The comintern: colonialism, nationalism and imperialism

In 1919, the Communist International, or Comintern, was founded in high hopes that the Russian Revolution would spread globally.1 The focus was on western Europe with its mass working-class movement. Given the wave of
revolutionary fervour, it seemed little was needed for capitalism to be overthrown. Yet, capitalism stabilised, and although substantial communist parties, looking to the Russian model, emerged from splits within mass reformist parties, these proved incapable of fulfilling the hopes placed on them.

However, the colonial and semi-colonial world was also heavily discussed. Could struggles for self-determination and national independence be as mighty a factor in bringing down capitalism? If “advanced” Germany could not come to the rescue of the citadel of world revolution, could the “backward” world do so by depriving the imperialist enemy of access to raw materials and cheap labour?2

Before the revolution, Russia’s economy was dominated by agriculture, unlike the economies of fellow imperialist powers. It was both extremely “backward” (in its enormous rural hinterland) and very “advanced” (in its industrial heartlands). Russia was a bridge between “west” and “east”; the revolution, which had broken with imperialism and won the peasantry to its side, could offer itself as a model for peasant nations seeking to break the grip of imperialism and achieve freedom.3

Lenin’s analysis of imperialism and the revolutionary potential of national struggles formed the basis of debate in the Comintern. However, putting principles into practice was complicated by the circumstances under which communists operated. A defining context was the new Soviet state’s paramount need to survive in a hostile world, but that began to impose its own logic: one that, with the growth of the Soviet bureaucracy whose tentacles extended into the Comintern, began to subordinate the need to spread the revolution—the rationale for the Comintern­—to “national” needs. China would be crucial in this respect. Only five years separated the foundation of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921 from it standing at the head of a workers’ revolution, the success of which would have been a tremendous blow against imperialism.4 However, this revolution was sacrificed because the bureaucracy felt that there was a better route to protecting the interests of the Soviet state than by revolution from below: an alliance with bourgeois nationalists who, as events unfolded, proved to be its enemy. This article will attempt to trace some of the processes that led to such a disastrous outcome.

Second International versus Comintern

The importance given by the Third (Communist) International to the colonial question was in stark contrast to the record of the pre-First World War Second International.5 The Second International tended to believe that most colonies were too backward economically and socially to achieve independence—they would have to wait for socialism in the “advanced” countries. Some on the reformist right argued, as did the Dutch party leader Henri van Kol, that the possession of colonies was compatible with socialism: “A socialist state,” said Van Kol, “will…have colonies, but the socialist party will prevent the exploitation and torture of indigenous peoples”.6 The 1904 Amsterdam Conference fudged the question, passing a resolution that “avoided either endorsing or opposing the pro-colonialist arguments” and limiting itself to “condemning colonial abuses”.7 At the 1907 Stuttgart Conference, supporters of colonialism were narrowly defeated.8

Underlying Van Kol’s call for a policy of colonial enlightenment, dressed in “Marxist” terms, was an utterly racist view of Africans as cannibalistic, superstitious and ignorant savages.9 In sharp contrast, Lenin, one of the four Russian delegates, denounced views he saw as “subordinating the proletariat to bourgeois ideology, to bourgeois imperialism”.10 He also recognised something almost entirely absent from Second International thinking: that the toiling masses in the colonial world were the agents of their own liberation. In “The Awakening of Asia”, published in 1913, Lenin welcomed the spread of the democratic revolution to “the whole of Asia—to Turkey, Persia, China. Ferment is growing in British India.” He linked this awakening to “the struggle for power by the advanced proletariat of Europe”.11

In “Backward Europe and Advanced Asia”, also from 1913, Lenin reversed Van Kol’s racist assumptions, arguing that the bourgeoisie no longer played a progressive role globally—that role now belonging to the proletariat. “Advanced” Europe was plundering China, its bourgeoisie allied with all that is reactionary and mediaeval, while raising “a cry about ‘civilisation’, ‘order’, ‘culture’ and ‘fatherland’… But all young Asia, that is, the hundreds of millions of Asian working people, has a reliable ally in the proletariat of all civilised countries”.12

The idea of an alliance between an insurgent movement in the “backward” world and a revolutionary industrial working class in the “advanced” one was central to the views adopted by the Comintern. By 1919, the year of the First Congress, “the national liberation, peasant, and working-class movements were making progress in China, India and other oppressed nations in Asia”, and also in Latin America as well as South Africa, where the founding of the African National Congress in 1912 “marked a new stage in the development of national consciousness among the oppressed peoples of that continent”, reflected in strikes and newly formed trade unions.13

The First Congress was not a representative gathering, owing in part to the imperialist blockade, but the Bolsheviks sent invitations to organisations representing workers from China, Korea, Persia (Iran) and Turkey who were resident in the Soviet republic. Nikolai Bukharin, a Bolshevik leader, was proud of the fact that “this was the first international workers’ congress to hear a speech delivered in Chinese”.14 Of 52 delegates, 13 could be said to represent peoples attempting to throw off the burden of colonial oppression.15 The delegate from the Communist Organisations of the Peoples of the East argued:

The East represents the underbelly of world imperialism, its source of supply. If the East arises and stretches out a hand to the socialist West, imperialism will be surrounded, and then the hour of triumph for world socialism will have sounded.16

However, it was the much more representative Second Congress that began to get to grips with the practicalities of communists relating to the fight for national liberation. The strategy was grounded in a position Lenin had relentlessly argued before the First World War: that the right to self-determination was not only
something that socialists should support as a matter of solidarity with the oppressed, but also an essential ingredient to weaken the common enemy­­—imperialism.17

Lenin and Roy on the national question

Lenin’s introduction to the session on National and Colonial Questions started with the global division between a handful of oppressor nations and numerous oppressed nations. He went on to argue that “reciprocal relations between peoples, as well as the world system as a whole, are determined by the struggle waged by a small group of imperialist nations against the soviet movement and the soviet states, headed by Soviet Russia”. Only from this standpoint could “the Communist parties in civilised and backward countries alike pose and solve political problems correctly”.18

Lenin accepted that it was better to speak of a “national-revolutionary” movement, rather than a “bourgeois-democratic” one, which was his original characterisation. Nonetheless, he argued that the national movement could “only be a bourgeois-democratic movement” in backward countries because they overwhelmingly consist of peasants rather than working-class people. That did not mean communist theory and practice were utopian—provided certain conditions were met: “it would be utopian to believe that proletarian parties in these backward countries…can pursue communist tactics and a communist policy without establishing definite relations with the peasant movement and without giving it effective support”.19 Lenin, no doubt, had in mind the Russian Revolution, when communists had successfully related to and won support from the peasantry, but his arguments and qualifications here seem designed to challenge over-inflated expectations about what inexperienced communists—as opposed to the well-rooted and well-organised Bolsheviks in Russia—might achieve in the colonial and semi-colonial world.

However, the Indian Marxist Manabendra Nath Roy questioned whether a “bourgeois-democratic” movement would prove as resolute in its opposition to imperialism as Lenin’s theses assumed. This formed the focus of an alternative set of theses, drawn up by Roy. In his original draft, Roy wrote:

[T]he first step towards revolution in the colonies of the bourgeois-nationalist elements may be useful. But the Communist International must not find in them the media through which the revolutionary movement in the colonies should be helped. The mass movements in the colonies are growing independently of the nationalist movements. The masses distrust the political leaders who always lead them astray and prevent them from revolutionary action.20

The historian Alexander Pantsov argues that Roy’s theory as first formulated and retained in garbled form in the amended theses ran as follows:

In India, China, and various other colonial and semi-colonial countries where the prevailing social relations are capitalist, the masses of the exploited are not and cannot be affected by bourgeois nationalism, and the bourgeoisie does not play a revolutionary role. Thus it is necessary to refuse to assist bourgeois democratic movements in those countries. The Communist International must proclaim a course for the socialist revolution which will also accomplish, in passing, national democratic tasks.21

This fits with Roy’s own claim, much later, that “I disagreed with [Lenin’s] view that the nationalist bourgeoisie played a historically revolutionary role and therefore should be supported by the Communists”.22 Pantsov concludes that “Roy exaggerated the significance of the revolutionary process in the Eastern countries for the world revolution”, and that Roy sought the rapid formation of communist parties in colonies and semi-colonies, that could “launch an immediate, uncompromising struggle for revolutionary hegemony”.23

We see here something akin to the ultraleftism that Lenin was at pains to correct in the western communist movements. Roy’s flawed analysis of oppressed countries entailed a dismissal of the potential of nationalist movements and voluntarism about what communists could do.24 Alfred Rosmer’s political memoir of the early days of the Comintern stresses Lenin’s concern to win Roy over:

Lenin replied to him patiently, explaining that, for a shorter or longer period, the Indian Communist Party would only be a small party with few members…incapable of reaching…significant numbers of peasants and workers. On the other hand, on the basis of demands for national independence, it became possible to mobilise great masses…and it was only in the course of this struggle that the Indian Communist Party would forge and develop its organisation in such a way that it would be in a position, when the national demands had been won, to attack the Indian bourgeoisie.25

At the same time, Lenin’s preparedness to accept Roy’s much amended theses as supplementary to his own indicates his tactical flexibility. He must have reckoned that a concession to the talented, if ultraleft, Roy was a price worth paying if it kept him, and those he influenced, within the orbit of the Comintern.26

While Roy was rightly critical of the bourgeoisie in the colonial and semi-colonial world, he was wrong to assume that bourgeois movements for national liberation could not lead mass resistance. In 1919, Mahatma Gandhi called for mass non-cooperation with British India, involving stay aways, civil disobedience and boycotts; in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), leaders of Sarekat Islam, the main national movement whose 1919 conference marked an ideological shift to secularism and socialism, “proved they were serious…by moving immediately to establish Indonesia’s first labour federation”.27

However, the condition of any alliance was the absolute necessity to preserve the ideological and organisational independence of communists from bourgeois nationalists. In practice, this approach, with its unavoidable tensions, would prove to be no easy matter. If one error lay in believing that the communist revolution made the national question redundant, the other—and this would later become a critical question—lay in believing the communist revolution had to be deferred so as not to alienate nationalist allies.28

Theory and practice

I will now turn to the practise of the Comintern, starting with the record of the Bolsheviks in solving their “internal” national question, especially the “colonies” inherited from the Tsarist Empire. Here, it must be emphasised that the mistakes and shortcomings of the Bolsheviks in the period of civil war that followed 1917 have to be weighed against the paramount need for the soviet state simply to survive, threatened as it was with extinction by internal and external enemies. Had it fallen, any hope of world revolution would have been dashed.

The right of the “advanced” nations, such as the Baltic states and Finland, to independence was granted almost as a matter of form. Ukraine was a different matter, complicated by the fact that it was the cockpit for a bitter struggle that pitted Soviet power against the reactionary White Armies and against imperialist intervention, first by Germany then by Allied forces, both French and British.29 The question of the right to self-determination had to be subordinated to the question of survival. Ukrainian “self-determination” under the aegis of imperialism was no independence at all: it simply meant swapping one set of exploiters (Tsarist) for another. There was also the acute realisation that a Ukraine under imperialist domination would deprive the Soviet state of access to vital resources, grain, in particular.

There had to be unity between Russia and Ukraine, but Lenin insisted that it should be a voluntary unity:

If a Great-Russian Communist insists upon the amalgamation of the Ukraine with Russia, Ukrainians might easily suspect him of advocating this policy not from the motive of uniting the proletarians in the fight against capital, but because of the prejudices of the old Great-Russian nationalism, of imperialism. Such mistrust is natural, and to a certain degree inevitable and legitimate, because the Great Russians, under the yoke of the landowners and capitalists, had for centuries imbibed the shameful and disgusting prejudices of Great-Russian chauvinism.30

Rakovsky, the future head of the Soviet Ukrainian government, having been dismissive in 1919 of nationalism in Ukraine as “something ‘imposed on the masses’ by the intelligentsia”, reversed his position.31 He remained committed to union and opposed to separatist tendencies. However, on returning to Ukraine in 1920, after the turmoil in 1919 which had briefly seen nationalist forces hold power, he realised that “sovietisation” (particularly, collectivisation) could not simply be imposed by a Bolshevik party all too easily associated with Russian chauvinism. There had to be an opening up to left-nationalist forces, such as the Borotbists (a left split from the Ukrainian Socialist-Revolutionary Party that eventually merged with the communists) with deep roots in the peasantry that the predominantly urban Bolsheviks lacked.

Some historians, out of general hostility to Leninism, have argued that the commitment to national liberation was only ever nominal—or, worse, a ploy to win the support of nationalist forces to establish Bolshevik control.32 This ignores the social, political and economic context in which the Bolsheviks operated. Preserving the revolution, giving it time to spread, was paramount, forcing some terrible choices on the Bolsheviks.33 Some “left” Bolsheviks tried to justify their centralising tendencies on the grounds that the victory of socialism in the form of Soviet rule made the national question redundant, but this was never the line adopted by Lenin.34

Baku

Turning to the national question in the “backward” countries the Bolsheviks inherited from Tsarism, a Congress of the Peoples of the East was held almost immediately after the Second Congress of the International. Indeed, a good number of Comintern delegates went straight there. It was, then, an extension of sorts of debates at the Second Congress but directed at a much larger and politically much more heterogeneous audience. The total number of registered delegates was 2,050, roughly half of whom were Communist Party members, 20 percent Communist Party supporters and 25 percent “non-party”. That it managed to attract so many delegates is testimony to the extent to which the oppressed in the colonial and semi-colonial world identified with the Russian Revolution.35

The conviction that the masses in the colonial and semi-colonial world faced a common imperialist exploiter lay behind the call to the Baku congress: “If you join with the workers and peasants of Europe and America, you will hasten the downfall of world capitalism and ensure the liberation of workers and peasants throughout the world”.36 The call was directed in particular to Muslims, who made up 10 percent of the Russia that the Bolsheviks inherited from Tsarism (16 million). The Bolshevik demand for self-determination and religious freedom won enormous support from Muslims, many of whom entered en masse not only the new governmental bodies created by the Soviet regime but the Communist Party itself: “approximately 15 percent…were Muslims; in parts of Central Asia, Muslims constituted up to 70 percent of the membership”.37 John Riddell argues that the scale of Muslim support for the Red Army was decisive: it helped “sway the balance in the civil war and push back imperialist invading armies… By early 1919, close to 250,000 working people of Muslim origin were serving in the Red Army under the command of Muslim officers”.38

It was not just the masses who were attracted. In April 1919, the new, would-be progressive, emir of Afghanistan, who was fighting British imperialism, sought help from Moscow. His representative issued a statement saying: “I am neither a communist nor a socialist, but my political programme entails the expulsion of the British from Asia… In this, I approximate to the communists, and in this respect, we are natural allies”.39

In November that year, Lenin argued at the Second Congress of Communist Organisations of the East (Second All-Russian Congress of Muslim Communist Organisations) that “the socialist revolution will not be solely, or chiefly, a struggle against their own bourgeoisie—no, it will be a struggle of all the imperialist-oppressed colonies and countries, of all dependent countries, against international imperialism”.40 Yet, Lenin also warned of the difficulties, of how the general theory and practice of communism had to be adapted to conditions “in which the bulk of the population are peasants, and in which the task is to wage a struggle against mediaeval survivals and not against capitalism”.41 This can be seen in the language used by Grigory Zinoviev at Baku.42 Zinoviev had ended his address to the conference with a call for a jihad (holy war) against imperialism. The film Reds has the US delegate John Reed, author of Ten Days That Shook the World (Boni & Liveright, 1919), exasperated by this. However, rather than seeing his call as an opportunistic concession to his audience, it would be better, as Ben Fowkes and Bulent Gökay argue, to understand it as an instance of the broader need “to support Islamist movements under conditions in which they contested local ruling classes, colonial control, or both”:

This “astonishing alliance” was defended by Lenin with great vigour against those who believed that communists should have no dealings with religious activism: he argued that it was vital to persuade such movements in the “colonial” world that their future lay with the workers of Europe against the imperial powers and that a dual approach was required.43

The alignment between Bolshevism and Muslim sentiment did not involve ideological surrender, as the tensions at the conference showed. The Bolsheviks made clear their commitment to respect the right to Islamic worship and Islamic (sharia) law, in line with the commitment they had made to the right to religious freedom. However, they also overrode objections to women’s participation and insisted that the Baku conference express its commitment to women’s rights.44 Such tensions pointed to a broader problem: the degree to which post-Tsarist Muslim-majority states would be soviet. Establishing soviet regimes risked alienating those who wanted independence but who were suspicious of, if not hostile to, “godless” communism. Not establishing them risked leaving the peasantry and the poor at the mercy of exploitation and opening a back door to hostile foreign interests. The Bolsheviks were necessarily committed to a form of independence that advanced the interests of the peasantry and the poor, hence the call for soviets as a way of giving power to them. Yet, the danger was that if sovietisation was experienced as going too far or too fast, the Muslim poor and the peasantry might be mobilised in opposition by leaders using supposedly shared religious values.

The presence of Enver Pasha, the de facto ruler of the Ottoman state during the war, at Baku was a foreshadowing of this problem. He had a reputation for having led Muslim resistance to the western powers, Britain in particular. With the fall of the Ottoman Empire, and his eclipse by the rising star of the Turkish national movement, Kemal Pasha (Atatürk), he had then turned to Moscow in the hope he could secure Soviet arms and finance to continue a struggle against western imperialism. Although this bourgeois politician may have been a hero to some, to others, including many delegates at Baku, he was the leader who had sacrificed thousands to the war machine and been heavily complicit in the Armenian genocide. His presence posed a dilemma for the Bolsheviks. On the one hand, his support could not be refused due to the high esteem in which he was held for raising Muslim resistance to the British. On the other hand, his enemy, Kemal Pasha, the leader of the new Turkey, also displayed “an active sympathy” for the Soviet government, which the Bolsheviks did not want to lose as it was in their interest to have an anti-imperialist, if bourgeois, state standing between them and the British.45

Enver was not allowed to address the conference, nor was the Kemalist representative. Instead, their written statements were read to the conference. A resolution, directed at Enver, was then put to conference, in which, after sympathising with “all Turkish fighters in combat against world imperialism”, regretted that the national revolutionary movement in Turkey was directed only against foreign aggressors: “success for this movement would in no way signify the emancipation of the Turkish peasants and workers from oppression and exploitation of every kind.” Without mentioning Enver by name, it also criticised leaders who had led “the Turkish peasants and workers to the slaughter in the interests of one of the imperialist groups” and demanded that they “make amends for their false steps”.46

Enver was an early example of nationalist leaders who sought an alliance with the Soviet state for self-serving ends. Even while at Baku, he engaged in fringe discussions to form anti-communist parties favouring the political unification of the Muslim peoples of the former Tsarist empire.47 In 1921, he joined a major anti-Soviet revolt in central Asia, which he attempted (unsuccessfully) to lead, during which he was killed in action.48

If Enver represented one problem faced by the Bolsheviks at the Baku Conference, there was another, more serious one: that of the degree to which Bolshevik practice failed to live up to its high aims. Zinoviev’s closing remarks highlighted the fact that in certain areas people coming under Soviet rule were treated in the same oppressive way as under their Tsarist masters. “Certain elements,” he remarked, “who have attached themselves to the Communist Party act in a way that brings shame on the title of Communist”. These “scions of the old bourgeois Russia who…have wormed their way into our ranks, carrying on the accursed tradition of the bourgeoisie and of tsarism, continue to look upon the local population as an inferior race”.49

The remarks referred particularly to what had happened in Turkestan, Central Asia, in early 1918. The Tashkent soviet government, isolated by civil war, had pursued a thoroughly chauvinist line, with former elements of the tsarist regime brutally oppressing the indigenous Muslim population.50 The Russian railway workers, soldiers and colonists, who constituted the base of the Tashkent Soviet, feared for their survival as a tiny minority in an alien world and were inclined, in Alexander Park’s words, “to interpret the class struggle as a conflict between Muslim and European”.51 This explains why the Bolsheviks’ rejection of Muslim participation in the government and of territorial self-rule took on a brutal “colonial” form.52 With “the killings, the pillaging and the unacceptable and interminable excesses of the soldiers of the Red Army”, Georgy Safarov wrote:

A yawning chasm has been created between the town dominated by the soviets and the indigenous masses. The attitude of the latter can be briefly summed up as: “When will we be finally rid of Russian freedom?” For, as far as they are concerned, Russian freedom means famine and death, cavalry raids by red guards, indiscriminate massacres, large-scale confiscations and arbitrary requisitions.53

Safarov, a leading Bolshevik expert on relations between Soviet power and the peoples of the East, singled out the “unconscious nationalism” that had “infected” the Russian proletarian masses, or at least “their backward sections”. This made them “see the Russian cities as the focal point of the revolution, and the non-Russian villages as the focal point of the petite bourgeoisie”. As a result, they “appl[ied] the same method of attack against these villages as employed against capital”. Conversely, there was “age-old distrust of the non-Russian villages towards the Russian cities and factories. The cities and the factories were developed and fortified on the immense expanses of the peasant world, as centres of Russian colonisation”.54 This identification of the cities and industry as synonymous with Russian colonial oppression meant that when the assault on capital moved beyond the city it came up against an environment “where the classes were not distinguished”, an environment in which the proletariat were seen as indistinguishable from colonisers.

However, it was not only the colonisers who had enslaved the indigenous poor. The upper classes of the indigenous population had also acquired power. As Safarov explains:

instead of helping the toiling masses in the cause of their national-cultural and class self-determination, [they] began to exploit them with ever greater intensity, transferring all the traditional feudal methods of oppression, such as bribery, looting and personal terror under the Soviet roof.55

With the Whites and the British defeated in the region, the unification of Turkestan with Soviet Russia allowed the central authorities to begin to liquidate the survivals of the past. Safarov warns:

If we transplant the communist revolution unaltered, to the backward countries, we can obtain but a single result: to unite the exploited masses with their exploiters in a common struggle for the freedom of national development. In these countries all the nationalisations and socialisations have about as much a basis as the nationalisation of the small peasant’s miniscule exploitation, or that of the cobblers’ awls…

The only remedy…is the labourers’ soviets, which by grouping the exploited together must end class inequality, give the land to the poor, free the artisan from the usurious intermediaries, liberate the toilers from drudgery and taxes, begin the education of the masses and the radical betterment of their conditions of existence, all at the public expense. This entire programme has not a single communist element. It is only after its realisation that the preparation for communism can begin among the backwards people.56

Before moving on, I will briefly draw attention to the opposite phenomenon, not the major one of Bolsheviks succumbing to national chauvinism but a lesser one of Bolshevik adaptation to Islam. The representative figure here is Sultan Galiev, a leading Bolshevik, member of the Central Muslim Commissariat and the commissariat of nationalities, who, along with Safarov, was a delegate from the Tatar Communist Party to the Comintern Second Congress. He came to believe that Marxism should be modified to fit Islamic society. Instead of a soviet state being established in central Asia, there should be, to quote Fowkes and Gökay:

an autonomous state…that would be ruled not by the Russians but by a Muslim communist party. [This party] would not introduce socialism, and the social revolution against the exploiting classes, including the “backward Muslim clergy”, would be postponed to a distant future.57

Galiev also was sceptical about the role of the industrial proletariat in the advanced countries, believing that it had more of an interest in taking over the system for its own benefit than in destroying it for the benefit of the colonised peoples. The colonial peoples therefore needed their own revolutionary
international. Eventually, he was expelled from the Bolshevik Party—by Stalin.

The Congress of the Toilers of the East

Where the Baku conference was aimed largely at a Muslim audience, the Congress of the Toilers of the Far East—which took place in January-February 1922, halfway between the third and fourth Comintern congresses—was aimed at developments mainly in Japan, China, Korea and Mongolia. The religious element was absent. It was a much smaller affair than Baku, with some 148 recorded delegates, mostly Communist Party members from these countries. Zinoviev was its chair, as he had been of the Baku conference. Of the other Russian speakers, the most important was Safarov, who gave the above-mentioned report on the national-colonial question.58

The international context is important. The real victor in the First World War had not been Britain or France but their transatlantic ally, the United States, which emerged virtually unscathed from the conflict. It sought to strengthen its global role, particularly in the Pacific. To that end, in mid-1921, it called the Washington Conference. The talk there of disarmament and justice for subject peoples was a smokescreen. The real purpose was to curb Japanese territorial and economic ambitions and challenge Britain’s naval supremacy. The US sought not the ending of imperialist oppression of subject peoples but the reconfiguration of imperialist rivalries to its advantage.

The fact that Soviet Russia had not been invited struck the Soviet leaders as ominous. They had no illusions in the Washington Conference, their participation would have been an opportunity to expose its real purpose, but their exclusion appeared as a new threat, this time in the east where Soviet power was still fragile. The regime had beaten its domestic and European enemies, but at a terrible price. The last thing it wanted was anything that might impede some kind of temporary normalisation of relations with the imperialist world. Internally, the regime faced mounting economic discontent, particularly among the peasantry, which saw no reason to continue with the system of requisitioning to feed the cities now that the civil war was over. The Soviet state desperately needed to rebuild its shattered economy. In the absence of immediate revolution in an advanced country that could bring it material aid, the regime was forced both to make concessions to petty capitalism at home (for instance by introducing the New Economic Policy, NEP) and to seek agreements with the economically more “advanced” capitalist world beyond its borders.

The year 1921 saw the first breach in the cordon sanitaire round the embattled state. The week after the Bolshevik Party introduced the NEP, Soviet Russia signed a trade agreement with Britain. Louis Fischer, a journalist with connections to leading Soviet figures, would reflect later, in 1930, on the Anglo-Soviet commercial treaty’s promise to refrain from anti-British propaganda. This move, of great significance given the Comintern’s commitment to national liberation in colonies like India, he said, “gave the British much more than the mere cessation of pamphlet, proclamation and agent activity. It was the Soviet acceptance of the status quo. It was a pledge not to spread revolution by armed force”.59 This is far too one-sided an interpretation—in essence, a projection backwards of the kind of realpolitik that came with Stalin’s ascendency from the mid- to late 1920s onwards. However, necessary though concessions to both domestic and foreign capital were, they produced an implicit division of labour between the Soviet state (operating as part of the state system) and the Comintern (operating to overthrow the states with which the Soviets were negotiating). Making deals with the devil, as Leon Trotsky put it, was unavoidable if the citadel of Soviet power was to remain an inspiration to those outside it to overthrow the devil. However, the contradiction of concessions to the devil in order to fight the devil could not be sustainable.60

With the non-invitation to the Washington Conference an initial plan was hatched to call a rival intergovernmental conference—an initiative “from above”, reflecting the Soviet state’s wish to be recognised as a legitimate participant in world affairs. When this came to nothing, the Congress of the Toilers of the East was the result. This was, by contrast, a Baku-style initiative “from below”.61 However, there was pressure to play down the Congress. Georgy Chicherin, the Soviet foreign secretary, wrote to Lenin to express his concern that openly proceeding might be risky: “It is…necessary…to avoid everything that might suggest the idea of a link between our government and the congress.” His advice to hold it “behind closed doors” was rejected.62 The fact that the Congress went ahead as planned is testimony to the fact that this was still a Comintern committed to international revolution. However, the potential for the “national” interests of the Soviet state to take priority over those of the Comintern was clear.

Much of the Congress itself was devoted to detailed reports by delegates of the economic, social and political realities of their countries. There was only one political clash. Zinoviev accused some adherents of the Chinese Guomindang (KMT) of looking to the US, a charge emphatically denied by the non-communist delegate sent by Sun Yat-sen: “There can be no desire on the part of the KMT to accept American bourgeois democracy”.63 Zinoviev was, however, correct in his suspicions. Sun Yat-sen had written several times to the US president and his Canton government had attempted to raise money on the US bond market.64 This clash was another harbinger of problems ahead.

The most important theoretical contribution came with Safarov’s report on the national-colonial question. He took up the question of the development of the “backward” countries of East Asia, with particular reference to China. Like Zinoviev, he condemned any illusion that an understanding with the US would bring genuine independence: the US was merely interested in exploiting the country for its cheap labour and raw materials. Only by taking radical bourgeois-democratic measures—nationalising the land, overthrowing warlordism, creating a republic and introducing a uniform income tax—could Chinese democrats hope to win their struggle for national independence. As for the Chinese proletariat, “We do not expect,” said Safarov, “the Chinese working class to take the commanding position which the Japanese workers [will be] able to [attain] in the near future”.65 Nevertheless, “the Chinese labour movement, the Chinese workers, must tread their own path, must not bind their fate to this or that democratic party or to bourgeois elements of one sort or another”. He adds:

We know perfectly well that in the near future there can be no sharp conflict between us and the bourgeois democratic elements organised in the national revolutionary organisation. But at the same time we must tell these bourgeois democratic elements that in as much as they endeavour to keep down the Chinese labour movement, in as much as they try to use the Chinese trade unions for their own petty political purposes…preaching class harmony between labour and capital, to that extent will we keep up a determined fight against them. We support any national revolutionary movement, but we support it only in so far as it is not directed against the proletarian movement.

He reinforced the point by adding that it would be as equally treacherous for supporters of the communist cause not to “support the national revolutionary movement” as it would be for supporters of the national cause to “fight against the awakening of the proletarian movement”. 66 For Safarov, there could be no talk of a soviet republic before the toiling Chinese masses were ready for it. Nevertheless, communists had to bring “light, culture and Communist ideas” to the peasantry so as to avoid isolation. China, he went on to argue, is, “not confronted with an impending Communist revolution, with immediate sovietisation”. However, “the gospel of the idea of soviets…must be preached.” He emphasised:

Soviets are the best weapons in the hands of the toilers of every country, whether it has a predominantly proletarian population or is a peasant country. The experience of the revolutionary movement in the Near East and in Central Asia most convincingly proves it, and this experience cannot pass the Far East without leaving a trace.67

The analysis contains an unresolved ambiguity. On the one hand, China is not yet ripe for sovietisation (ie for the soviet form of government). On the other hand, soviets must still be preached because they are the best form of struggle for the toiling majority. Safarov urges a unity of aims between democrats and communists, but unity would surely disappear if soviets got beyond a matter of “preaching” and formed part of a real struggle—and, indeed, what would be the point of preaching if practice were not to follow? Hence, the demand for unity would seem to necessarily involve a self-denying ordnance on the part of communists.

Zinoviev’s earlier contribution was even less clear.68 “Soviets,” he argues, “are possible even there where the proletariat is not numerous and where there is a preponderance of [peasants]. We are not speaking of soviets in the wide sense of the word, but of the watchword of soviets… You may boldly state that we advocate the soviet system. This form of government is possible in countries with no industrial proletariat”.69 The “boldness” is at odds with the qualification he makes, namely, that the call was not for soviets “in the wide sense of the word” (so, not as a form of government?) but as a “watchword” (so, as a piece of propaganda?).

The issue goes beyond lack of clarity (Zinoviev) or ambiguity (Safarov)—it reflects the deeper issue that faced the Russian Revolution of 1917. Were conditions not yet ripe for soviet power? If so, one might offer conditional support to the bourgeois provisional government “insofar as its activities
correspond to the interests of the proletariat and of the broad democratic masses of the people”, as some Bolsheviks argued early in the revolution.70 Or was soviet power the only way to satisfy the bourgeois demands (notably, land to the peasants) that the bourgeois government was incapable of granting out of fear of revolutionary struggle? Lenin’s answer was the second, in effect a belated and unacknowledged recognition of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution, described by its originator as “the revolutionary conception according to which the bourgeois revolution would not be able to solve its problems without placing the proletariat in power”.71

This relates to a second issue, whether the peasantry is capable of taking power for itself. In an appendix to his History of the Russian Revolution, Trotsky is unequivocal on the matter. After asking if the peasantry could crowd out the proletariat and occupy its place, he replies: “That is impossible. All the experience of history protests against this assumption. It shows that the peasantry is completely incapable of playing an independent political role”.72 That incapacity would, by implication, also limit the role peasant soviets could play. Confusion over these issues goes some way to explaining the slippages in Zinoviev’s and Safarov’s discussion of soviets.

What if conditions were very different from those that in Russia? What if the “backwardness” of colonial and semi-colonial countries oppressed by imperialism was such that it lacked the industrial working class capable of fulfilling the role assigned to it by Trotsky? The best one could expect would be the achievement of national liberation, with, at its centre, the (peasant) soviets which, under communist influence, would look to the Russian Soviet (proletarian) state as representing their interests.73 This would strengthen the hegemony of the Soviet state and enable the newly liberated countries to advance towards socialism. However, the lack of a proletariat hardly applied to China—the similarities with Russia were greater than the differences, despite China being more “backward”. China also had, in the KMT, the kind of progressive bourgeois-revolutionary organisation with which communists could ally—and its leader professed admiration for Lenin and the Soviet state. The KMT had a significant relationship with the masses. “A key factor” in the “tempestuous development” of the Chinese workers’ movement in the early 1920s, argues Pierre Broué, a Trotskyist historian of the Comintern, was “the massive support from the [Guomindang], which organised many strikers”, among them the 1922 Hong Kong sailors’ strike backed by Sun Yat-sen’s government.74

However, its support was selective. Workers’ action against foreign-owned enterprises was one thing; workers’ action that might damage domestic interests, another. Alexander Pantsov points to the failure of the 1923 Beijing-Hankou railway strike because “the Communist-led workers, having raised social demands, did not receive any support” from the KMT.75 This was a warning to the young Chinese Communist Party to build forces capable of acting independently of the KMT to protect and advance working class interests and to stop any backsliding by nationalist forces, which, as we noted earlier, were not consistently anti-imperialist. This was no easy matter.

The question was posed acutely by the tactic of entryism. In early 1923, the Comintern instructed the Chinese Communist Party to join the KMT as individual members. The initiative came from Maring (his real name was Henk Sneevliet), the Comintern representative in China. He had been a Dutch
revolutionary active in Java (in the Dutch East Indies) and drew on his experience of entry work in the mass Islamic nationalist movement, the Sarekat Islam. At the Second Congress of the Comintern, the same year in which the Indonesian Communist Party was founded, Sneevliet could claim success for the policy of entering, “a mass movement, which has around 1.5 million members”:

Although the name of this organisation—Sarekat Islam—is religious, it has taken on a class character. This movement’s programme encompasses the struggle against sinful capitalism, a struggle directed not only against the government but also against the Javanese nobles. From this you can appreciate that the revolutionary socialist movement must establish strong ties with this mass organisation, with Sarekat Islam.76

Now, he argues, communists should “simply enter the Guomindang and use its loose organisational structure as a means for developing their own propaganda and contacts among the masses”.77 Initial opposition to entry among some Chinese communist members, worried that such a step would “confuse class organisations and curb our independence.” It would give way to acceptance that “cooperation with the revolutionary bourgeoisie is the necessary road for the Chinese proletariat” and that “in Sun Yat-sen’s group in Canton there was the nucleus of the kind of national-revolutionary movement to which Lenin had referred at the Second Congress of the Comintern”.78

However, a different emphasis was to emerge, one that had less to do with opening up opportunities for Chinese communists and more to do with building the KMT. The January 1923 resolution of the Comintern executive stressed the necessity of organising “a powerful centralised party to act as the headquarters of the national revolutionary movement” and that only the KMT could be that party. As for the Communist Party itself, it could not be developed into a mass organisation in the near future “because the working class [had] not become powerful”.79 This resolution was adopted at the Third Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in June 1923. The need for some kind of democratic alliance between the CCP and the KMT was one thing, if only to overcome the sectarian isolation of the former, but the resolution seemed to be arguing that only the KMT could be built under current circumstances. In that case, the necessity simultaneously urged on the party to “maintain its independent organisation…to organise the working masses, to build trade unions and thus establish a basis for a powerful mass communist party” was rendered problematic.80

Significantly, 1923 was the year in which Soviet Russia and the KMT reached an agreement over sending Soviet armaments and advisors to China. The agreement suited both sides: Soviet Russia acquired an ally against imperialism and the KMT could strengthen itself organisationally and militarily. The joint declaration of principles, signed that year by Adolf Joffe on behalf of the Soviet state and by Sun Yat-sen stated:

Dr Sun is of the opinion that, because of the non-existence of conditions favourable to their successful application in China, it is not possible to carry out Communism or even the Soviet system in China. M. Joffe agrees entirely with this view; he is further of the opinion that China’s most important and most pressing problems are the completion of national unification and the attainment of full national independence. With regard to these great tasks, M. Joffe has assured Dr Sun of the Russian people’s warmest sympathy for China, and of (their) willingness to lend support.81

Broué stresses that when this statement first appeared in Izvestia (News), the phrase about China not being ripe for communism was omitted.82 What are we to make of this? On the one hand, the idea that China was not yet ready for Communism or “even the Soviet system” reflected one strand of Comintern thinking we have touched on. On the other hand, the omission of that sentence seems to reflect a worry that this was a concession too far to Sun Yat-sen. Yet, the agreement with Sun Yat-sen was in conformity with the resolution we have just seen. It, in effect, subordinated building the CCP to building the KMT. What we seem to have here is an example of an emerging tendency as noted earlier: for the interests of the Comintern to be subsumed by those of the Soviet state. In this case, it calls into question the position taken by the second congress—that support for bourgeois liberation movements was conditional on communists being able to pursue their independent politics.

The year 1923 was not just crucial for the development of the Comintern’s Chinese policy. The failure of the revolution in Germany—which, had it succeeded, might have changed the course of history—did not receive an honest accounting of the mistakes made by the German and Russian party leaders. Instead, its weaponisation by Zinoviev, then engaged in a struggle against “Trotskyism”, to exempt the Comintern from all blame, marked a decisive step to putting the needs of the bureaucracy above those of international revolution. This was a step towards the Stalinist thesis of socialism in one country, a process that would now engulf the development of the Chinese revolution, up till then one of real promise.

Initially, the CCP was not much hindered by its alliance with the KMT. On 1 June 1925, a general strike, with communists in its leadership, spread from Shanghai to all major cities. Insofar as it was a strike against foreign capital, the KMT went along with it. However, once it became clear that the CCP—now a mass party with thousands of members and at the heart of a strike committee (“Government Number Two”)—was close to becoming an alternative to the formal state, right-wing bourgeois elements of the KMT became determined to “use, control and then destroy the mass movement”.83

Chiang Kai-shek, who had succeeded Sun Yat-sen after his death in 1925, was their man. The weapons and the training funnelled his way as a result of the Soviet agreement meant that he now had a well-trained and effective army—one that could be used against the foreign enemy but also against the working class and political opposition to the KMT. If the CCP had benefited from entryism, achieving greater freedom to act, and shaping elements of the KMT, the social forces looking to Chiang Kai-shek to protect their interests benefited more so.84 The KMT tolerated the mass movement up to a point. Faced with the 1925 general strike, it could no longer do so. In 1926,
Chiang Kai-shek launched his first military coup, introducing martial law, locking up leading communists and arresting “Government Number Two”. The claim that an alliance between the CCP and KMT served the interests of the working class could no longer be maintained.

The CCP now proposed breaking the alliance but was refused Comintern permission to withdraw from the KMT. It was told to submit to Chiang Kai-shek’s demands—to stop all criticism of KMT principles, to give its membership lists to the KMT executive, to seek permission to implement Comintern instructions, to remove all communist heads of departments—and to make a formal apology for the party’s “misdemeanours”.85 Borodin, now the Comintern representative in China and an advisor to the KMT, stated: “The present period is one in which the Communists should do coolie service for the Guomindang”.86

Worse still, the Soviet bureaucracy painted the KMT in false colours: the KMT was not just a revolutionary organisation, it claimed, but one “playing the same role in the East” as the Bolsheviks had in Russia, which would “destroy the foundation of the rule of the imperialists in Asia”.87 The Comintern even admitted the KMT into its ranks, with only Trotsky voting against in the Soviet Politburo. From being a nationalist party of the liberal bourgeoisie, with which the Communists might be in temporary alliance, it was redefined as a “revolutionary bloc of the workers, peasants, intellectuals, and urban democracy [ie, the bourgeoisie] on the basis of a community of class interests of these strata in the struggle against the imperialists and whole militarist-feudal order”.88

This meant abandoning the central thesis of the early Comintern: the need for parties able to pursue independent working-class politics to a revolutionary conclusion. The party was in effect to be liquidated. Communists now had to restrain the mass movement to keep it within limits acceptable to the bourgeoisie. Naturally, the beneficiary was Chiang Kai-shek, now feted by the Comintern as a revolutionary, whose second coup, in 1927, after seizing control of Shanghai, involved a bloodbath in which workers’ organisations were utterly destroyed. Not even this disaster could force the Comintern leadership to admit the flaws in its strategy. Initially, Stalin denied Chiang Kai-shek had staged a counter-revolutionary coup. When, finally, the reality had to be admitted, Stalin and his agent in China swung from ordering the Chinese Party to uncritically back the bourgeois demands of the KMT to ordering it, in 1927, to stage a “communist” uprising in Canton, led by a “soviet” magicked out of thin air with no roots in the working class.

This lurch from tail-ending bourgeois nationalism to a revolutionary coup might seem paradoxical. What it reflected was an abandonment of the working class as the agent of change. Either the “progressive” bourgeoisie replaced it or the party acted as a substitute for the working class. Events in China were the first, and most disastrous, example of this process, but not the last. It spelt the destruction of the policy that the early Comintern congresses had mapped out for revolution in the colonial and semi-colonial world.

It seems clear that the decision to enter the KMT, described by Nigel Harris as “not much more than the personal following of Sun and his associates”, was undertaken without much clarity. 89 Was entry opposed by any leading Bolsheviks? At the time it seems not, though later, in a letter to Max Shachtman in December 1930, Trotsky stated that he “personally was from the beginning, that is, from 1923, resolutely opposed” to this policy.90 Doubts about this claim are largely irrelevant.91 The real problem was twofold. On the one hand, Trotsky only began to articulate a critique of Comintern policy in the mid-1920s, in response to the events just described, drawing on his theory of permanent revolution. On the other, he felt obliged, once Zinoviev had broken with Stalin to form the United Opposition of 1926 to 1927, not to raise the issue of entry into the KMT, for which Zinoviev, as head of the Comintern in 1923, had been responsible and which Zinoviev continued to defend.92 As Trotsky admits in the same letter to Shachtman, his silence on this issue was a mistake.

The disastrous course of events in China was a reflection of the Comintern’s revival of the Menshevik “stages theory”, in which, contrary to Trotsky’s conception, the bourgeoisie had to lead a bourgeois revolution before the issue of socialism could be placed on the agenda. It was this logic that required the “coolie service” Borodin ordered the communists to perform. The string of analyses that Trotsky penned from the mid-1920s, the force of which is apparent in Harold Isaacs’ The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution, showed the relevance of the theory of permanent revolution.93 Trotsky argued that an alternative outcome was possible, one in which a revolution led by the working class in so “backward” a country as China could have been successful. This involved a stinging critique of the degeneration of the Communist International under Stalin.94

Conclusion

What I have outlined here is the failure of the Comintern to bring about anti-imperialist revolutions in the colonial and semi-colonial world in the way Lenin and his co-thinkers believed was possible: an alliance between anti-imperialist bourgeois-revolutionary forces and communists. This was not down to objective circumstances. Rather, one has to look to the subjective factor, including the miscalculations and ideological errors committed by the Comintern, which bore poisonous fruit in China. It is also worth asking another question. Was the problem just one of failing to implement the strategy outlined by Lenin at the Second Congress? Or was the very notion of an alliance between communists and revolutionary bourgeois nationalists, an alliance of adversaries, to borrow the title of John Sexton’s edition of the proceedings of the Congress of the Toilers of the Far East, unrealisable, however desirable it may have been? In a sense, this is to return to the issue raised by Roy’s theses.

The judgement I reached earlier in this article was that the differences between Lenin and Roy, differences which Roy toned down following discussion, were not sufficient to cause a rift that might have derailed the Comintern’s attempt to relate to broader anti-imperialist forces awakened by war and the Bolshevik revolution. Duncan Hallas, with the benefit of hindsight, argues that the Chinese revolution of 1925-7 decisively exposed the contradictions in Comintern policy: the contradiction between the reality of bourgeois nationalist movements and hope that they could be genuinely revolutionary. As he bluntly puts it: “The ‘bourgeois liberation movement’ which does not fear the arousal of ‘the mass of the exploited’ is not to be found in the 20th century”.95

We should, though, also remember that the Comintern had changed. By the time of Stalin’s ascendancy, the tendency for the needs of the Soviet state to be perceived as having priority over those of the international revolution became settled policy. The subordination of the CCP to the KMT was the first such major example. Stalin took this logic to its ultimate conclusion, with the Comintern becoming an adjunct of the bureaucracy’s foreign policy and losing any purpose it still retained under Zinoviev. Therefore, the high hopes of the Second Congress were dashed—and when the colonial empires eventually came to end, as they did after Second World War, they did so in very different ways from those envisaged by the early Comintern.

Does that then mean the debates in the congresses we have been examining are now irrelevant? Far from it. Although today’s world is different from that of the 1920s, the question of national liberation and the struggle against imperialism remains alive, no more so than in the Middle East where the long agony of the Palestinian people remains unresolved—and will do for so long as the right to self-determination is not harnessed to workers’ revolution in the region. Due allowance made for the way in which the world has changed, there are still lessons to be learnt from the early Comintern.

Gareth Jenkins is a retired lecturer. His translation of Pierre Broué’s Histoire de l’Internationale communiste, 1919-1943 is awaiting publication.

Notes