History of Comintern

América Latina en la Internacional Comunista, -1943. Diccionario Biográfico 7 AGRADECIMIENTOS Un trabajo como el que ahora exponemos, en modo alguno obedece a la participación de pocas personas. Para completar (y a veces corregir) las informaciones biográficas contenidas en los expedientes personales del archivo de Moscú, pudimos contar con los conocimientos de historiadoras (res) especializadas (os) en uno o varios Partidos Comunistas. Agradecemos (por orden alfabético) a:

The following is an extract of a book review by Peter Brandt, Berlin, translated by Norman LaPorte (the full review see: Twentieth Century Communism 3 (2011), p. 226-230).

One of the darkest chapters in the history of Soviet-style communism was the two years of the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, 1939-41. And here, as in many other cases, whoever wanted to know what was really happening then could have known earlier--at least in general outline (...) By this means the intensity of German-Soviet co-operation around 1940--both the open and secret support of the USSR for the Nazi Reich--was more clearly established; as well as the fact that Stalin in the summer of 1939 consciously decided in favour of the option presented by Hitler's Germany, which he thought was advantageous for him. Overall, today one can no longer speak of a poor state of research in relation to the inter-state level of the pact.

This book, however, presents documents on an aspect of the topic that is relatively underexposed though not previously unknown: the specific role of the Communist International, its various member parties, and in particular the KPD in exile. And it is a study as fascinating and gripping as it is depressing. The collection is complemented by a contribution from a contemporary witness, Wolfgang Leonhard, who experienced the policy reversal inside the Soviet Union and the communist movement as a very young man, and who remains today perturbed by the shock of these events. Bayerlein's introduction, which follows an extensive contextualising foreword by Hermann Weber, contains some impressive interpretational work, which is almost always convincing. This study is to be recommended without reservation!

The book is not an edition for purely academic use. The sources it presents are, generally, published consecutively, as a series of extracts, but also comply with academic referencing norms; and they manage to fit a large amount of rich material between the covers. The individual extracts are each preceded by a short introduction, giving the necessary historical context. Additionally, more specific explanations or notes are incorporated into the text and, together with relevant photographs, listed in the margin. An annotated register of names, an index of pseudonyms, codenames and acronyms, and a thematically ordered compilation of selected literature, round off this user-friendly volume for a broadly historically and politically interested public. The documents, translated from various languages into German, originate in the main from the Russian State Archive for Social and Political History and the Archive of the Parties and Mass Organisations of the GDR in the Federal Archives; in addition there is material from a number of other archives, plus, not least, documents from several foreign publications.

At the centre of the documented events (... ) is the encoded correspondence of the Moscow Centre of the Comintern, which was handled by its secret radio networks; the informal sources around Stalin and his closest collaborators; and party and government declarations, official correspondence, speeches, articles, secret reports and so forth, at various different levels. From all this there emerges into view a multifarious and dense network of a very particular mechanism, and its specific relationships to the power politics of the Soviet state and ideological legitimisation. Communist sources are frequently cross-referenced to (more or less private) statements by left-wing critics, from within the communists' own ranks, and there are also revealing quotes from Goebbels's diaries. In the course of this, the nomenklatura appears above all else as a dictatorship, based on methodical lies and self-deception.

What was the bottom line? The official communist party characterisation of the war before the summer of 1941 was that it was imperialist on both sides (...). But during the years of the Hitler Stalin pact world communism--following Stalinist foreign policy and its instrumentalisation by the Soviet state--in fact stood on the side of national socialist Germany, although this was cloaked in official neutrality. This was most blatantly visible in the attempts of the communist parties of northern and western Europe to enable the continued existence of their organisations and press during the course of the German occupation of their respective countries in the spring and summer of 1940. The hopes of German communists themselves for a long time focused on a semi-legal status for the KPD under the national socialist dictatorship. According to Walter Ulbricht, they would then defend the German-Soviet Pact--together with social-democratic workers and Nazi 'working people'--against the aggressive, bellicose plans of England, the alleged centre of world imperialism, and 'expose' its enemies. It was because of this perspective that world communism hushed up national socialist terror during these years, especially the persecution of the Jews.

This means that Ulbricht's infamous article in the Comintern journal Die Welt (9 February 1940)--which Bayerlein takes up--far from representing an extreme position or an aberration, in fact describes in its logic exactly the political line of the KPD, the Comintern and its Moscow masters. After the rapid victory of the German Wehrmacht over the French army and the speedy establishment of Nazi hegemony on the European continent, which was obviously not anticipated by Stalin, there was a tentative modification--though not a revision--of the communist stance on the war that had been propagated since the end of August 1939.

Bayerlein's collection does also show how profoundly the communist world movement--especially in Europe--struggled to accept the Hitler-Stalin Pact, and in the subsequent period tried to assess how to react to further changes to the situation as brought about by the Soviet-German Boundary and Friendship Treaty of 28 September 1939. They had, after all, battled for years under the banner of antifascism. But 'fascism' and 'antifascism' were now, according to foreign minister Molotov, 'outdated unusable formulations'. The previous world view had virtually been turned on its head.

Initially, a number of communist parties misunderstood the German-Soviet Pact as purely an emergency measure taken by Stalin, which would still allow them to continue the policy of the 'people's front' period in a modified form. (...) The Moscow leadership, communicating its stance via the Comintern, had to intervene severely in this case, as well as against other communist parties, in order to 'correct' this (...) Especially among their closer allies in the left and liberal political spectrum, there was a horrified distancing from this policy. Among German political exiles, the Hitler-Stalin Pact (...) contributed decisively to a rapprochement of independent left-wing socialist groupings and the rump SPD.

One of the particular merits of the present selection of documents is the opportunity it offers of establishing continuities between the 1939-41 phases and the following phase--from the beginning of the Wehrmacht's Russian crusade until the dissolution of the Comintern (1941-43). A key continuity was the complete abandonment of a world revolutionary orientation--in the original sense--in favour of the pursuit of espionage activities for the USSR, which could now scarcely be differentiated from the political activities of the International. (The heroic resistance of communists in Nazi-dominated Europe, including the Third Reich, is of course another story.) The proclaimed aim of the making of 'patriotic alliances'--now very widely conceived--is, upon closer examination, on a par with the empty phrases of the pact phase. (...)  This effectively Moscow-initiated strategy is rightly stripped of its heroic halo by Bayerlein, through the use of documents by contemporary critics.

The title of the book is a quote from the last article written by the inspired publicist and organiser Willi Münzenberg, who had been forced out of the KPD in 1938-9 because he did not follow Ulbricht's policy towards the communists' allies on the left--or on other forms of intolerant and ill-advised behaviour. On 22 September 1939, in response to the Nazi-Soviet Pact, Münzenberg wrote--in a reference to the typical Stalinist psychosis of betrayal: 'Today millions wake up in all countries, they stretch out their arms, pointing to the East, and call: "The traitor, Stalin, is you!"'

Münzenberg, who was murdered in the summer of 1940 in unexplained circumstances, could not know in the autumn of 1939 how far Stalin was prepared to go. In furtherance of the pact, more than 1000 imprisoned German communists who had fallen out of favour were got rid of by simply handing them over to the National Socialist security forces at the German-Soviet demarcation line.

Since its creation in 1998, the “German-Russian Historical Commission” has conducted research on the Communist International. Thanks to the archival revolution, the Commission has succeeded in closing important gaps in earlier research on German–Russian relations and the history of German communism. This volume contains over 500 mostly unpublished documents, extensively annotated (about 5000 footnotes), and nearly 1000 abstracts of decisions made by the Soviet Politburo,  it will become a standard work long consulted by future researchers concerning the impact of German-Soviet relations, their relevance for the interwar period, the history of KPD and the history of Communism in general. Hitherto unresolved research questions could be resolved and partial aspects corrected.

The Russian Far East was a remarkably fluid region in the period leading up to, during, and after the Russian Revolution. The different contenders in play in the region, imagining and working toward alternative futures, comprised different national groups, including Russians, Buryat-Mongols, Koreans, and Ukrainians; different imperialist projects, including Japanese and American attempts to integrate the region into their political and economic spheres of influence as well as the legacies of Russian expansionism and Bolshevik efforts to export the revolution to Mongolia, Korea, China, and Japan; and various local regionalists, who aimed for independence or strong regional autonomy for distinct Siberian and Far Eastern communities and whose efforts culminated in the short-lived Far Eastern Republic of 1920–1922. The Rise and Fall of Russia’s Far Eastern Republic, 1905–1922 charts developments in the region, examines the interplay of the various forces, and explains how a Bolshevik version of state-centered nationalism prevailed.

This paper explores the life of Joseph Grigulevich (1913–1988), a famous early Soviet illegal intelligence operative, who conducted various " special tasks " on behalf of Sta-lin's foreign espionage network. These included the murder of dissident Spanish communist Andreas Nin (1938), a participation in the assassination of Leon Trotsky (1940), posing as a Costa Rican ambassador (1949–1952), and an abortive project to assassinate Joseph Bros Tito (1952). In contrast to conventional espionage studies that are usually informed by diplomatic, political, and military history approaches, I employ a cultural history angle. First, the paper examines the formation of Grigulevich's communist and espionage identity against his background as a cosmopolitan Jewish " other " from the interwar Polish-Lithuanian realm. Second, it explores his role in the production and invention of intelligence knowledge, which he later used to jump start his second career as a prominent Soviet humanities scholar and a bestselling writer of revolutionary non-fiction.

Michael David-Fox und .deI: deut~ehen faschistisc~en ~echten. Dazu traf ~r sic?, wie .ein Doku~~e~t belegt, personIIch mIt dem Alplall-MItglIed Grabowsky zu ell1er funf-bIS sechsstundIgen Sit_ zung. Grabowsky informierte die Analytiker des Volkskommissariats jür aUsWärtige Angelegenheiten auch über die Ausrichtung der verschiedenen Nationalbolschewisten wobei er sich vor allem auf den Tat-Kreis konzentrierte, aus dem eine Reihe vo~ Alplan-Mitgliedern kam. Die Tat hatte so etwas wie eine Ostideologie entwickelt, die von der Vorstellung eines deutsch-slawischen Zwischeneuropas ausging, das Ost und West teilte.'9 Gerade solche sowjetophilen Tendenzen in der radikalen Rechten Wurden nach der Machtergreifung der Nationalsozialisten 1933 allerdings eingeschränkt und unterdrückt. Dennoch berichtete Politbüro-Mitglied Lazar' Kaganovic Stalin im August 1932 von seiner Lektüre der Gesprächstranskripte sowjetischer Diplomaten in Deutsch_ land. Es ging vor allem um das nationalsozialistische Afplan-Mitglied Reventlowund den militärischen Agenten, Abenteurer und Professor für Militärgeographie, Oskar Ritter von Niedermayer, der als Organisator der geheimen militärischen Zusammencu'_ beit zwischen Reichswehr und Roter Armee acht Jahre in der UdSSR gelebt hatte. Niedermayer habe der sowjetischen Botschaft in Berlin angeboten, Kontakte zu Hermann Göring he~lstellen und damit eine ständige Verbindung zur NSDAP aufzubauen. 3o "Die Mitschriften zeigen", schrieb Kaganovic an Stalin, dass selbst faschistische Elemente uns vertrauen müssen, dass sie die Beziehungen, die zwischen uns entstanden sind, nicht stören wollen. Das ist natürlich äußerst wichtig, weil diese Elemente, wie es aussieht [ ... ], in Deutschland an der Macht bleiben werden. 31 Kaganonvics naive Auffassung vom prosowjetischen Potential des deutschen Faschismus stammt von jemandem, der vermutlich wusste, was Stalin hören wollte. Sie zeigt, dass das Engagement für die konservative Revolution keine Einbahnstraße war, denn Kaganovic extrapolierte zweifellos aus Kontakten zu jenen Teilen der deutschen Rechten, die zur Zusammenarbeit mit den Sowjets bereit waren. Es sollte nicht das letzte Mal sein, dass das Kalkül Stalins und seiner Satrapen bei ihren Erwartungen an Bündnisse mit der entgegengesetzten Seite des politischen Spektrums nicht aufging.

Engl.: Bernhard H. Bayerlein: No antifascism without antistalinism. Willi Münzenberg, "Die Zukunft" and the Antistalinist Turn in the German speaking Emigration 1933-1940. In: Global Spaces for Radical Transnational Solidarity, Bayerlein/Braskén/Sonnenberg (eds.), e-book, Berlin, 2018, p. 218-270. https://www.muenzenbergforum.de/ebook, freely accessible
This essay article attempts to show how Stalinism as the ideology and methodology of the Communist Parties and the Communist International not only contributed to the German and European catastrophe of 1933 and the defeat without a major fight of the world’s strongest labour movement and German Communism against Hitler, but also to the weakening of anti-fascism and the decline of German-speaking political emigration in the years to follow until the outbreak of WWII in the “midnight of the century”. The article critically scrutinizes not only the retrograde path of orthodox party anti-fascism which together with the Social Democratic Party SPD inhibited a united front and united action against Hitler in 1933, but also looks empirically for clues and arguments for the emergence of a counter-reaction of the political and social movements and outstanding contemporary actors.
In doing so, the article provides clear evidence of the unfolding of a widespread anti-Stalinist reflex and even a Stalinism-critical transformation and reorientation of the German (and partly also European) anti-Hitler opposition between 1933 and 1940 as a consequence of the establishment of the system of state terror and modern slavery in the Soviet Union and follows the different paths and transmissions of this new type of disastrous political culture and methodology on a transnational level. Besides giving some rather spectacular empirical hints, the article analyses this transnational paradigmatic shift and response to Stalinism which is often neglected in historical writing or political analysis, denying its significance for the traditional workers' movement and the left and democracy as a whole. The traditional workers movement with its instrumental party Marxism, nevertheless, was finally not strong enough to oppose orthodox Stalinist and social-democratic party politics and perished under fascist and Stalinst rule in the barbarism of the Second World war.
This shift in political and cultural history, crucial for the understanding of the 20th century, has often been overlooked and even denied by mainstream historiography and was later in a certain way pasted up by the victory of Stalin and the allies in 1945. Therefore, the article criticizes a trend that considers Stalinism either as a revolutionary and antifascist movement or as simply not existing, denying it or treating it as an irrelevant problem. Specially, its corrosive, disrupting and demoralizing influence on the history of German-speaking political emigration in Europe and the Americas has often been considered as trivial. The argumentation of the article is based on new research results mainly on the German émigré community in France and Mexico as well as on the modes of entanglement of the transnational network triangle connecting Germany, Russia and the Comintern. It mainly goes back to the history of the German-speaking world of political emigration and anti-fascist articulation. In this respect, the party-induced history of antifascism in the German émigré community proves to be a sequence of open or more or less covert political scandals, hostilities, acts of defamation and criminalisation of honest persons, independent personalities, among them outstanding critics, authors or organizers like Kurt Tucholsky, Walter Benjamin, Willi Münzenberg or Gustav Regler. In most cases, these developments can be empirically traced back to Stalinist practices of "line communism" in the words of Babette Gross (she was the wife of Willi Münzenberg and sister of Margarete Buber-Neumann). These practices arose from Great Russian nationalism and “Socialist colonialism” (Lenin), in the 1930s, this led to a global process of sometimes hybrid, sometimes brutal de-internationalisation of the communist movement.
This longer essay is also based on a research project on Münzenberg's weekly newspaper “Die Zukunft” (The Future) (1938-1940) at the Institute for Social Movements at the Ruhr University Bochum, with a two-year grant from the Fritz Thyssen Foundation. My thanks go to Uwe Sonnenberg (Berlin) for important hints.

"ABSTRACT
Fredrik Petersson
Title: “We Are Neither Visionaries Nor Utopian Dreamers”. Willi Münzenberg, the League against Imperialism, and the Comintern, 1925-1933
On 10 February 1927, the “First International Congress against Imperialism and Colonialism” in Brussels marked the establishment of the anti-imperialist organisation, the League against Imperialism and for National Independence (LAI, 1927-37). The complex preparations for the congress were though initiated already in 1925 by Willi Münzenberg, a German communist and General Secretary of the communist mass organisation, Internationale Arbeiterhilfe (IAH, 1921-35), together with the Communist International (Comintern, 1919-43). Berlin was the centre for the LAI and its International Secretariat (1927-33), a city serving the intentions of the communists to find colonial émigré activists in the Weimar capital, acting as representatives for the anti-colonial movement in Europe after the Great War. With the ascendancy to power of the Nazi Party (NSDAP) on 30 January 1933, the LAI reached an abrupt, but nonetheless, expected end in Berlin. This doctoral thesis examines the role, purpose and functions of a sympathising communist organization (LAI): to act as an intermediary for the Comintern to the colonies. The analysis evaluates the structure and activities of the LAI, and by doing so, establish a complex understanding on one of the most influential communist organisations during the interwar period, which, despite its short existence, assumed a nostalgic reference and historical bond for anti-colonial movements during the transition from colonialism to post-colonialism after the Second World War, e.g. the Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung, Indonesia in 1955. Fredrik Petersson’s study, based on archives in Moscow, Berlin, Amsterdam, London, and Stockholm, uncovers why the Comintern established and supported the LAI and its anti-imperialist agenda, disclosing a complicated undertaking, characterised by conflict and the internal struggle for power, involving structural constraints and individual ambitions defined by communist ideology and strategy.
"

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Resumen: Abierto al público desde 1991, el Archivo de la Comintern contiene abundante material referido al desarrollo del movimiento comunista en las diversas regiones del mundo. En el presente artículo los autores ofrecen una detallada relación de las colecciones e inventarios relacionados con América Latina, que permiten ahondar en el estudio de cómo fueron surgiendo los vínculos orgánicos entre la Comintern y los partidos o grupos comunistas de Latinoamérica, investigar el carácter y el grado de influencia ejercida por la dirección de Moscú en la formación y el funcionamiento de los partidos comunistas del área, destacando aquellos documentos que revelan las causas y motivaciones profundas que incidieron en la evolución de la estrategia y la táctica de las organizaciones afiliadas a la IC y los entresijos de las crisis que atravesaron.

Around the world, historians, journalists and the public interested in the history of communism and the Left have complained about the scarcity of informal or private sources and testimonies about leading groups of the Comintern, the Communist parties and the Soviet leadership. Rightly, it was regretted that only scarcely, information had filtered out of Stalin closest circle, or could not be entrusted to posterity at all. Similarly, the small number of such authentic documents on the leadership of the Comintern in the 1930s and 1940s was emphasized concerning the multiple inflections of international communist policy according to the requirements of foreign policy and Soviet political power in general. The publication of the diary of the Bulgarian communist leader Georgi Dimitrov, who became "helmsman of the Comintern" under Stalin, and which includes the period between 9 March 1933 and June 1943, marked a major turning point for our knowledge and historiography. Although published some fifteen years ago, the Dimitrov Diary still offers a wealth of knowledge, whose exploitation has only just begun. The following transnational vision tries to resume the history of the Communist International and its relationship with Stalin and the Communist Parties in the light of the new insights provided by the diary. This vision sheds a light on the transnationally entangled process of how anticommunism and nationalism arose from the innermost of the Soviet system itself under the rule of Staline.

In his contribution, Bernhard H. Bayerlein deconstructs the myth of the anti-fascist Soviet Union, using the example of a secret meeting with the official of the Soviet Embassy in Berlin, Boris Vinogradov, in February 1933.
Bernhard H. Bayerlein dekonstruiert in seinem Beitrag den Mythos von der antifaschistischen Sowjetunion am Beispiel eines Geheimtreffens im Februar 1933 mit dem Pressesprecher der sowjetischen Botschaft in Berlin, Boris Winogradow.

C entenares de libros y miles de artículos han sido escritos sobre la historia de la III Internacional (la Comintern); no obstante en ella existen lagunas y varios enigmas. Una de las causas primordiales de este hecho es la confrontación ideológica acerca sobre la actividad del "partido comunista mundial". Porque mientras los adversarios del movimiento comunista intentaban comprobar que la actividad de las secciones nacionales de la Comintern fue dirigida siempre desde Moscú y que los partidos comunistas nunca fueron organismos independientes, los comunistas por su parte insistían en la originalidad de sus partidos y buscaban la manera de ocultar un tema muy importante, es decir, el carácter de las relaciones entre sus partidos y el Estado Mayor de la Comintern en Moscú. Ambas corrientes adversarias, al mismo tiempo basaban sus postulados sobre "las conjeturas y suposiciones" sin tener la posibilidad de comprobar sus teorías condocumentos, como lo ha escrito francamente el historiador R. Alexander en su obra fundamental "Comunismo en Latinoamérica". La mayoría de los partidos comunistas latinoamericanos perdieron sus archivos por las persecuciones y a causa de su existencia ilegal, mientras que los documentos del archivo de la Comintern y los acervos documentales de la policía eran inaccesibles para los investigadores durante mucho tiempo. Por esta razón los comunistas se concentraron principalmente en el análisis de la confrontación ideológica dentro del comunismo internacional, en tanto que sus oponentes se empeñaron

This paper questions the historiography of the sympathizing organization the League against Imperialism (LAI 1927-37) by focusing the discussion on relevant facts and factors essential for a general understanding of the history of the LAI and its legacy. While doing so, the paper also calls into question the necessity to revise the term "front", as it is frequently used in communist history/cold war history, and, how "nostalgia" contributes in shaping our understanding of former events and episodes. The LAI is without hestiance typical of the above. The paper includes a concise outline on the history of the LAI, and concludes its discussion with a critical assessement that questions nostalgia as a framework to produce and install historical knowledge. This is also a draft for an article, planned for publication in an anthology on radical leftwing networks 2014.

El trabajo está enfocado en la presentación de los “archivos trofeo” que los soviéticos confi scaron a las autoridades alemanas durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial, a través de algunos documentos – seleccionados por su interés para la historia iberoamericana del periodo–, que puntualizan lo que podrían ser embriones de redes
anticomunistas y de colaboración internacional contra el comunismo, que empezaron a formarse bajo la República de Weimar, lo cualplantea un nuevo enfoque de estudio de las relaciones entre Alemania y los países latinoamericanos en este periodo.

Willi Münzenberg functioned as one of the most outstanding organisers, propagandists and media-activists of the Left in the Weimar Republic. Until his demise in confused circumstances in Southern France in 1940, Münzenberg functioned as a cen- tral actor both in the German speaking exile and in the Euro- pean anti-Hitler opposition. The networks initiated and upheld by him included worldwide, non-governmental cultural and political solidarity organisations. As a part of the “solar sys- tem of the Comintern” (Otto Wille Kuusinen) they became the most important intermediary empire of transnational and tran- scultural anti-colonial and anti-imperial organisations during the 1920s and 1930s. As an anticipated cultural international these initiatives gathered global collective forces and liberation potentials from capitalism. The organisations led by Münzen- berg created a wide range of multimedia initiatives, spanning from pictorial newspapers to film, from book clubs to publis- hing houses, from revues to mass demonstrations, from wor- kers’ photography to film productions. Besides workers, these interventionist and highly public engagements attracted the support of intellectuals, artists and cultural personas. Anyone interested in anti-war movements since the First World War, left cultural politics, or specific relations between socialist and communist movements and transnational solidarity during the interwar period cannot overlook Willi Münzenberg. This paper is the collective introduction to the volume of the First International Willi-Münzenberg Congress, held in Berlin 2015, edited by Kasper Braskén, Uwe Sonnenberg and myself, freely accessible as an e-book on the Internet. https://www.muenzenbergforum.de/ebook/

El artículo analiza las relaciones entre el movimiento campesino mexicano, el Partido Comunista y la Internacional Comunista durante los años veinte. Se muestra cómo la política de “frente único” posibilitó la alianza entre agraristas y comunistas en México, misma que colapsó por factores externos (el giro a la
izquierda de la Comintern y su política de “clase contra clase”) como internos (la represión del gobierno mexicano contra los comunistas y la asimilación del movimiento campesino a las estructuras oficiales).

The article analyzes the relationship between the Mexican peasant movement, the Communist Party and the Communist International during the twenties. We show how the policy of "unit
ed front" enabled the alliance between agrarians and communists in Mexico, which collapsed by external factors (the left turn of the Comintern and its policy of "class against class") and internal
(Mexican government repression against the communists and t
he assimilation of the peasant movement to official structures).

A chronological survey and presentation on the history of the sympathising organisation the League Against Imperialism and for National Independence (1927-1937), published in The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism, Immanuel Ness and Zak Cope (eds.) (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp.688-96.

The article introduce the theoretical assumption that the League against Imperialism was the most valuable organizational entity for the Comintern (Communist International) to spread Bolshevik propaganda and gather intelligence for a shorter period during the interwar years. This is also one of the first published synopsis for my doctoral disseration on the LAI: 'We Are Neither Visionaries Nor Utopian Dreamers'. Willi Münzenberg, the League against Imperialism, and the Comintern, 1925-1933 (Åbo Akademi University, 2013).

This article will examine the course of the factional struggle between Yugoslav communists that developed behind the frontlines of Spain in 1938 and investigate the involvement of foreign communists in their dispute. I will attempt to contextualize the struggles inside the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (KPJ) within broader power dynamics of the Comintern during the Great Purge, in order to gain a better understanding of both the KPJ and the Comintern as a whole in this period. The main organizer of the Yugoslav volunteers for the cause of the Spanish Republic, the KPJ, found itself in one of the most turbulent periods of its history at this particular time. In August 1937, its general secretary was arrested in Moscow and charged with espionage. The news of the arrest soon reached the volunteers in Spain, and many of them became engulfed in the emergent factional conflict, while struggling to make sense of the situation based on fragmentary information from abroad.

The Abortive "German October" 1923. New Light on the Revolutionary Plans of the Russian Communist Party, the Comintern and the German Communist Party. In: Kevin McDermott, John Morison (eds.): Politics and Society Under the Bolsheviks. Selected Papers From the Fifth World Congress for Central and East European Studies Warsaw 1995, Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1999, pp. 251–262.

The article discusses the participation of the Communist International (Comintern, 1919-1943) in the Caribbean region throughout most of the 1930’s, and argues in favor of an international dimension for local and regional developments since the 1920’s that will include the Soviet Union as an imperialist contender, along with the customary colonial powers. The essay also enumerates examples of the sort of international, cultural networks fostered by the Comintern’s agenda and its political agents throughout the area, pointing out the connection between this sort of communication and the region’s leap into modernity that defined the decolonization process in the late 1940’s. In these developments, New York as the center of a Caribbean diaspora becomes instrumental as the point of departure and confluence for the agents of international communism and Caribbean nationals during the decade of 1930. The evidence in turn implies a call to reformulate the historical evolution of the Caribbean diaspora in New York between the 1920’s and the 1940’s, taking into consideration the Comintern’s contribution to the transnational aspect of Caribbean radicalism, politics and culture in the post-war era. Finally, it also suggests a possible revision of the chronological framework for the Soviet Union’s presence in the Caribbean region long before the Cuban revolution of 1959, in view of declassified documentation from the archives of the Communist International.

O marxismo brasileiro ainda não é centenário. Apesar dos poucos brasileiros que citam e discutem superficialmente "o Mouro" no final do século XIX e nos primeiros anos do século XX, é apenas a partir dos anos 1920 que no Brasil, efetivamente, os ensinamentos de Karl Marx e Friedrich Engels, tornam-se ferramenta analítica de compreensão da realidade e de sua transformação.

Víctor Jeifets y Lazar Jeifets
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El artículo analiza las complejas relaciones entre la III Internacional, su sección nacional en México y el movimiento antiimperialista nicaragüense encabezado por Augusto C. Sandino, con el objeto de averiguar las causas de la ruptura de esta alianza. Sobre la base de documentos poco conocidos de la Comintern resguardados en Moscú, así como de la correspondencia de Sandino que se conserva en los archivos mexicanos, los autores recuperan la historia poco conocida de las relaciones dentro del “triángulo” formado por Sandino, la izquierda y el Gobierno mexicano en la segunda mitad de la década de 1920. Al demostrar las causas del interés de los comunistas hacia Sandino (un deseo de ampliar su influencia usando la táctica frentista), se hace un balance de dichas relaciones, explicando las causas de ruptura entre la Comintern y el sandinismo. Así, se prueba que Moscú y los comunistas mexicanos resultaron incapaces de mantener un nivel adecuado de interacción con Sandino y que, además, los conflictos personales agravaron el asunto.

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The article analyzes the complex relations among the Third International, its national section in Mexico, and the Nicaraguan anti-imperialist movement led by Augusto C. Sandino, in order to inquire into the causes of the breakdown of the alliance. Practically unknown Comintern documents safeguarded in Moscow, as well as Sandino’s correspondence kept in Mexican archives, make it possible to recover the little known history of the relations within the “triangle” formed by Sandino, the left, and the Mexican government in the second half of the 1920s. By showing that one of the reasons for the communists’ interest in Sandino was broadening their influence through frontist tactics, the article reviews those relations and explains the causes of the break-up between the Comintern and the Sandino movement. The paper concludes that Moscow and the Mexican communists were unable to maintain an adequate level of interaction with Sandino and that personal conflicts exacerbated the situation.

The PCF and the internment in France of the International Volunteers : The Impossible Final Settlement of The Komintern Project Called International Brigades

En août 1938, Joseph Staline acquiesça à la demande du gouvernement républicain espagnol de démobiliser les Brigades internationales, dans une tentative désespérée d’obtenir de la communauté internationale un retrait des forces expéditionnaires germano-italiennes en Espagne. Quelques mois plus tard, en février 1939, plusieurs milliers de volontaires internationaux échouaient dans les camps d’internement  français après la Retirada. Le PCF fut alors chargé du lourd fardeau de trouver une solution pour  extraire les vétérans internés en France. Le parti français  fut le récepteur bien malgré lui d’une liquidation impossible, celle des Brigades internationales, projet désormais caduque du Komintern et sacrifié à l’aune de la volte-face stratégique de Staline en Europe durant l'été 1939.

This article examines the global travels and anti-colonial thought of the Indian revolutionary Manabendra Nath Roy. It focuses particularly on his little explored stay in revolutionary Mexico, where he became a founder of the Mexican Communist Party in 1919. Drawing on archival sources from various countries and Roy's own writings, the article situates Roy's exploits somewhere between a global anti-colonialism, transnational solidarity and diasporic nationalism. It explores particularly the possibilities and the limits of an image of Asia and Latin America as regions united in their oppression by imperialism, and warranting shared anti-colonial strategies in the framework of international Communism.

Se analizan las particularidades de la formación del PC en Ecuador. La creación del primer grupo comunista causó varias contradicciones entre los comunistas ecuatorianos y el Secretariado Sudamericano de la IC que actuaba sobre la base del PC de Argentina. Uno de los rasgos importantes del proceso de surgimiento del PC en Ecuador, fue su creación a base del Partido Socialista dentro del cual existió otro partido -el Comunista-que era secreto, pero dirigido por la misma gente que encabezaba al PSE. Se analizan también algunos complicados problemas de las relaciones entre el PSE-PCE y la III Internacional y su Secretariado Sudamericano.

The Communist International (Comintern) has been a prominent topic of research in the wake of the »archival revolution«. Only very few questions are left considering this unique international organisation, and even the most clandestine aspects of its activity are being dealt with by historical research. But what should be made of Bolshevik activists in distant Russian provinces praising the »new International« in their resolutions and personal diaries, of Red Army units carrying the International on their battle flags, and of rank-and-file sympathisers of the Left Opposition addressing the Comintern with their hopes to change the party line? Based on Max Weber’s concept of charisma and its institutionalisation, the following article strives to assess the Comintern not just as an organisation, but as a political symbol and a charismatic force in the early Soviet society. By taking into account a broad variety of sources, including Bolshevik internal and public documents detailing policy-making, the press, letters »from below« and ego documents, the article strives to reconstruct the images of the Comintern that were created by the Party and shaped the imagination of the rank and file as well as reaching beyond the party membership. The International as a potent symbol is being assessed already before the Comintern’s official formation in 1919, and its transformations are followed through into the onset of Stalinism.

Dalla sua fondazione nel gennaio 1921 il partito comunista italiano attraversò una crisi che indebolì la sua capacità di lotta contro il fascismo insorgente.  Quella crisi che si manifestò anche in un crescente dissidio con l'Internazionale Comunista, trovò soluzione nel passaggio della direzione del partito daAmadeo  Bordiga a Antonio Gramsci, nel 1924.  Il presente saggio presenta il travagliato percorso di quella vicenda anche attraverso la disponibilità di documenti poco noti gentilmente messi a disposizione da quello che fu l'archivio del Comintern di Mosca .

La ponencia esta dedicada a la influencia de la Revolución de Octubre 1917 al desarollo del movimiento izquierda uruguayo especialmente en el contexto de la historia del Comintern. Tambien se analiza la participación de los comunistas uruguayos en las actividades del movimiento comunista y obrero mundial. Una de las tareas principales de la ponencia es demonstrar como los eventos rusos influyeron a la vida política y social del Uruguay, al genesis del comunismo uruguayo y toda la izquierda uruguaya como unas fuerzas políticas reales. Basando en los documentos del Fondo de la Comintern la ponencia explica las etapas del desarollo de la izquierda uruguaya en el contexto de la izquierda mundial.

En 1935, en el marco del giro frente populista del movimiento comunista internacional, el Partido Comunista de Chile y la Federación Obrera de Chile abandonaron el " sindicalismo libre " y aceptaron, tácitamente, participar del " sindicalismo legal, " regulado por el despreciado Código del Trabajo, en pos de la unificación del movimiento sindical. Utilizando documentación inédita y hasta ahora desconocida del Komintern, adjuntada a un dossier policial brasileño, este artículo argumenta que la línea sindical que terminó instaurándose en Chile fue el resultado de una serie de conflictos, negociaciones y acuerdos, tanto entre dirigentes chilenos y emisarios Cominternianos, como al interior de la misma orgánica cominterniana.