The Red Flag: A History of Communism (25 page)

At the Second Comintern Congress of 1920, Lenin and the Bolsheviks seriously began the task of centralizing international Communism under tight Bolshevik control. The Congress decided that all parties had to fulfil ‘Twenty-one Conditions’, the most important being Communists’ complete separation from the unified ‘Social Democratic’ parties. Furthermore, only ‘tested Communists’ could remain members; ‘reformists’ and ‘opportunists’ were to be expelled. The principles of the conspiratorial Bolshevik vanguard party were now being applied to the international movement. There was some opposition to this Communist purism, especially from the German Independent Social Democrats, but Grigorii Zinoviev, the Comintern boss, was adamant. Those who opposed the creation of separate Communist parties, he sneered, ‘think of the Communist International as a good tavern, where representatives of various countries sing the “Internationale” and pay each other compliments, then go their separate ways and continue the same old practices. That is the damnable custom of the Second International and we will never tolerate it.’
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All member parties had to be reconstituted as ‘Communist parties’, and were to be subordinate to an executive committee dominated by the Bolshevik party.

The result was the emergence of pure Communist parties, disentangled from the mixed-left parties of pre-war Europe. The division in the Russian party of 1903, between revolutionary Bolsheviks and gradualist Mensheviks, was being replicated in the international Communist movement. In some countries, the Communists benefited from the resulting splits. In Germany, the tiny Communist Party succeeded in attracting the majority of the Independent Social Democrats into the fold, and emerged as a mass party with 350,000 members. Meanwhile in France, the French Communist Party (PCF) took the majority of the members of the old Second International socialist party, the SFIO. But in Italy, the splitting of the old Socialist Party (PSI) left a smaller Italian
Communist Party with a mere 4.6 per cent of the vote. Significant parties also emerged in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and Finland. But elsewhere, in Iberia, the Low Countries, Britain, Ireland, the USA, Denmark and Sweden, Switzerland and much of Eastern Europe, Communist parties were minuscule. Apart from in Germany and Finland, they rarely secured more than 5 per cent of the popular vote, and the Communist Party of Great Britain won a mere 0.1–0.4 per cent of the vote (although it did win a single seat in Parliament in 1922).
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Germany had by far the largest and most powerful Communist party outside the USSR.

It was clear that the revolutionary tide was ebbing, and in March 1921, the new situation faced the Bolshevik leaders starkly. The March Action in Germany had failed; economic collapse had forced Russia to introduce the New Economic Policy; and it was now glaringly obvious that the Soviet economy could only be built by exporting raw materials (especially grain) to the outside world. In the same month, the Soviets concluded their first trade agreement with a capitalist country – Great Britain. It was clear that full socialism lay over a very distant horizon; as Trotsky explained in June 1921, ‘Only now do we see and feel that we are not immediately close to our final aim, to the conquest of power on a world scale… We told ourselves back in 1919 that it was a question of months, but now we say that it is perhaps a question of several years.’
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The result was a new policy. Communist parties were to cease to agitate for immediate revolution, though they were still to prepare for it in the longer term; instead ‘united fronts’ had to be forged with the members – but not the leaders – of reformist socialist parties. As the icy relations between the USSR and the West thawed slightly (the Treaty of Rapallo was concluded with Germany in 1922, and the British Labour government extended diplomatic recognition to the Soviet Union in 1924), the new policy seemed to be justified.

In some parts of the world the new line had some real effects, most strikingly in China in the collaboration between the Chinese Communists and the Nationalist Guomindang, and in Britain, where the Communist Party established links with the trade unions through the Anglo-Russian Committee. Many Communists, especially in the smaller, more marginal parties, welcomed the opportunity to play a role in the broader left. But in most places the isolation of Communists continued. The ‘united front’ policy was bafflingly contradictory, banning contacts with Social Democratic parties, but calling for collaboration with
reformist trade unions. Many Communists also resisted collaboration, especially in Germany, where they retained their hatred for the Social Democrats; their hostility was fully reciprocated.

The frequent zigzags in Moscow’s policy compounded the difficulty of forging links with the moderate left, and isolated the Communists even further. A major turning point came with the humiliating failure of yet another attempt at a German revolution – the ‘German October’ of 1923. Following the French and Belgian occupation of the Ruhr in 1923, the left of the German Communist Party, with their allies in Moscow, Trotsky and Zinoviev, insisted that the Communists could create an alliance with nationalists, forging them into a revolutionary force. Moscow provided substantial funding for the insurrection, but the Communists had massively exaggerated working-class support, and the revolution had to be called off.
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The failure coincided with Lenin’s terminal illness and the resultant power struggle within the Soviet party leadership. Trotsky’s rivals, including Stalin, fully exploited the disaster, and the humiliation was used as an excuse to centralize power and curtail local radicalism. In 1924 the Kremlin launched the ‘Bolshevization’ of the Comintern, meaning that member parties had to become ‘Bolshevik parties’, all part of a ‘homogeneous Bolshevik world party permeated with the ideas of Leninism’.
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In practice, this meant that Communist parties were increasingly transformed into tools of Soviet foreign policy. Stalin did not pretend otherwise: ‘An
internationalist
is one who is ready to defend the USSR without reservation, without wavering, unconditionally; for the USSR is the base of the world revolutionary movement, and this revolutionary movement cannot be defended and promoted without defending the USSR.’
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The actual degree and effect of Moscow’s interventions in national Communist parties is a complex, and controversial, question.
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The Comintern, a relatively small organization, clearly could not monitor and control the activities of all Communist parties at all levels. Also, in several places Communist subcultures emerged, founded on local radical left-wing traditions, which had little to do with Moscow.
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However, the Comintern did try to establish control over the parties’ leaderships, and it had several ways of exerting influence – by sending agents to ‘fraternal’ parties, by supporting party factions against opponents, and, at the other extreme, by expelling recalcitrants and closing
parties down (as happened to the Polish Communist Party in 1938). Financial aid also played a role.
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However, perhaps as important in sustaining Moscow’s power was the USSR’s prestige amongst Communists, and the national parties’ weaknesses. Whilst there was resentment at Moscow’s arrogance, the Western parties had to accept that the Bolsheviks had brought Communists to power whilst they had not. And defeat convinced many that strict discipline, imposed by Moscow, was even more crucial than in the past.
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One way the Bolsheviks controlled the movement was by summoning leading international Communists to report regularly to Moscow, and a close network was formed around the inappropriately named Hotel Lux.
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A grand
fin-de-siècle
building on Moscow’s central Tverskaia (later Gorkii) Street, it had, however, passed its prime and was now a notoriously shabby and spartan hostel. It was to be a temporary home to many Communist leaders, from the Bulgarian Dimitrov to the Vietnamese Ho Chi Minh, from the German Ulbricht to the Italian Togliatti. Communist activists ran into each other in the cold showers – the Yugoslav Tito first met the American party leader Earl Browder in these unpromising circumstances.
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Moscow’s International Lenin School for Western Communists, founded in 1926, was another tool by which the Kremlin attempted to exert influence over the movement. Thousands of party members studied there between the wars, most of them young, male and working class. Compulsory courses included academic classes in Marxism and the ‘History of the Workers’ Movement’, and the study of political tactics and how to organize strikes and insurrections. The wisdom of Lenin was supplemented by the insights of the classic German military theorist Clausewitz. Students also visited factories – a rather riskier event for the Comintern authorities: some visitors were shocked at the low living standards of Russian workers compared with their fellow proletarians in capitalist countries, and asked awkward questions.
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But most important for the Comintern, especially after Stalin’s rise to power, was the inculcation of a Bolshevik party culture of discipline and ‘conspiracy’, much like that described by Brecht. Students were given new names and were forbidden from telling friends or family where they were. One Welsh miner engaged in ‘self-criticism’ for neglecting these principles. His connections with the Labour party, he accepted, had left him with ‘Social Democratic remnants I have brought with me from my own country. [I] ended up by committing this gross breach of Party discipline and conspiracy which is impermissible in our Party as a Party of a new type.’
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Life for the Comintern student was tough and intense. Wolfgang Leonhard, a German Communist who was at the school during World War II when it was evacuated eastwards to the Urals city of Ufa, remembered his rigorous lessons on Nazi ideology and how to refute it. He spent so much time learning about Nazism that when he returned to Germany after the war and met real Nazis he found he was better versed in their beliefs and mores than they were themselves.
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Much of the rest of his time was taken up with either exercise or improving manual labour; students had to maintain their links with the working class:

Relaxation was rare and consisted largely of regimented folk singing. Some students, like the Yugoslav leader Tito’s son, Zharko, who had an affair with an ‘enchanting Spanish girl’, refused to submit to the discipline and were expelled.
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Most survived though, and several went on to be fully committed Leninists and Stalinists, becoming future leaders of European Communist parties.
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Efforts were being made to ‘forge’ the young, radical and chaotic parties of the revolutionary period according to a new template issued in Moscow.

However, whilst Moscow did generally succeed in persuading or forcing national parties to follow the frequently changing party line, it was not always easy, for national Communists had their own agendas and could engage in passive, or even active, resistance. As has been seen, in Germany the party left objected to the united front with the socialists in the mid-1920s, whilst later in the decade, when the line moved to the left under Stalin, the right resisted. The British leadership also opposed the Kremlin from the right. In October 1927 the leader of the British Communists, blacksmith’s son Harry Pollitt, initially opposed the new Comintern demand that a harsh struggle had to be fought against the Labour Party, realizing how unpopular it would be; it was only in 1929 that the British party leadership fully accepted the new line.
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Bolshevization therefore made life difficult for the national parties, partly because Moscow’s line could be unpopular, and partly because the Comintern’s culture could be alien. Party members not only had to learn heavy Marxist jargon (originally in German, the official Comintern language), but also new Russian Bolshevik argot (‘agitprop’, or ‘party cell’). Party propaganda was often drafted in Moscow, without local consultation, and Communists struggled to make the clotted slogans sound appealing.
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Even so, despite Bolshevization, local parties did try to blend local and Comintern cultures, and they had their distinct characteristics. In Germany, the militant culture fostered by Rosa Luxemburg and the Social Democratic left before 1914 survived, whilst in Britain, and elsewhere, the puritanical morality of Communism made sense to people brought up in a Christian socialist culture of temperance and earnestness.
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Meanwhile, the Oxford-educated and half-Indian British Communist Rajani Palme Dutt persisted in referring to younger party members as ‘freshers’ – the Oxbridge slang term for first-year students.
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Several Communist parties saw a gradual decline in membership over the 1920s and early 1930s; the membership of the French party, for instance, fell continuously between 1921 (109,391) and 1933 (28,000). This was doubtless helped by the clumsy hand of the Kremlin: in countries like France and Britain, where moderate socialist political parties were well-established, the Comintern’s sectarianism was clearly counterproductive. Yet for some party members, subject to harassment after the failure of the revolutions, Bolshevik ‘discipline’ and support could be welcomed. For activists suffering privations, the ‘Soviet Union’ represented the ideal they were fighting for, a land of milk and honey. Annie Kriegel, in her ethnographic study of French Communism, tried to capture their thinking: