Communist International

The Comintern (from Communist International) is a commonly-used name for the Third International. It was formed on the initiative of Lenin and the Russian Communist Party (later the Communist Party of the Soviet Union or CPSU), as they were of the opinion that the Second International had betrayed socialism by the support of its major sections for the First World War.

Founded in March 1919 the Comintern would hold seven World Congresses, the last in 1935, until it was dissolved in 1943. Left communists today recognise only the first two congresses and the Trotskyist movement recognises the decisions of the first four only. But all seven traditionally form the bedrock of the mainstream Communist Parties.

Lenin had previously written of his extreme disgust with the way in which many European Social-Democrats had failed to oppose World War I, and was particularly critical of individuals such as Karl Kautsky and Ramsay MacDonald, disparagingly describing them as Social-Chauvinists (socialists in words, chauvinists in deeds).

This failure of the Second International Social-Democrats prompted the Bolsheviks to adopt the name Communist in place of Social-Democrat, and to convoke the Third International.

Central to the policy of Comintern was that Communist parties should be established across the world to aid the international proletarian revolution, and the idea of democratic centralism, which involved rigid control of the Communist Party from the centre.

Whilst the Comintern was supposedly an international organisation, it was effectively controlled by the Soviet Union.

For a party to join the Comintern it had to accept 21 conditions. Some of these were:

To carry out propaganda in the countryside and cities in favour of proletarian revolution
To remove reformists and centrists from positions in the working class movement
To combine legal and illegal methods of working
To supervise the activities of any members in parliament
To denounce pacifism
To support colonial liberation movements
To ensure trade unions join the 'red' trade union international rather than the 'yellow' Amsterdam one.
To organise on the basis of democratic centralism and to have regular purges of membership
To support all existing Soviet republics
To revise its party programme with policies of the International
To accept all decisions of the Comintern as binding
To take the name 'Communist Party'
To expel all members who voted against any of the 21 conditions

The first Chairman of the Comintern's Executive Committee was Grigory Zinoviev from 1919 to 1926 when he was dismissed after falling out with Stalin. Nikolai Bukharin led the Comintern for two years until 1928 until he too fell out with Stalin. Stalin himself led the organisation thereafter.

In 1938 Leon Trotsky formed the Fourth International as a rival to the Comintern believing that the Third International had become thoroughly bureaucratised and Stalinized and was no longer capable of regenerating itself into a revolutionary organization.

The Comintern was dissolved by Stalin on May 15, 1943 by Stalin who wished to reassure his World War II Allies, particularly Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill that the USSR was no longer pursuing a policy of trying to foment revolution in the western democracies.

In 1947 the Cominform or Communist Information Bureau was created as a substitute. It was an informal network made up of the Communist parties of Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, France, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Romania, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia. It was dissolved in 1956.

While the pro-Moscow Communist parties of the world no longer had a formal international organisation they still took their leadership from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and would have periodic meetings in Moscow, the most notable one being in 1962 where the Sino-Soviet split became public for the first time. There was especially close coordination between the CPSU and the Communist Parties of the Warsaw Pact.