Stalin and the Comintern

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Lominadze, in the course of his struggle against Stalin, circulated a conversation he had had with him about the Comintern: "The Comintern represents nothing and it ekes out its existence only because of our support." Stalin, as is his custom, denied he had said this. All those who know Stalin and his attitude toward the Comintern, however, do not doubt for a moment that Lominadze was telling the truth.

By this we do not want to imply that Stalin's statement corresponds to the reality. On the contrary, the Comintern lives irrespective of the support of Stalin. The Comintern lives by virtue of the ideas on which it is based, by virtue of October, and, primarily, by virtue of the contradictions of capitalism. In the past — and we hope in the future — these factors have been stronger than the bureaucratic financial noose which Stalin calls support.

But the "aphorism" which we have quoted expresses better than anything else the real attitude of Stalin and Co. toward the Comintern and supplements perfectly the theory of socialism in one country.

In 1925, when the kulak course of that policy was in full bloom, Stalin did not feel at all ashamed to express his contempt for the Comintern and for the leaders of its sections. When Stalin with Zinoviev's consent proposed at the Politburo to pull Maslow out of the archives and send him to Germany, Bukharin, then a follower of Stalin and Zinoviev but not taken into confidence about all their plots, objected: "Why Maslow? … You know this person very well. … It is impossible, etc. …" To which Stalin replied: "They have all been baptized with the same holy water. In general there are no revolutionaries among them. Maslow is no worse than the others."

During a consultation concerning a certain concession [to foreign capitalist investors], one of the members of the Politburo remarked: "To grant it for forty or for fifty years makes no difference. We must assume that by that time the revolution will not have left any trace of the concessionaires." "The revolution?" Stalin rejoined. "Do you think the Comintern will accomplish this? Forget it. It will not bring about a revolution in ninety years." Is it necessary to recall once again the contemptuous remarks of Stalin about the "emigres," that is, about the Bolsheviks who had worked in the parties of the European proletariat?

Such was the general spirit in the Politburo. A haughty and contemptuous attitude toward the West European Communists was required for good form. "Do you really think that Purcell and Cook will make the revolution in England?" asked the Oppositionists. "And you perhaps think that your British Communists will make the revolution?" was Tomsky's retort.

The attitude toward the Communist parties of the East was still more contemptuous, if that is possible. Only one thing was required of the Chinese Communists: to keep quiet so as not to disturb Chiang Kai-shek in the performance of his work.

It is not at all difficult to imagine the juicy expression this philosophy takes from the mouth of Voroshilov, with his inclination to all types of chauvinism. In the sessions of the delegation of the Russian Communist Party, immediately preceding the plenum of the Executive Committee of the Comintern in 1926, Voroshilov "defended" Thälmann with his characteristic competence, almost like this: "Where can they find better ones? They haven't any revolutionaries. Of course, if we could give them our Uglanov, he would conduct their affairs in an entirely different manner. For them, Uglanov would be another Bebel." This became a winged phrase. Uglanov in the role of a communist Bebel in Germany! At that time Voroshilov apparently had not foreseen that Uglanov would some day become a "pillar of the kulaks" and an "agent of the saboteurs." Yet even today Voroshilov himself does not doubt that the 1925 policy was the best of all policies.

So we see that Lominadze has reported nothing new. His testimony only bears witness to the fact that the attitude toward the Comintern expressed within the top inner circle has not changed after all these years. And how could it? Lominadze's testimony fades, becomes absolutely superfluous before the fact that the leadership of the international proletarian vanguard is today wholly abandoned to the Manuilskys, the Kuusinens, and the Lozovskys, the people who in the USSR are not and cannot be taken seriously.

No. The Comintern does not live because of the support of the Stalinist bureaucracy, but despite it. The sooner it frees itself from this support, the sooner it will regenerate itself and rise to the level of its historic tasks.