The Transnational World of the Cominternians

B. Studer

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137510297
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia rusa

The 'Cominternians' who staffed the Communist International in Moscow from its establishment in 1919 to its dissolution in 1943 led transnational lives and formed a cosmopolitan but closed and privileged world. The book tells of their experience in the Soviet Union through the decades of hope and terror.

1

The Bolshevik Model

Founded in 1919, the Comintern was global in its political ambitions. Taking a clear distance from the prevailing nationalism of the period of the First World War and indeed rejecting the very idea of the nation, the organization defined itself as internationalist. In this, it situated itself in the radical tradition of the European workers’ movement. Internationalism was both the necessary condition and the goal of a revolutionary organization that would soon stand at the head of some hundred Communist parties (‘sections’) across the world. In terms of organization and activity, of course, the national aspect could not be ignored. The ‘world party with national sections’ was thus characterized by a two-level hierarchy: at the top, the Comintern understood itself as a supranational and transnational world movement which, at the level beneath, adopted the subordinate national section as its principle of organization.¹ While the Comintern – as a field of communication and action over and between national frontiers – may rightly be described as inter- and transnational, like the biographies of its militants its activities were nonetheless equally grounded in national space. Further underlining the hybrid complexity of the Comintern was, from the beginning, the central and fast-growing role of the hegemonial Soviet Russian state which blurred the lines between state and non-state actors.² The utopian project of a new society rested on ideas not only of political but also of bureaucratic organization.

1.1 Global architecture and multilocal activity

Research faces practical and theoretical difficulties arising not only from the assymetry of power between the Soviet Union and the Communist ‘sister parties’ and between the international and national levels, but also from the very different realities represented by what was, on the one hand, a worldwide movement whose cultural appeal extended even to non-Communists (one has only to think of the many sympathetic intellectuals, writers and artists), and a centralized, Moscow-based bureaucratic apparatus on the other. Around its leading body, the Executive Committee of the Communist International, (ECCI) was an array of administrative offices, political committees and also, increasingly, informal if not secret decision-making bodies.³

Things are made no simpler by the fact that this highly ramified structure was several times radically remodelled. Among the directing bodies – to mention only the most important – were the Presidium of the ECCI, the Secretariat of the Chairman or the Secretary-General of the ECCI (1921–1926; 1935–1943) and the Political Secretariat or Politsecretariat (1926–1935), the Political Commission of the Political Secretariat (1929/1930–1935), and the Organization Bureau or Orgbureau (1921–1926). Auxiliary functions were carried out by departments defined by specialist role (the Organization Department, the Agitprop Department, the Information Department, the Publishing Department, the International Liaison Department-OMS) and by territorially defined regional secretariats (1926–1935), sometimes as many as 13 in number. Communications between the ECCI and the national sections passed via secret couriers, sometimes even the ordinary mail, as well as through the emissaries and instructors sent by Moscow to different countries. The larger parties had their own permanent delegations or representatives in Moscow. Of these, the Russian-born Frenchman Boris Souvarine, expelled in 1924 for supporting Trotsky, is no doubt one of the best known. In the following decade, the parties’ Moscow representatives were generally of another type, less intellectual and generally of working-class origin. In the case of the British party, this was the Scotsman Peter Kerrigan, a keen boxer and footballer in his youth, who had left the Glasgow shipyards for the Lenin School. He joined André Marty’s secretariat (responsible for the Anglophone countries) in 1935, before leaving for Spain as a political commissar. Organized as technical departments were the Library, the Translation Department, the Archive, the Bureau of the Secretariat, the Administrative Department, the Publications Department, the Garage and the Hotel Lux. The Comintern also had numerous representations around the world that enjoyed a degree of regional decision-making power, within the general line established at the centre, among them the West European Bureau (WEB) in Berlin, Brussels and Paris, the Far Eastern Bureau in Shanghai, the South American Secretariat in Buenos Aires and Montevideo, and the Caribbean Bureau, to mention only a few. Operational between 1927/28 and 1933, the WEB served as an outpost for the coordination of activities in Western Europe. With Hitler’s accession to power in 1933, Germany became too dangerous and Comintern activities in Europe were concentrated in Paris, Prague and Copenhagen, though presences also existed in other cities such as Stockholm, Basel and Zurich. The Spanish Civil War then saw a shift of activity to the Iberian Peninsula. Networks were established to convey volunteers first to the recruiting centre in Paris and then onward to Albacete, where the International Brigade headquarters were established. This whole venture represented an organization in itself and a distinctive space of transnational communication with its cross-border contacts and exchanges. One that had to remain secret, trustworthy and secure, while still remaining capable of improvization. The hierarchical but polycentric internationalism of the early days, however, gave way in time to a concentration on Moscow. From the mid-1930s onward, and more particularly during the war, propaganda activities were increasingly directed from the Soviet Union, via radio and telegram.

To this network also belonged the many international mass organizations, each concerned with a particular area: trade unionism (Profintern); social service (International Red Aid, Workers’ International Relief); colonialism (the League against Imperialism); and with youth, women, cooperatives, sport and so on. According to the present state of research, there were some 60 such organizations with international responsibilities and relations.⁴ Though they might not all have been Communist organizations in outward appearance, their Communist members were obliged to act as an organized fraction. The multiform and highly ramified yet centralized architecture of this transnational organization for revolutionizing the workers of all countries also included printing shops, publishing houses and newspapers across Western and Central Europe. In Paris, for example, the Comintern owned the publishing houses Éditions Sociales and Éditions du Carrefour, in Berlin Verlag Karl Hoym and Neue Deutsche Verlag, in London Martin Lawrence Ltd. In 1929, there were at least 18 Comintern-owned publishing houses, which in 1929–1930 were responsible for printing 448 titles across all the European languages, totalling 22 million books in all.⁵ And last but not least, the Comintern also created ‘knowledge institutions’, its own international schools and universities.

Before the ‘New Man’ could be brought into being, one had to work with the old. According to the latest research, almost 16,000 people worldwide worked for the Comintern international apparatus at one time or another,⁶ some 500 or 600 at the heart of the organization, in Moscow. The Moscow apparatus reached its maximum in the early 1930s, with 524 people (though one report gives 666)⁷. At that time, there were two technical staff for each of the 175 political staff. Adding to these the secret International Liaison Department, the publishing staff and the party leaderships that were in Moscow, as well as the personnel of the Hotel Lux, none of which were included in the ECCI headcount, the figure rose to 800, according to a highly confidential report by the Cadre Department.⁸ According to more recent research, however, the whole ECCI apparatus accounted for 591 people in August 1939 and 513 in March 1940.⁹ In any event, in early 1943 there were 161 people working in the (central) Press and Radio Department alone.¹⁰ There were significant variations through time, attributable not only to the many reorganizations and the effects of the Terror, but also to staff turnover. This was particularly high during the ‘Stalinization’ of the Comintern, as old party cadres were replaced by others, younger and committed to the new line. Records for 1929, for example, show 140 departures and 147 new arrivals, and for the following year 206 and 241 respectively. The period saw a significant increase in numbers, to meet the needs of increasing control over cadre recruitment to the Communist parties and to the Comintern itself. Under the direction of the Cadre Department, which by the middle of the decade had as much say in personnel policy as the ECCI Secretariat itself, the recruitment of Comintern functionaries was subject to strict rules and requirements. In 1936 the already strict procedures were made even more stringent, calling not only for multiple certifications, questionnaires and a detailed evaluation (kharakteristika) but also testimonials from other members.¹¹

In the early 1930s, however, such detail was not yet the order of the day. A staffing report was aware of ‘roughly 500’ Comintern employees, but had precise details for only 331 of them.¹² Personnel information was at that time neither regularly updated nor centrally controlled, with the Special Department of the OMS and the Cadre Section of the Organization Department maintaining separate personnel files. These mainly covered functionaries in the secret departments of the Comintern or other posts of particular importance, while ‘technical’ and temporary employees received hardly any attention. Only with the creation of a specialized Cadre Department in early 1932 was it decided to demand autobiographies from all newly recruited staff.¹³

Nonetheless, those then responsible for personnel matters within the Comintern were able to use the data available to offer a snapshot of those employed in the apparatus.¹⁴ In terms of party membership, nearly two-thirds were members of the Soviet party, while a third were members of ‘sister parties’, though there is evidently some uncertainty here, as another third apparently declared themselves as not belonging to any party. Accounting for a good fifth of Comintern employees, the German Communists even then formed the largest national group apart from the Russians, who accounted for almost half. A whole series of other nations were also represented, but by significantly smaller contingents.¹⁵ However, the figures are again not completely straightforward, as, in accordance with Soviet practice, the report distinguishes between citizenship and nationality. By nationality there were 152 Russians, 48 Jews, 38 Germans, nine French and five Poles (among others), while by citizenship there were 206 Soviet citizens, 30 German, six French and six Polish (again among others). These relative magnitudes are partly confirmed and partly qualified by a recent systematic longitudinal study of data on 580 leadership cadres between 1919 and 1936.¹⁶ While the shares of the Russians (115) and the Germans (50) are in fact still the largest (followed by the French with 33, the Czechoslovakians with 30, the Americans and the Poles with 28 each, and the British with 22), the Russian share declines with time from 45 per cent in 1919 to 14 per cent in 1937. According to the same report, oral communication must have presented some problems, for 123 – more than a third – spoke only Russian, 14 understood nothing but German, two spoke only English and two only French. This linguistic deficit would however have likely been compensated for by the more polyglot cadres, among them the 107 who spoke both Russian and German, the 52 trilinguals who added French to the other two, and the further 21 whose English represented a fourth language.¹⁷

The questions about social class were answered in a very unsatisfactory manner, says the report-writer, a third describing themselves simply as workers, two-thirds as white-collar employees. Even so, 25 had a university degree, while 13 had at least started on a university education.¹⁸ A good half had attended secondary school, a third had received an elementary education only, while at the very far end of the scale were the 22 people who were barely literate. In terms of occupational category, there were 67 skilled workers, 40 unskilled, 36 party functionaries, 69 white-collar employees, 16 journalists or publicists, six editors, two doctors, 12 teachers and 31 persons without occupation.¹⁹ Changes in the figures through time reveal, however, a striking decline in cadres who had received secondary or tertiary education. Between 1920 and 1937 the proportion fell from about two thirds to one third, with the share of those having received only an elementary or vocational education rising from one third to two thirds.²⁰

The self-descriptions reported here probably represent a mixture of current and previous occupations. That most respondents were ‘professional revolutionaries’ is shown by the answers to the question about the last place of employment. Even before working for the Comintern, a good two-thirds were working for the Party or an associated organization either in the Soviet Union or elsewhere. Only 24 came directly from a factory, 19 had been working in other contexts, 19 were in their first employment, and 15 had not yet completed their vocational training. How unsystematic the implementation of cadre policy was in the early 1930s is also shown by the fact that, of 189 people, a clear majority had found a position with the Comintern on their own individual initiative, with only 52 having beeen recommended to the Comintern by ‘sister parties’.

1.2 Centralization, discipline and loyalty

From the individual actor’s perspective, the Comintern was a voluntary community of goals and solidarity that offered access to political-intellectual and financial resources, though one that indeed brought certain obligations with it. The original, utopian aim was clear in activists’ minds, and clearly set down on paper: this was nothing less than ‘world revolution’. As the Swiss representative at the Comintern’s founding congress in Mocow in 1919 put it: ‘We believe in the victory of the proletarian revolution, and we look with enthusiasm to the East, where our Russian comrades in struggle have already seized power’.²¹

This statement makes direct reference to two problematic features that characterized the project from start: the belief in a speedy victory, and the advantage the Russian comrades enjoyed over the other parties not only in terms of the political capital represented by their successful takeover of power but also in the real capacity to exert influence by means of the human, material and symbolic resources that this made available to them. This had two consequences. Firstly, with the failure of the ‘German October’ in 1923, the original goal increasingly gave way to that of the protection of the Soviet Union. Despite the Communist International’s expansion in Asia and elsewhere, in 1924 nearly three-quarters of its membership outside the Soviet Union was to be found in only four countries: Germany, Czechoslovakia, France and Yugoslavia. In the years that followed, the Comintern’s following in Europe declined continuously. Only in the 1930s did the Communist parties once again be...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Acronyms
• Introduction
• 1 The Bolshevik Model
• 2 The New Woman
• 3 In Stalin’s Moscow
• 4 Soviet Party Practices
• 5 Becoming a ‘Real Bolshevik’
• 6 The Party and the Private
• 7 From Comrades to Spies
• 8 Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index