Global spread of Communism

Comintern
Unlike other international labor organizations, the founding members of the Comintern
proclaimed from the outset that it was to be the global party of the revolution. As this
objective proved impossible to attain, the organization gradually became an appendix of
Soviet politics before disappearing totally in 1943. Nonetheless, for several decades of the
twentieth century, it left a significant if not lasting trace upon the international
communist movement. Regarding political forms, the initial, very centralized structure
served as a model for dissemination, then as a means that differentiated political
organizations across the world that claimed to be communist.

In the mid 1920s, during the brief period when Bukharin took over as secretary after
Zinoviev had been removed, the globalization of communism was inseparable from the
actions of the Comintern. A peak was reached during the Sixth Congress with discussions
about a program for the international communist movement.

Development of national parties

During the Second Congress of the CI in Moscow in 1920, the central subject of discussion
was the constitution of communist parties. These discussions, and the decisions reached,
gave shape to how the parties were to function as national sections of the Comintern. In
order to comply, they were to call themselves communist parties and to greatly modify
their activities which to date had been similar to those of the socialist parties. The
Congress thus adopted the “Twenty-One Conditions” of entry into the Third International.
These gave strict instructions for the actions to be taken within each party. The aim was
to constitute parties that had a truly revolutionary aim and a desire to take political
power

The expansion of communist parties outside Europe amounted to a number of precocious

attempts, often unknown or at any rate underestimated, since the initial results were
limited. Hence the geographical rooting of the communist parties in the world, subject to
diverse local conditions as well as the strategic fluctuations of the Comintern, was
unevenly distributed. Nonetheless, the first attempts at communist construction are
always interesting, whether they be in Iran, India, China, Palestine, North and South
America, or North and South Africa – if considered within their wider, twentieth-century
historical framework.

During the decade of the 1920s, several communist parties were set up in zones outside
Europe. These included areas close to the USSR where it was often Russian immigrants
who set up parties that often met with brutal repression, particularly since they were
often oppressed by both the local authorities and the French or British powers. This was
notably the case in the Middle East. In India, despite British influence, Marxist ideology
was spread by the communists in large industrial centers such as Bombay (Mumbai). After
a difficult start, the development of communism in China was far stronger, but it had to
face hard trials and very violent repression. This considerably reduced its influence at the
 end of the 1920s. Yet again, the Comintern was there to support this chaotic evolution
where the stakes were high and the scope well beyond China alone.

Communism and nation-making

Theory
Communism and nationalism have been seen as opposites. Even the former’s supporters
maintained that Marxism has not contributed much to the analysis of the latter, not least
because it downplayed its importance. Communists and nationalists repeatedly clashed,
and the nation, or the national, was repeatedly denied in the name of class, or of the
social. Yet simply to counterpose the two is inaccurate, as there were many reciprocal
borrowings and hybrids of various kinds, and communism was to play a key role in the
twentieth century’s national liberation movements.

Soviet example
The interpenetration between what must be seen as two aggregations of related
phenomena, rather than as two discrete entities, is attested by a number of theories and
movements, as well as by scores of socialist states evidently featuring a more or less
“national” orientation, and by countless attempts at creating states on the basis of a mix
of national and social aspirations. The first, crucial experience was of course the Soviet
one: not just the pan-Soviet phenomenon, soon contaminated by Russian great-power
chauvinism, but also the many “national socialisms” of the Soviet republics, where in the
1920s socialism was presented, and used, as a tool of national liberation.

Non-Soviet examples
After 1945, with the rise of the socialist bloc, revolution in China and Cuba, decolonization
and the emergence of many socialist states, the relationships between communism and
nationalism became even closer, and the attempt to establish the primacy of the
“international” by means of the socialist camp rapidly collapsed.2 This is attested by the
weight of the national factor in the make-up of the socialist leaderships of many of the
new states, China included;3 by the debates on the “national roads” to socialism; by the
clashes between the national interests of the new socialist states; and by the many ways
in which the communists of former colonies dealt with the national question before
liberation, and nation-building – extending to war against neighboring states – after it.

Stalin and Lenin

In 1903 the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party declared in favor of self-
determination for the empire’s nationalities. While Mensheviks later espoused Renner’s
and Bauer’s policies, Bolsheviks stuck to that choice, carrying it to its logical conclusion. In
Marxism and the National Question Stalin transcended the opposition between socialism
and nationalism without compromising the former’s supremacy. Defining the nation as “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,” a list that – through Bauer – harked back to Italian nationalist theories, Stalin
 acknowledged the role of noneconomic factors. He also fruitfully combined these ideas
with Marxism’s evolutionism, tying the forms taken by the national question to different
historical stages: National claims were legitimate at a certain stage of development, and
revolutionaries had therefore to support them, because, as Lenin wrote, “the struggle [of
the masses] against all national oppression, for the sovereignty of the people, or the
nation [is] p

In 1919, the Third Communist International (Comintern) was founded. Its second 1920
Congress adopted the theses “on the national and colonial question” presented by Lenin
and M. N. Roy, the former advocating support for national bourgeoisies in their fight for
independence, the latter insisting on the revolutionaries’ own initiative. A former Bengali
nationalist, and the founder of both the Mexican and the Indian Communist Parties, Roy
was then placed in charge of the Asian bureau, directing communist policies toward the
Asian subjects of European empires. Once more the communists thus proved adept at
maneuvering the national question, something that Western socialist parties were unable
to do, as the incapacity of the Italian socialists to think also in national terms, thus
opening the road to fascism, was indicating (a mistake that, also because of Stalin’s
advice, Togliatti was not to repeat in post-World War II Italy).

Poland
The Bolsheviks’ victory in the civil war coincided with defeat at Warsaw. Nationalism’s
capacity to bind social strata together proved superior to the communists’ appeal to the
Polish proletariat, as Moscow implicitly recognized by adopting for the first time, during
the war against Poland, the trinkets of Great Russian nationalism.

At the international level, the communist approach to national struggles was marked by
the coexistence of the lines that Lenin and Roy discussed in 1920, in their turn distorted
by Soviet state interests. In Turkey as in China Moscow supported at first the pro-national
bourgeoisie line, granting financial and military aid to Mustafa Kemal and the
Kuomintang, and defending their modernization projects, including linguistic ones.
However, in spite of the failure of the 1923 revolution in Germany, where Karl Radek in
his “Schlageter speech” claimed that “the great majority of the nationalistminded masses
belong not to the camp of the capitalists but to the camp of the workers,” an important
section of the Comintern continued to stress the importance of a pure communist and
worker policy, and considered the alliance with nationalists a betrayal potentially leading
to massacres of communists like those of 1927 China.

National communism
If Kim Il Sung’s North Korea and other regimes are considered, it may be surmised that by
the 1960s most socialist countries were in fact “national communisms,” to use Zbigniew
Brzezinski’s 1962 definition: Everywhere communist leaders were forced to come to
terms with state needs, including ideological ones, and found in nationalism a powerful
tool in the furthering of their aims
Peter Zwick proposed to group these national communisms into two categories: on the
one hand those which developed in countries that tried to gain a certain independence
from Moscow, and inspired Marxist national liberation movements; on the other, the
communist chauvinisms that developed in the USSR or in China, but also in Vietnam or in
the Yugoslavian republics. Some belonged to both categories, that is, they searched for
autonomy but oppressed their own minorities; and in a way, the two varieties
corresponded to the two national socialisms, that from below and that from above, that
developed in nineteenth-century Europe (for instance in Ukraine and in Germany), the
difference being that in the twentieth century they controlled a state.3

Communism and decolonization

Decolonization, and therefore the national question, played a crucial role in both. After
condemning Georgy Malenkov’s reinterpretation of “peaceful coexistence,” Khrushchev
appropriated the term, and tied it to decolonization, of whose importance he grew aware.
The USSR was to coexist with the West, and at the same time protect – also militarily –
national liberation struggles and the new states coming out of them. This way the world’s
equilibrium would switch in favor of socialism, to which an isolated West was to concede
defeat. This concept fully matured in the early 1960s, but its seeds were present in
Khrushchev’s speeches at the Twentieth Party Congress of 1956, in which the support for
national liberation struggles went hand in hand with a reevaluation of the “national
roads” to socialism. The benefits Moscow derived from the new international situation
were already evident in the summer of that year, when the Third World’s appreciation of
Moscow’s defense of Nasser limited the damages of the Hungarian crisis. Four years later,
the UN Assembly – until then under Western control – started to swing in favor of the
USSR, thanks to the votes of the new countries entering it

The fall of the worldwide colonial system is generally associated with the end of World
War II in 1945. The collapse was the result of a crisis of colonialism, which was largely
precipitated by the anti-colonial struggle of the people in the colonies, spreading
primarily across Asia and Africa. Initially, in most of these countries the thrust of the
struggle had a nationalist orientation. The seizure of power by the Bolsheviks in Russia in
October 1917 had an electrifying impact on the struggle of the colonial peoples. This was
manifest in more than one way. First, the Soviet government proclaimed that the USSR
stood by colonial peoples and would extend all possible support to their cause. Second,
the formation of the Communist International (Comintern) in 1919, with its headquarters
in Moscow, led to the formation of communist parties in the colonies, and this opened up
an alternative perspective for the people in the colonies vis-à-vis nationalism. Third, the
struggle of the colonial people for the first time in history was viewed in the spirit of
internationalism, when, besides the Russian Communist Party and the Comintern (1919–
43), communist parties of the metropolitan countries came forward to extend their
support to the cause of the colonial people.

First, as the Comintern and the communist parties in the colonies under its guidance and
control acted as major catalysts of anti-colonial struggle, how were they to work out an
 understanding of the colonial question that was distinct from that of nationalists? Second,
the communist parties of the metropolitan countries were required in principle to
support the cause of the anti-colonial struggle, but in practice this led to tensions that to
a large extent vitiated the relations between the communist parties in the colonies and
those in the metropole.

The defeat of the German Revolution and the retreat of the revolutionary forces across
Europe put an end to the projected dream of imminent world revolution, and this made it
imperative for the Russian Communist Party and the Comintern to pay special attention
to the national liberation movement in the backward, colonial countries.

victory of the revolution in the colonies was a necessary condition for the triumph of the
revolution in the West, and that it was, therefore, imperative for the European proletariat
to extend all possible aid to the struggles of the colonial people. The “Directives on the
Nationality Question and the Colonial Question,” passed by the Congress and signed by
Lenin in 1920, emphasized that all communist parties should come to the help of the
bourgeois-democratic liberation movements in the colonies, but also wage a battle
against the influence of all reactionary and mediaeval elements in these countries.

Between the Comintern’s Fifth and Sixth Congresses (1928) another development took
place which was quite significant for the colonies. This was the establishment of the
League against Imperialism (LAI) in 1927 in Brussels, which was virtually a front
organization of the Comintern. Willi Münzenberg was the key figure in organizing its
activities which were primarily aimed at lending support to the cause of the colonial
peoples. The LAI espoused the idea of an anti-imperialist popular front,

entry of the Soviet Union into the war from 22 June 1941 and the Comintern’s description
of the new situation as a “People’s War” led to a tricky situation in many colonies where
nationalism was an important force. As the communist parties were now under an
obligation to defend the cause of the Soviet Union and support the Allied Powers, in
countries like India this was perceived by many as tantamount to the communists
collaborating with British imperialism, which led to nationalists accusing communists of
being “traitors,” and to the isolation of the communists from the mainstream anti-
colonial struggle.

Ho Chi Minh
As regards the French Communist Party (PCF) there was a major gap between official
pronouncements and its mobilizational activities. The French empire embraced Vietnam
in Southeast Asia and a large part of the Arab world, including Syria, Algeria and Morocco.
Among the first Vietnamese communists Ho Chi Minh, Bui Lam, Nguyen van Tao and
many others were members of the PCF and Nguyen van Tao was even elected a member
of its Central Committee. Indeed it was only in April 1931 that the Communist Party of
Indochina (ICP) ceased to be a section of the PCF and became officially recognized as an
independent section of the Comintern. Ho Chi Minh had been sent to Moscow by the PCF
and became an important figure in the Comintern. Together with Mikhail Borodin,
Moscow’s Comintern emissary, he was instrumental in organizing the anti-colonial
struggle in Vietnam under the auspices of the ICP. For Ho Chi Minh it proved an uphill task
to work out his own strategy within Comintern guidelines, in accord with the traditions
and culture of his homeland. This was manifest on two levels. In 1925 he established the
Thanh Nien (Vietnamese Revolutionary Youth League), which focused on the idea of a
new Vietnamese society, with an emphasis on anti-imperialism (national independence
from French occupation) and anti-feudalism (land to the tiller). However, this strategy
came in for severe criticism especially after the Comintern’s Sixth Congress in 1928. The
commencement of the “third period” led to a break with the Thanh Nien strategy, as left-
wing sectarianism raised its head, subordinating the cause of national unity against
French colonialism to domestic class struggle. In 1930 the Nghe Tinh Soviet movement, an
abortive communist uprising against French colonialism, ended in disaster. The period
after the Sixth Congress witnessed a clear division within the ICP between a group that
became the majority, which questioned the idea of giving priority to forging national unity
and the Comintern position in the name of internationalism and class struggle, and a
minority, represented by Ho Chi Minh and his associates, which became suspect in the
eyes of the Comintern. Ho was dubbed a “nationalist,” and his position that violence
against the landowners and the bourgeoisie be kept to a minimum and that they be
neutralized was labeled “opportunist.” It was only after the Communism and the Crisis of
the Colonial System 223 Core terms of use, available at
https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316137024.011
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Australian Catholic University, on 07
Oct 2017 at 12:48:31, subject to the Cambridge Seventh Congress of the Comintern
(1935) that it became possible for Ho Chi Minh to revive his earlier strategy. In July 1939
he submitted a report to the Comintern on the ICP’s strategic line during the Popular
Front period which stressed that the main agenda was national liberation and that the
main contradiction was one between imperialism and the Indochinese masses. The
eventual result was the establishment of the Viet Minh front in 1941, which aimed to
fight the Japanese and the French occupation forces.

Despite many setbacks, twists and turns, and eventually the collapse of the Soviet Union
in 1991, it is an incontrovertible fact that the Bolshevik Revolution, primarily through the
formation of communist parties in the interwar period, decisively contributed to the crisis
and fall of the colonial system. If one takes stock of this phenomenal event, then a
number of conclusions follow.

Second, to a large extent the Comintern’s shift from the strategy of a united front (1920–
22) to that of “class against class” via “Bolshevization” (1924–34) contributed to this
animus against anti-colonial nationalists. At the same time, it is also undeniable that the
anti-colonialism of the communist parties flourished following the Comintern’s adoption
of a popular/united front line in 1935. The underlying explanation was simple. In most of
the colonial countries the influence of the communist parties was small compared to that
of the nationalist and noncommunist parties and groups. The understanding of the
 Seventh Congress opened up a new opportunity for the communist parties to forge
alliances with these forces and to build up their own mass base among the workers and
peasants, and sometimes this eventually paid dividends.

Third, as affiliates of the Comintern, communist parties were bound to toe the line of the
International, even if it did not square with the realities of the given situation. But there
were exceptions. In Vietnam and Indonesia, for example, the Comintern’s presence was
not as strong as it was in the case of India, thanks to the domineering role of the CPGB.
Those parties that could build up a relatively autonomous space and connect with the
masses emerged as a major force in the future. Those that did not (i.e. India) eventually
declined. The communist movement in the colonies was mostly weakened by the
internecine conflict of two lines, i.e. class (anti-capitalism) versus nation (anti-
imperialism), commonly viewed as “left” versus “right,” and international versus local.

Role of Communism in early 20th Century