Stalin’s envoys

Here is a small, particularly dense work on the Cominternists, these communists from all countries, actors of the Communist International (IC), or Comintern, founded at the call of Lenin in 1919 and dissolved by Stalin in 1943. Brigitte Studer estimates their total number at nearly 10,000, who are either in Moscow, in the apparatus, or on mission to the stranger. On a subject that has long been mistreated (in both senses of the term), the work should become a reference for all those interested in the enigma of communism in the XX^e century.

The role of the Communist International, this global party of communism, was for a long time unknown, due to lack of sources, and interpreted through the prism of conspiracy history: were these emissaries not clandestine and their activities secret? For many historians, it was through his relay that the power of theUSSRAnd ultimatelyby Stalin himself, on the communist parties which were only sections of it. Hence the accusations long made against them of being only “parties from abroad”. The conditions were therefore ripe for the history of the Comintern to fuel the conspiracyism of eager analysts, eager, by flirting with irrationalism, to sell thrills. This scientific synthesis of work carried out over more than thirty years (partly thanks to the archives of the RGASPI in Moscow, now accessible), led in particular by the author herself, but which are unfortunately only known to specialists, deserves to be meditated on.

Life and death of internationalism

Brigitte Studer, professor of history at the University of Bern, after a thesis in social history devoted to the Swiss Communist Party, gradually attached herself to the international dimension of the history of communism by favoring the analysis of its institutions and its actors, the famous Cominternians. The study is therefore firmly anchored to biographical and prosopographical research, while questioning, in this way, all the issues in the history of Sovietism or, in other words, of Stalinism.

In this work, the author takes up several studies previously published in different languages ​​(German, English, French), now problematized in a vigorous introduction under the auspices of Reinhart Koselleck and his conception of “expectation”, this future present fact, as a condition of commitment (p. 4). The Cominternists are at the heart of this communist identity in its utopian dimension of the 1920s and 1930s, which is also a necessarily “transnational” dimension. We must never forget that before the re-nationalization of the communist imagination and state practices, “internationalism was omnipresent not only in the thinking of leaders but also in Soviet public practices” (p. 5). As Vassili Grossman points out in his novel, Life and Destinythe Second World War was the vector, in USSRof the blossoming of a national feeling “until then underground” (p. 627).

The period studied – 1919-1943 – is therefore fundamental for investigating the mystery of this alchemy which transformed everything into its opposite: equality into claimed inequality, materialism into spiritualism (a story which curiously echoes the current return of Confucius in People’s China), internationalism as nationalism, Marxist rationalism as a state religion, new education as a re-use of pedagogical traditionalism, women’s liberation as a reconfiguration of male domination, revolutionary youth as a communist gerontocracy. This means that this period plunges us into a world that is difficult to imagine and today covered by the representations which characterize victorious Stalinism, that of the post-Second World War, where words only served to prolong the agony of an egalitarian and internationalist utopia which was still that of the Cominternians.

Make no mistake: Brigitte Studer does not intend to rehabilitate through gang a period of communist history to the detriment of its Stalinist future, to save Lenin by demonizing Stalin. With this study, it is, on the contrary, a matter of coldly thinking about a story that concerns us first and foremost because it poses the, after all classic, question of the Revolution, rationally desirable – how to accept political irrationalism and its misdeeds? – but often historically detestable (here the Great Terror, the Gulag, summary executions, political lying elevated to the art of government, the return to values ​​of order in the name of “Marxism”, etc.).

Travelers and victims of the Revolution

The men (but also the women), the activists, who experienced this symbolic upheaval, this renationalization of the communist imagination and these reinvestments of the values ​​of order, had obviously diverse destinies, of those who, very early on, lost communist influence to those who, until the end, remained faithful, sometimes with a superficial loyalty that was gradually devitalized. B. Studer begins his story by placing himself in Paris in the summer of 1933, when three members of the Communist International met: the German Willi Münzenberg, the Bohemian Otto Katz and the Hungarian Arthur Koestler, with the task of countering the Nazi propaganda machine. Koestler, she recalls, left the Party in 1938, Münzenberg died in 1940 in still unexplained circumstances after having denounced the German-Soviet Pact, while Katz, a model Cominternian, waited, if we dare say, 1952 to be caught up in the story. Arrested in Prague as part of the Slansky trial, named after the main Czechoslovak leader incriminated in this repetition of the “Great Trials” in Moscow, he was sentenced to death and executed.

These internationalist travelers are only three of the figures of these Cominternists who, from 1919 to 1943, were “professional revolutionaries (who) dedicated all or part of their lives to a total distinctive commitment and (who) sometimes also lost it” ( p.2). From mission to mission, they are at the heart of the global geopolitical issues of the interwar period and the history of communism. As such, they are privileged actors whose personal history, often tormented, takes place on the multiple stages of the political game. The Comintern “was transnational and, in the words of Jürgen Osterhammel, a social space beyond the national cultures that configured it” (p. 5). He had the whole world as his field of action.

In this transnational perspective, four main circulation channels must be analyzed according to B. Studer:

The processes of formation and imposition of common political goals; structural links aimed at a unified and centralized organization; personnel exchanges; and finally, the formation of a culture through the integration of communists into a global system and a specific way of life, as the French communist writer Paul Nizan describes it in The Conspiracy (1938): “communism is is politics but also a lifestyle.” (pp. 9-10)

The Comintern, comprising 67 national sections at the beginning of the 1930s, was in fact a complex bureaucratic organization, in continual transformation, both structural and political (p. 11). Taking up the periodization proposed by Franz Borkenau in 1938, B. Studer distinguishes several phases:

At its beginnings, the Comintern sought to promote world revolution, then it became a tool in Russian factional struggles, before, finally, becoming primarily an instrument of Soviet foreign policy. (p.11)

B. Studer offers a study of “Stalinism” through this entry route, in my opinion particularly heuristic. Comintern actors, as well as foreign communists living in USSRfar from being protected, were mass victims of Stalinist repression at the end of the 1930s. As B. Studer recalls, “the Comintern was a focal point for the paranoia that Stalin maintained towards the foreign spies”: “All of you in the Comintern are playing directly into the enemy’s hands,” the latter wrote to the Secretary General of the Comintern, Georgi Mikhailov Dimitrov, in February 1937.

But the Cominternians were first and foremost actors of a “civilization of self-report “, of which Party autobiographies and self-critiques were the key words, and actors monitored, examined, trained, oriented thanks to specific institutions which today offer researchers a considerable documentary mass and are at the principle of a vast field international research institute which is sometimes called the “ soviet subjectivities “. B. Studer played a key role in the development of this field, as a historian attentive to the multiple “paradigmatic” developments, from which she borrows tools and conceptualizations. We will find in this book a summary of his contributions.

It is certainly futile to try to summarize the developments of this synthesis which, in 8 short chapters, covers a number of fundamental themes. After having defined the Bolshevik model, B. Studer successively studies “the new woman”, the life of the Cominternists in Stalin’s Moscow, the Soviet Party practices in which they engage, their transformation into “real” Bolsheviks (and the “technical of oneself” that this supposes), the relationships between the Party and private life, the modalities of another possible individual future, which allows one to move from the status of comrade to that of spy.

We will retain here, certainly arbitrarily, one of these issues taken up in an epilogue which opens with a sketch of a comparative analysis of the Cominternist period with the following, that of the Cominform. The dissolution of the Comintern in 1943 obviously does not mean that the world communist system had abandoned its verticalism dominated by theUSSR. Quite the contrary. Many elements of the Comintern were taken over and restructured. The Cominform will be one of its main extensions. However, this should not be concluded that nothing has changed. Symbolically, the dissolution of the Comintern puts an end to an internationalist project of a certain type in favor of a bureaucratized internationalism. The logic of survival of the devices is now prevalent and their inertia dominates, even if the language can still create illusions, even if the workers’ struggles – whose raison d’être is in no way based on communism but on another reality, that of capitalist domination – nourishes communism outsideUSSRfor example in France.