The Communist International and Imperialism

viewpointmag.com/2018/02/01/communist-international-imperialism/

Ian February 1,
Birchall 2018

Presentation of Vladimir Tatlin’s Letatlin, 1932

The 1914–1918 war was an imperialist war. Britain’s aim was to prevent German colonial
expansion in North Africa and Latin America, and to exclude Germany from other foreign
markets. In addition Britain had made a secret deal with France and Russia to carve up
the Ottoman Empire. British “victory” in World War I meant that the British Empire was
larger in the 1920s than it had ever been before. And despite their rhetoric, the
European empires had no intention of “liberating” the colonial peoples. After World War I
there was national self-determination for European nations, but certainly not for the
countries of Africa and Asia.

The Russian Revolution of 1917 offered an alternative, a source of hope to the exploited
and oppressed throughout the world. The Russian leaders understood that it was
necessary to spread the revolution. If it remained isolated it could not survive. After 1917
they suffered an appallingly cruel so-called “civil war” (in fact an invasion by troops from
various countries including Britain and the United States). Revolutions in Hungary and
Bavaria in 1919 were rapidly crushed. As yet nobody was talking about socialism in one
country. So the new Soviet state needed allies, in its own interests and in the interest of
the workers of the whole world. Either socialism would extend its victory, or exploitation
and oppression would continue and new wars would break out.

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It was with this perspective that the Communist International (Comintern) was founded
in 1919, with the object of encouraging world revolution. The Second Congress of the
International, held in Moscow in July and August 1920, had brought together a large
number of socialists and syndicalists who were going to form the new Communist parties
which could overthrow world capitalism once and for all. But the great majority of
delegates came from Europe. It was also necessary to look for allies elsewhere, in what
Grigory Zinoviev, the president of the Communist International, called “a second step
forward.” 1 This was the Baku Congress of September 1920, with which the Bolsheviks
made a symbolic declaration of their opposition to imperialism and attempted to lay the
foundations for an organizational expression of this opposition.

It is worth recalling the Baku Congress because it demonstrated the Bolshevik

commitment to fighting imperialism, establishing a tradition which remained powerful
for some years, but which was later lost with the rise of Stalin. I shall try to set out briefly
the strengths and weaknesses of Baku, and then give a short account of the subsequent
developments of the Comintern.

The Bolsheviks’ vision was of a world where colonialism and racism would be abolished
and forever forgotten. According to the Bolshevik Radek, it was necessary to “reconstruct
mankind on a new basis of freedom, where there will not be people of different-
coloured skins with different rights and duties, where all men share the same rights and
duties.” 2 Hence the Manifesto adopted by the Second Congress of the International had
stressed the importance for Communists in imperialist countries of the struggle against
their own imperialism:

The socialist who directly or indirectly helps to perpetuate the privileged position of one
nation at the expense of another, who accommodates himself to colonial slavery, who
makes distinctions between peoples of different race and colour in the matter of rights,
who helps the bourgeoisie of the metropolis to maintain their rule over the colonies
instead of aiding the armed uprising of the colonies; the British socialist who fails to
support by all possible means the uprisings in Ireland, Egypt, and India against the
London plutocracy – such a socialist deserves to be branded with infamy, if not with a
bullet, but in no case merits either the mandate or the confidence of the proletariat. 3

It was in this context that the Executive Committee of the International had invited
representatives of the oppressed peoples to gather at Baku. It was an appropriate place.
Baku was in Azerbaijan, one of the countries of the former Tsarist Empire which had
become independent in 1918, and which was “at the junction between Russia and the
East.” 4 But also it was a center of oil production, and the Bolsheviks recognized the
importance that oil would have in the 20th century. When the American John Reed
addressed the delegates, he asked them: “Don’t you know how Baku is pronounced in
American? It’s pronounced oil!” 5

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The journey was a dangerous one. The British government made every effort to prevent
the delegates from getting to Baku. A steamboat carrying Iranian delegates was attacked
by a British aircraft; two delegates were killed and several wounded. British warships
tried to prevent Turkish delegates from crossing the Black Sea. Two Iranians were killed
on the Azerbaijan border by the Iranian police. 6 Delegates coming from Moscow had to
pass through regions devastated by the civil war. The French delegate, Alfred Rosmer,
recalled:

The trip … allowed us to see at first hand the vast extent of damage done by the civil war.
Most of the stations had been destroyed, and everywhere the sidings were full of the half-
burnt wrecks of coaches. When the Whites had been beaten, they destroyed everything
they could as they retreated. One of the most important stations in the Ukraine, Lozovaia,
had just recently been attacked by a band of Whites, and we had right before our eyes the
damage caused by such attacks, which were still frequent in these regions. 7

Nonetheless delegates came in large numbers. It is difficult to establish precise figures,

but according to the stenographic report of the Congress there were 1891 delegates,
including 1273 Communists. Non-Communist delegates were warmly welcomed; as
Zinoviev, president of the Communist International, put it:

We did not ask you: “What party do you belong to?” We asked each one: “Are you a man
who lives by his labour? Do you belong to the working masses? Do you want to put a stop
to the strife between the peoples? Do you want to organise a struggle against the
oppressors? That is enough. Nothing more is required, you will not be asked for any Party
card.” 8

Many of the delegates came from the countries of the former Tsarist empire and from
the Middle East. There were 100 Georgians, 157 Armenians, 235 Turks, 192 Persians and
82 Chechens – but also 14 Indians and 8 Chinese. Translation took up a lot of time; Asian
languages were heard which had been suppressed in the Tsarist period. Alfred Rosmer
recalled that “the auditorium was extremely picturesque. All the Eastern costumes
gathered together made an astonishingly rich and colourful picture.” 9

In his introductory address, Zinoviev explained clearly why the Russian revolutionaries
recognized that their struggle was only a small part of a general struggle against world
imperialism and that the Russian Revolution could not succeed unless it was part of a
much broader movement:

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 We are mindful that in the world there are living not only people with white skins. …
There are also in the world hundreds of millions of people who live in Asia and Africa.
We want to put an end to the rule of capital everywhere in the world. And this will
become possible only when we have lit the fire of revolution not merely in Europe and
America but throughout the world, and when behind us march all the working people of
Asia and Africa.

The Communist International wants to unite under its banners speakers of all the
languages of the world. The Communist International is sure that under its flag will rally
not only the proletarians of Europe but also the mighty mass of our reserves, our infantry –
the hundreds of millions of peasants who live in Asia, our Near and Far East. 10

Zinoviev also argued that the Russian Revolution would only be a small episode in a
much bigger process, predicting “when the East really gets moving, then not only Russia
but all of Europe will seem only a small corner of the vast scene.” 11 But for workers in
the West it was not simply a moral question. Zinoviev reminded them that they had a
very urgent material interest in supporting the struggles of the colonial peoples: “The
Italian bourgeoisie is now threatening its workers that, if they should revolt, Italian
capital will move coloured troops against them.” 12 Of course unity between European
workers and the oppressed in the colonies would not be easy. Many workers had
acquired imperialist attitudes, while the victims of colonialism might imagine that
workers in the imperialist countries were getting at least crumbs from the table of their
own imperialists.

But the British delegate, Tom Quelch, reminded his listeners that there was an objective
basis for unity. He began his speech with a quotation from Karl Marx, who said that “the
British working class would be free only when the peoples of the British colonies were
free.” Therefore he insisted that “the enemy of the British working class, the British
capitalist class, is at the same time the enemy of the peoples of the East, the oppressed
East.” 13

In his closing speech Zinoviev went so far as to propose a revision to Marx’s Communist
Manifesto. Marx had said “Workers of all lands, unite!” but now, according to Zinoviev, this
should be replaced by: “Workers of all lands and oppressed peoples of the whole world,
unite!” 14

The Congress aroused great enthusiasm. For Zinoviev, a fine speaker who sometimes
lapsed into wish fulfillment, the task was “kindling a real holy war against the British and
French capitalists.” 15

A more realistic and honest perspective was given by Karl Radek:

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 We approach these peoples not in order to use their strength for our struggle against
capitalism, but in order to help them to escape not only from the yoke of capital but also
from medieval relations, from the yoke of feudalism and ignorance, and to give them the
opportunity to begin living as human beings. We approach them knowing that the young
Communist world which is being born amid unheard-of suffering cannot yet bring them
the wealth of the West, that this has still to be created, but we approach them so as to free
them from the yoke of capital, to help them build a new, free life in whatever way they
will consider corresponds to the interests of their working masses. 16

The Congress was only a beginning. It should be said that, strictly speaking, it was an
assembly rather than a congress. There was very limited time, reduced even further by
the need for translations. It is hard to know exactly how the delegates had been elected.
The great majority of them did not have any chance to speak and it was scarcely possible
to take genuinely democratic decisions. Nonetheless several questions of great
importance were raised.

Alfred Rosmer, who had been one of the French delegates at the Congress of the
Communist International, made a searing attack on the hypocrisy of French imperialism:

When the world war began, the bourgeois press of all countries asserted that this world
war would bring freedom to the oppressed nations, in opposition to barbarous Germany.
But if that was so … why did the great powers not begin by freeing the peoples they
themselves oppressed? Why did Britain not give freedom to Ireland? Why did it keep the
three hundred million people of India under its yoke? Why did France, which said it was
fighting against German barbarism, oppress and hold down Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria
and other Moslem countries? And why is France now carrying on a war in Cilicia and
Syria in order to enlarge her empire by adding a piece of Asia?

When the war ended France and Britain tried to take back from these peoples even the
miserable crumbs they had given them. When it was necessary to fight the Germans,
when hundreds of thousands of Algerians, Tunisians, and Moroccans had to be
mobilized, they were promised various freedoms; but the very day after Germany had
been defeated all these miserable freedoms were withdrawn, and when the
representatives of Tunisia sent a delegation to France and pointed out that 45,000
Tunisians had fallen on the battlefield, and recalled the promises that had been made to
them, these delegates were themselves put in prison, and those native newspapers
which took the liberty of publishing the fact were closed down and confiscated. 17

But if the Congress backed struggles against imperialism, the organizers insisted that
there was no point replacing imperialists with indigenous exploiters. As Zinoviev put it:

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 What sense does it make to a Georgian peasant if [Georgia’s Menshevik rulers] sing like
nightingales about the “independence” of Georgia, when the land remains as before the
property of the old landowners, when the same old oppression continues, and when at any
moment some British general can trample with his jackboots on the throat and on the
chest of the Georgian peasant and worker? … The great importance of the revolution that
is beginning in the East lies not in requesting the British imperialist gentlemen to take
their feet off the table, and then permitting the Turkish rich to put their feet on the table.
…
18 No, we want … [the world to be] ruled by the working man with toil-hardened hands.

Naturally there were delegates of various different religions, but in particular there were
many Muslims. For the Bolsheviks the aim was to draw out the radicalism which was
integral to the Muslim tradition. According to the Russian delegate Skachko:

Even according to the shariat, the land can belong only to him who tills it, and not to the
clergy who have grabbed it, like the mujtahids [Shi’ite divines] in Persia, who were the
first to violate the fundamental law of the Moslem religion. They are not defenders of this
religion but perverters of it. They are just such parasites and oppressors as the feudal
landlords, except that they are also hypocrites who disguise their character as oppressors
behind the white turban and the Holy Koran. This mask of sanctity must be torn from
them, comrades, and the land they own must likewise be wrested from them and given to
the working peasantry. 19

But practice did not always conform to theory. Critical voices were heard. One of the
presidents of the Congress, Narbutabekov, used very vigorous language to protest
against the actions of Bolshevik bureaucrats in Turkestan:

I tell you, comrades, our Turkestani masses have to fight on two fronts. On the one against
the reactionary mullahs in our own midst, and on the other against the narrow nationalist
inclinations of the local Europeans. Neither Comrade Zinoviev, nor Comrade Lenin, nor
Comrade Trotsky knows the real situation, knows what has been going on in Turkestan
these last three years. … But now, as we travel about, Moslems come up to us and say
that our beliefs are being trampled on, that we are not allowed to pray, not allowed to bury
our dead in accordance with our customs and religion. What is this? It is nothing but a
sowing of counter-revolution among the toiling masses. 20

It appeared that, despite the good intentions of the Bolsheviks, what Lenin called “Great-
Russian chauvinism” was far from dead.

Of the 1891 delegates there were only 55 women. Nadzhiya, a Turkish woman, mocked
Western feminists who were obsessed with the veil, and at the same time made a
powerful challenge to Eastern men, proposing very concrete demands:

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 The women’s movement beginning in the East must not be looked at from the standpoint
of those frivolous feminists who are content to see woman’s place in social life as that of a
delicate plant or an elegant doll. This movement must be seen as a serious and necessary
consequence of the revolutionary movement which is taking place throughout the world.
The women of the East are not merely fighting for the right to walk in the street without
wearing the chadra, as many people suppose. For the women of the East, with their high
moral ideals, the question of the chadra, it can be said, is of the least importance. If the
women who form half of every community are opposed to the men and do not have the
same rights as they have, then it is obviously impossible for society to progress: the
backwardness of Eastern societies is irrefutable proof of this.

Comrades, you can be sure that all our efforts and labours to realize new forms of social
life, however sincere and however vigorous our endeavours may be, will remain without
result if you do not summon the women to become real helpers in your work. …

But we know too that the position of our sisters in Persia, Bukhara, Khiva, Turkestan,
India and other Moslem countries is even worse. However, the injustice done to us and to
our sisters has not remained unpunished. Proof of this is to be seen in the backwardness
and decline of all the countries of the East. Comrades, you must know that the evil done
to women has never passed and will never pass without retribution. …

The women Communists of the East have an even harder battle to wage because, in
addition, they have to fight against the despotism of their menfolk. If you, men of the
East, continue now, as in the past, to be indifferent to the fate of women, you can be sure
that our countries will perish, and you and us together with them: the alternative is for us
to begin, together with all the oppressed, a bloody life-and-death struggle to win our rights
by force. I will briefly set forth the women’s demands. If you want to bring about your
own emancipation, listen to our demands and render us real help and co-operation.

1. Complete equality of rights.

2. Ensuring for women unconditional opportunity to make use of the educational and
vocational-training institutions established for men.
3. Equality of rights of both parties to marriage. Unconditional abolition of polygamy.
4. Unconditional admission of women to employment in legislative and administrative
institutions.
5. Everywhere, in cities, towns and villages, committees for the rights and protection
of women to be established. 21

For other important questions there was no time. Three documents on Palestine and
Zionism were presented to the Congress, but they were not discussed. 22 A statement
from the Central Bureau of the Jewish sections of the Russian Communist Party
described Zionists as serving British imperialism and condemned the artificial
establishment of a privileged Jewish minority in the population of Palestine.
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In the short-term, the results of the Congress were quite modest. A Council of
Propaganda and Action was set up with 35 Communist and 13 non-party members. But
already world capitalism was beginning to stabilize itself. Alfred Rosmer comments: “In
the following months there were no uprisings significant enough to worry or seriously
involve the imperialist powers.” 23 The Council of Propaganda and Action was short-lived
– it lasted only until the beginning of 1922. But it played a part in 1921 in the founding of
the Communist University of the Toilers of the East, with 700 students of 57 nationalities
and branches at Baku and Irkutsk. 24

But, to quote Rosmer again, in the longer term the Congress had a real influence on
political developments in Asia:

A deep disturbance had been caused, but the effects were visible only later on. Time was
needed for the debates and resolutions to bear fruit, and the gathering together of
sufficient forces who understood the struggle that would have to be carried on against
masters who hitherto had been all-powerful. 25

Communist Parties were founded in Turkey (1920), Iran (1920), China (1921) and
elsewhere.

If the ideas of Baku lived on, and still live on, many of the participants met a more tragic
fate. Several, including Zinoviev, Radek, and Narbutabekov, perished during the Stalinist
terror of the 1930s; Alfred Rosmer was expelled from the French Communist Party in
1924. Yet just after the Baku Congress there were grounds for hope. The Communist
International was no longer confined to the countries of Europe; it was expected that a
Communist movement would develop in Asia, and even in Africa and Latin America.
World imperialism would face a real threat.

Certainly there were problems. In North Africa there were European Communists who
considered that the native population was too “backward” to take part in the Communist
movement. A report adopted by the Second Communist Interfederal Congress of North
Africa in 1922 explained that “what characterises the native masses is their ignorance.
This is above all the main obstacle to their emancipation.” 26 In South Africa there were
Communists who argued that a liberation movement of the coloured races was not
practical politics. 27 The International had to combat such elements within its own ranks.

But inside Russia, in the very heart of the revolutionary movement, there were also
problems. The Bolsheviks had triumphed in the civil war and repulsed imperialist
invasions. But the economy had suffered badly. The Kronstadt rising of March 1921
revealed the weakness of the new régime; the Bolsheviks had to retreat with the New
Economic Policy.

The great problem was the isolation of the revolution. Even in Europe the first
revolutionary wave had begun to subside. In Italy Mussolini was making progress. In
France and Britain the class struggle was becoming less acute. The great hope that

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remained was Germany. A German revolution could strengthen isolated Russia and
encourage new revolutionary movements elsewhere.

In 1923 Germany seemed ripe for revolution. An economic crisis had led to wild inflation.
The Ruhr was occupied by the French army because a weakened Germany could not pay
the reparations demanded by the Versailles Treaty.

This was the French Communists’ finest hour. The French Communist Party created a
newspaper aimed at soldiers called La Caserne (the barracks), which encouraged
insubordination and fraternization with German workers. The Communists distributed
two million leaflets and posters. There were many African soldiers in the French army;
the propaganda distributed to the Senegalese tried to link the struggle of the German
workers and that of the Senegalese people for independence.

But there was no German revolution. The USSR remained isolated. In this context of
defeat, Stalin proposed a new strategy, that of “socialism in one country.” According to
Stalin “the victory of socialism in one country, even if that country is less developed in the
capitalist sense, while capitalism remains in other countries, even if those countries are
more highly developed in the capitalist sense – is quite possible and probable.” 28 Now
the priority was industrialization. As Stalin put it in 1928: “The question of overtaking and
outstripping the advanced capitalist countries technically and economically is for us
Bolsheviks neither new nor unexpected.” 29

The USSR would have to face the military threat of the capitalist countries which
surrounded it. And that would mean adopting capitalist methods inside the country. The
last remnants of working-class power were destroyed.

The first test for the new strategy came in China. The young Chinese Communist Party
seemed to have a promising future – there were great struggles developing in Shanghai
and elsewhere. But the Russian leaders advised the Chinese communists to make an
alliance with the nationalist movement known as the Guomindang, led by Chiang Kai-
shek. The result was a disaster. On April 12, 1927, Communist Party organizations in
Shanghai were violently suppressed by the military forces of Chiang Kai-shek and the
Guomindang. Subsequently there was a purge of Communists across the country.

At the same time Communist parties were being transformed within the imperialist
countries themselves. A great many of the militants who had founded these parties were
expelled or left, and they were often replaced by a new layer of bureaucrats who were
more flexible and obedient. By the beginning of the 1930s the Comintern had radically
changed. According to historian Pierre Broué:

The Comintern … seemed very much weakened, the main cause being its close reliance
on the leadership of the Russian Communist Party. This situation made it possible for the
Russian leaders to use its parties for their own ends, as pawns in their own diplomatic
manoeuvres. 30

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In 1928 the Sixth Congress of the Comintern adopted the new line of the so-called “Third
Period.” According to this perspective fascism and social democracy had become twins,
and social democrats were condemned as “social fascists.” In Germany this strategy had
fatal results; the Communists refused to build a united front and Hitler came to power.
This was one of the greatest crimes of Stalinism.

For European workers, who had political freedoms and trade-union rights, the difference
between fascism and democracy, even in its capitalist version, was clear. In Trotsky’s
words “in the war against fascism we were ready to conclude practical military alliances
with the devil and his grandmother, even with Noske and Zörgiebel.” 31

But in the colonial countries the situation was somewhat different. In Africa and Asia the
Third Period seemed to correspond to a certain reality. During a revolt in Nigeria fifty
unarmed women were massacred by the troops of a British Labour government. The
Communist paper The Negro Worker blamed “His Majesty’s Social-Fascist government.”
According to Hakim Adi, “the designation … did not appear entirely misplaced.” 32 The
“Sedition Bill” in the British colony of the Gold Coast imposed a penalty of three years
imprisonment on any African who was in possession of literature banned by the colonial
governor.

In 1928 the Red International of Labour Unions set up the International Trade Union
Committee of Negro Workers. Among its activities were a drive to unionize black workers
and a campaign to defend the Scottsboro Boys, young black men in the United States
who had been falsely accused of rape and threatened with the death penalty. Papers The
Negro Worker and Le Cri des Nègres were launched and distributed in Africa, often with
great difficulty. Although Comintern finance of these activities was very limited, it can be
said that the Committee made a useful contribution by disseminating anti-imperialist
and anti-racist ideas. 33

When Hitler came to power the Stalinist leadership recognized its mistakes. Between
1934 and 1936 the Comintern made a remarkable turn. Now the priority was no longer
the struggle against imperialism, but rather the struggle against fascism. The
consequences were visible in the policies of the French Communist Party. According to
Jacob Moneta:

The French Communist Party’s turn on the colonial question was so fundamental that not
only did it approve repressive measures against nationalist movements in the colonies, but
it openly demanded the smashing of an organisation like the Étoile Nord-Africaine (North
African Star) which it considered a nuisance. 34

In 1926 it had been members of the French Communist Party, Hadj-Ali Abdelkader and
Messali Hadj, who had founded the Étoile Nord-Africaine, the first organisation to call for
complete independence for Algeria and the countries of the Maghreb. 35 But now the
French Communists were abandoning their support for Algerian independence.

In 1937 Communist Party leader Maurice Thorez explained to the party’s Ninth Congress:
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 If the decisive question of the present time is a successful struggle against fascism, then it
is in the interest of the colonial peoples to maintain their union with the French people,
and not to adopt an attitude which could favour the objectives of fascism and, for
example, place Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco under the rule of Mussolini or Hitler, or
make Indochina into a base for the operations of Japanese militarism. 36

And in a speech in Algiers in 1939 Thorez used a very questionable analogy:

We want a free union between the peoples of France and Algeria. A free union means the
right to divorce, but not an obligation to divorce. I should even add that in the present
historical conditions for Algeria this right involves a duty to become even more closely
united with French democracy. 37

In January 1937 the French Popular Front government, backed by the Communists, took
the decision to dissolve the Étoile Nord-Africaine. A few days later L’Humanité published a
long article criticizing the “hostility of the leaders of the Étoile Nord-Africaine to our party
and to the Popular Front,” but not condemning the dissolution. 38

After the brief interval of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, the logic of the Popular Front continued.
The priority was the defence of the USSR and hence the struggle against fascism. While
unity against fascism in Europe made strategic sense, it should not be forgotten that the
imperialist states comprising this alliance themselves committed atrocities in the
colonized world. During the Second World War, for example, three million died of famine
in Bengal as a direct result of the policies of the British government. One could easily
understand a Bengali who didn’t make a distinction between British leader Winston
Churchill and Hitler.

On June 9, 1943 the dissolution of the Comintern was announced. It was a concession by
Stalin to the Western leaders who were his war allies. Yet, as Broué writes, in reality for
some years the Comintern “had only been a caricature of what it used to be.” 39 For
example, the resolution proposing the dissolution of the Comintern made no mention
of the national liberation struggle of the colonial and semi-colonial peoples. 40

With that, the Comintern formally came to an end. Though highly contradictory, the
Communist International played an important role in the history of global revolutions in
the 20th century, leaving behind a legacy that is still with us to this day.

This article is an edited version of two pieces that originally appeared in French at
Contretemps.

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