 positions are sometimes applied today in order to justify opposition
to the demands of national liberation movements. But they should be interpreted in
the light of the way the Bolshevik position was applied in the decisive test of revolution.
The indigenous peoples of tsarist Russia

The oppressed peoples that made up the majority of the pre-1917 tsarist empire can
be broadly divided into two categories.
On the western and southern margins of the empire lived many peoples — among
them the Finns, Poles, Ukrainians, and Armenians — that met all of Stalin’s objective
criteria of nationality. As nations, they possessed clearly defined historical and cultural
traditions. It was these peoples that the pre-1917 Bolsheviks had chiefly in mind when
they discussed the national question.
But there were also many peoples in Russia — in the Crimea, on the Volga, in the
Caucasus, and in central and northeast Asia — that had been subjected to settler-
based colonisation similar to that experienced by the Palestinians, the Blacks of South
Africa, and — in much more extreme form — the indigenous peoples of the Americas.
These subjects of the Russian tsar, whom the Bolsheviks often spoke of as Russia’s
“Eastern peoples,” had seen their lands seized, their livelihood destroyed, and their
language and culture suppressed. They had suffered discrimination and exclusion
from the dominant society.
When revolution broke out in 1917, these peoples, although varying widely in
their level of social development, had not yet emerged as nationalities. The evolution
of written national languages, cultures, and consciousness as distinct peoples was at an
early stage. Most identified themselves primarily as Muslims. Assessed by Stalin’s
criteria for nationhood, they did not make the grade. But in the crucible of revolution,
national consciousness began to assert itself, provoking and stimulating demands for
cultural autonomy, self-rule, and even national independence.
This fact itself is worth pondering. A revolution is, in Lenin’s phrase, a festival of
the oppressed. Peoples long ground down into inarticulateness suddenly find
inspiration, assert their identity, and cry out their grievances. We cannot predict the
shape of freedom struggles that will emerge in a revolutionary upsurge.
The soviets take power

On November 15, 1917, one week after the workers and soldiers of Russia took power,
the Soviet government decreed the “equality and sovereignty of the peoples of Russia”
and the right of these peoples to self-determination up to and including independence.10
Subsequently, five nations on the western border, including Poland and Finland,
asserted their independence, which the Soviet government recognised. Others opted
to federate with the Russian Soviet republic.
But the matter did not stop there. The Soviet government invited each nation
within Russia to hold a soviet congress to decide whether and on what basis to participate
in its federal structure. National minorities were offered not only the ultimate right to
separate but autonomous powers over language, education, and culture that gave
expression to the right of self-determination. The government spelled out this policy
in April 1918 with reference to Russia’s Eastern peoples in an article by Stalin, then its
Commissar of Nationalities. These regions, he stated, must be “autonomous, that is
have their own schools, courts, administrations, organs of power and social, political
and cultural institutions,” with full rights to use the minority language “in all spheres of
social and political activity.”11
This policy applied also to religious customs and traditions. Thus the Sharia — the
Muslim common law — was recognised in traditionally Muslim territories as an integral
part of the Soviet legal structure.
The Soviet government also endorsed the rights of the Muslim peoples to lands
recently seized by Russian colonists, including when these lands had been utilised only
seasonally by Muslim peasant nomads. It supported local initiatives to repossess such
land in the North Caucasus and endorsed resettlement of Russian colonists in Turkestan
as a means of restoring land seized by settlers after the defeat of an uprising of subject
peoples in 1916.
It also worked to educate government personnel as to the social structure of the
Eastern peoples. An appeal to Red Army personnel in 1920 urged that soldiers see the
small independent producers and traders of these regions as allies, as toilers, not as
profiteers. It noted that among these peoples, “a clear class differentiation has not yet
taken place … The producers have not yet been torn away from the means of
production. Each handicraftsman … is also a merchant. Commerce … rests in the
hands of millions of small traders, [each of whom] only has a penny’s worth of goods.”
Given all this, “the rapid implementation of communism … nationalisation of all trade
… of handicraftsmen … is impossible”. This analysis is strikingly applicable to the
conditions of the indigenous masses today in Bolivia and other Latin American countries.
Promotion of national culture

With regard to the Eastern peoples, Soviet policy went far beyond support of land
claims and autonomous governmental structures. The Soviet government supported
the evolution into mature nationalities of peoples still only at the dawn of national
consciousness. In this way, these peoples would be able to reach a cultural and political
level that would facilitate their integration into Soviet society on a basis of equality.
The soviets therefore embarked on an ambitious program to promote national
cultural development. Local experts were engaged to choose, for each ethnic group,
the dialect best adapted to serving as the basis for a national language. Alphabets were
devised for the mostly pre-literate peoples. Dictionaries and grammars were written
and put to use in the publication of minority-language newspapers.
Education was started up in the minority languages, including within the Russian-
speaking heartlands — in every locality where there were 25 students in the minority
language group. By 1927, across the Soviet Union, more than 90% of students from
minority nationalities were being educated in their own languages. The governments
of autonomous republics were responsible for education in their national language
beyond their own borders — a policy that bore some similarity to the Austro-Marxist
program of “national-cultural autonomy” against which the Bolsheviks had argued

prior to 1917.
The same principle applied to the Jewish minority, which had no national territory.
A Jewish commission of the Soviet government administered hundreds of Yiddish-
language schools scattered among several national republics. Many leaders of this
body came from the Bund, a Jewish Socialist current that had advocated such structures,
against Bolshevik objections, before 1917.
By 1924, publishing activity was under way in the Soviet Union in 25 different
languages, rising to 44 in 1927.
Preferential hiring
The Soviet government strove to assure that each nationality was represented in local
governmental organs in proportion to its size in the population as a whole. This policy
was termed “korenizatsiia” — “indigenisation” according to the Oxford dictionary, or
“affirmative action” in modern idiom.
The Turkestan region of Central Asia provides a good test case, for there the
soviets initially excluded Muslims from their ranks and turned a harsh face to the
demands of the Muslim majority. In March 1918, the Soviet government called a halt
to this policy, and when soviet elections were held in Turkestan the next month, 40%
of those elected were Muslim. The proportion of Muslims in the local Communist
Party membership rose from almost zero to 45% by the end of 1918. In 1919, the
Communist Party central committee specified that candidates for government office
could be nominated independently of the party by any Muslim workers’ organisation.
One veteran of those days recalls that Lenin reacted angrily to information that all
the soviets in Turkestan used the Russian language, saying, “All our talk about Soviet
power will be hollow so long as the toilers of Turkestan do not speak in their native
tongue in their institutions.”12
By 1927, minority nationals predominated in the soviet executive bodies in their
regions.
The Communist Party universities, a major source of new cadres for party and
state, gave preference to candidates from minority peoples. By 1924 these peoples
made up 50% of the overall student body, roughly equal to their weight in the population.
But it took time to make good the imbalance in party membership. By 1927, Muslim
peoples’ weight in the party membership had reached about half their proportion of
the population as a whole.
Efforts were also made to speed economic development in territories of the Muslim
peoples. They were encouraged to enter the working class, which in these territories had
previously been almost entirely Russian in composition. Progress was rapid: by 1926
minority peoples made up a majority of the employed work force in Tadzhikistan,
Turkmenistan, and Dagestan, and about 40% in Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan.
These achievements, of course, were possible only through the initiative and
leadership of revolutionists from the minority nationalities themselves. With rare
exceptions, there was no Bolshevik movement among the Muslim peoples prior to
1917. The leaders of this transformation came mainly from revolutionary nationalist
movements — which many Marxists, then and now, disparagingly term “bourgeois”.
The central leadership of the Communist Party repeatedly allied with these forces in
order to overcome resistance to its policies toward Muslim peoples from within its
own ranks.13
Baku Congress
The Bolsheviks argued within the Communist International in support of their
approach toward oppressed nationalities, and it was codified by resolutions of the
Comintern’s Baku Congress of the Peoples of the East in 1920 and Second and Fourth
World Congresses in 1920 and 1922. In his closing remarks to the Baku Congress,
Gregory Zinoviev proposed an amended wording to the closing words of the
Communist Manifesto: “Workers of all lands and oppressed peoples of the whole
world, unite”—a concept that remains valid for our times.14 And armed with this
understanding, the International won support rapidly during those years across Asia.
The mood of these years is captured by Babayev, who attended the Congress of
the Peoples of the East in Baku as a young Muslim Azerbaijani in 1920, serving as a
guard. Interviewed many years later, he recalled that “when the call to prayer came, he
found it natural to set aside his gun during devotions, after which he would ‘go back to
defend with our blood the conference and the revolution’. Inspired by the [conference’s]
‘declaration of holy war against the enemy of revolution’, he explains, “thousands of
people, convinced there was no contradiction between being a Bolshevik and a Muslim,
joined the Bolshevik ranks.”15 The Muslim delegates also utilised the Baku congress to
voice their concerns about chauvinist abuses by Soviet officials in the autonomous
republics. A lengthy resolution on this topic was submitted by 21 delegates, representing
a wide range of nationalities. In his closing remarks, Zinoviev promised energetic
corrective action. After the congress ended, 27 delegates travelled to Moscow to meet
with the Communist Party Political Bureau, which adopted a resolution drafted by
Lenin. The resolution’s sweeping provisions included the decision to found the
University of the Peoples of the East and instructions to rein in the authority of
emissaries of the central government in autonomous regions.
Stalinist reversal
During the 1920s, a privileged bureaucratic caste arose in the Soviet Union, headed by
Stalin, which showed increasing hostility to the rights of minority nationalities. This
trend led Lenin, in his last months of activity, to launch a campaign to defend the rights
of these peoples.16
After Lenin’s death in 1924, the Stalinist forces gained control of the Communist
Party of the Soviet Union and the Soviet state apparatus. Soviet republics in Asia were
subjected to bureaucratic centralisation, chauvinist policies, hostility to minority
language rights, and massive counter-revolutionary terror. Nonetheless, the gains of
the Russian revolution in the domain of national rights were not wholly extinguished.
In particular, the Asian Soviet republics retained enough strength to successfully assert
their independence when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.
Conclusion
Lenin’s pre-1917 articles on self-determination provided the Bolsheviks with a
foundation for their course during the revolution. But the Bolshevik approach to the
struggle of the oppressed nationalities was radically enhanced by the experiences of
the revolution itself. In the process, the Bolsheviks showed a capacity to ally with and
learn from the most advanced fighters for national freedom. They set aside old schemas
and allowed real social forces to shape their strategy, one that might today be called
“unity through diversity”.
Today, in the midst of a new rise of liberation struggles in several continents, the
policies of the Bolsheviks of Lenin’s time provide an example of how the working class
can ally with oppressed peoples in common struggle. The unity of the working class
depends on solidarity with oppressed peoples and sectors. The program of this struggle
includes not just political self-determination for oppressed nationalities, but
unconditional support for their struggle to win the political, cultural, and economic
rights needed to achieve genuine equality. And that may well involve — as in the case
of the indigenous peoples of Russia in the years following the 1917 revolution —
positive measures to assist these peoples in developing their cultural and political
potential as nationalities.
Notes
1 http://boliviarising.blogspot.com/, August 14, 2006.
2 www.indigenes-republique.org/.
3 Jeremy Smith, The Bolsheviks and the National Question, 1917-23 (University of London:
London, n.d.), p. 14.
4 V.I. Lenin, Collected Works (Progress Publishers: Moscow, 1960-71), Vol. 19, pp. 99-100.
5 ibid., Vol. 22, pp. 150-152.
6 J.V. Stalin, Works, Vol. 2 (Foreign Languages Publishing House: Moscow, 1954), p. 307.
7 V.I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 22, p. 146.
8 ibid., Vol. 20, p. 35.
9 ibid., Vol. 22, p. 146.
10 John Riddell, ed., To See the Dawn (Pathfinder Press: New York, 1983), p. 248.
11 Jeremy Smith, The Bolsheviks and the National Question, 1917-23, p. 24.
12 ibid., p. 145.
13 For Lenin’s comments in 1920 on the terminological side of this question, see Riddell, ed.
Workers of the World and Oppressed Peoples, Unite (Pathfinder: New York, 1991), Vol. 1,
p. 212 or Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 31, p. 241, or do an Internet search for “unanimous
decision to speak of the national-revolutionary movement”.
14 John Riddell, ed., To See the Dawn, p. 219.
15 ibid., pp. 29-30.
16 See Lenin’s Final Fight (Pathfinder Press: New York, 1995) or do an Internet search for
Nationalities or “Autonomisation”.
Sources & Further Reading
The resolutions of the Communist International’s four congresses held in Lenin’s

time (1919-22) and Lenin’s works are available in the Marxists Internet Archive at
www.marxists.org.
The proceedings of the first two Comintern congresses and related documents
from the years 1907-20 are presented in The Communist International in Lenin’s Time,
edited by myself and published by Pathfinder Press (www.pathfinderpress.com) between
1983 and 1993. The series includes these volumes:
l Lenin’s Struggle for a Revolutionary International (1907-16)
l The German Revolution and the Debate on Soviet Power (1918-19)
l Founding the Communist International (First Congress, 1919)
l Workers and Oppressed Peoples of All Countries, Unite (Second Congress, 1920, 2
volumes)
l To See the Dawn (Baku Congress of the Peoples of the East, 1920)
In addition to these sources, the appendix draws extensively on Jeremy Smith’s
important work, The Bolsheviks and the National Question, which uses Soviet archives
released after 1990. See also Dave Crouch, “The Bolsheviks and Islam”, in International
Socialism 110.
Under the impetus of the Russian Revolution, the

Communist International was founded in Moscow in
early 1919. It was designed as a vehicle to bring together
revolutionary vanguards from around the world and
promote the development of the struggle for anti-
imperialism, workers power and socialism.
In the 1920s and thirties the Russian Revolution
underwent a bureaucratic degeneration. The
Communist International also suffered this fate.
But in its first five years, when it was still led by Lenin
and his closest collaborators, it elaborated a program
and strategy that incorporated the lessons of the
revolutionary era.
The purpose of this pamphlet is to introduce this
program. Properly understood, it remains profoundly
relevant to the struggles shaking the world today.

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