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Abstract
The Popular Front politics which governed Comintern policy 1934–1939 have been positively judged by historians of British Communism. The experience cannot be properly assessed without integration of its provenance in Soviet Stalinism and subsequent unfolding in France and Spain. This article reviews the literature, analyses the origins of the line and validates explanations which locate its roots in the search for solutions to the challenges fascism offered the Russian regime. Arguments that national parties had a significant hand in its creation and development are evaluated. The Popular Front’s break with earlier Marxism; its understanding of fascism; the class structure; alliances with the bourgeoisie; its suppression of working-class insurgency; its revival of nationalism; and the relation of its theory to legitimation of the interests and strategies of the Soviet elite, are critically discussed. The successes and failures of the policy are assessed and its afterlife sketched. A short-term, instrumental tactic, it remained part of the repertoire of Stalinism and informed national parties’ journey to reformism and Eurocommunism.
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Notes
1 Jim Fyrth, ‘Introduction: In the Thirties’ in Jim Fyrth (ed.) Britain Fascism and the Popular Front (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1985), p. 15. The Popular Front period has likewise been celebrated by radical historians of US Communism who peeled away its Stalinist politics, enthused over its cultural policy and presented its campaigning activity and grassroots leadership as a model for the 1980s left. For critical discussion from different perspectives, see John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, In Denial: Historians, Communism and Espionage (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2003); Bryan D. Palmer, ‘Rethinking the Historiography of United States Communism’, American Communist History, 2:2 (2003), pp. 139–173.
2 Eric Hobsbawm, ‘Fifty Years of People’s Fronts’ in Fyrth, op.cit., p. 243.
3 Ibid., p. 250.
4 Margot Heinemann, ‘The People’s Front and the Intellectuals’ in Fyrth, op.cit., p. 57.
5 Ben Pimlott, Labour and the Left in the 1930s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 143.
6 Ibid., p. 202.
7 James Hinton, Labour and Socialism: A History of the British Labour Movement, 1867–1974 (Brighton: Wheatsheaf Books, 1983), p. 159.
8 Geoffrey Foote, The Labour Party’s Political Thought: A History (London: Croom Helm, 1985), p. 162. For an attempt to assimilate Popular Front ideas to the tradition of Mill, Bentham and Green, which shows little understanding of either Leninism or Stalinism, see David Blaazer, The Popular Front and the Progressive Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
9 George Orwell in Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (eds) The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Vol. 1 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), p. 339. Orwell considered it ‘an unholy alliance between the robbers and the robbed’ which ‘must always in the long run have the effect of fixing the capitalist class more firmly in the saddle’ (ibid.).
10 The other Popular Front experiment in the 1930s was in Chile; see Paul Drake, ‘Chile, 1930–1958’ in Leslie Bethell (ed.) The Cambridge History of Latin America since 1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 267–310; Manuel Caballero, Latin America and the Comintern, 1919–1943 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
11 Helen Graham and Paul Preston, ‘The Popular Front and the Struggle Against Fascism’ in Helen Graham and Paul Preston (eds) The Popular Front in Europe (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1987), p. 16.
12 Paul Preston, A Concise History of the Spanish Civil War (London; Fontana, 1996), pp. 104–105.
13 Fernando Claudin, The Communist Movement: From Comintern to Cominform (London: Peregrine, 1975). In an echo of the 1930s, the prominent Eurocommunist, Monty Johnstone, identified Moscow-centric interpretations common among a range of historians with Trotskyism: ‘Their complementarity is, however, no proof for the usual Trotskyist contention that the people’s front policy was dictated by Stalin to promote “the diplomacy of the Soviet bureaucracy” … In fact, the people’s front grew out of the needs and experiences of working-class struggle against fascism and finance capital’: Monty Johnstone, ‘Trotsky and the People’s Front’ in Fyrth, op.cit., p. 91.
14 Kevin McDermott and Jeremy Agnew, The Comintern: A History of International Communism from Lenin to Stalin (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996).
15 Geoff Roberts, ‘Collective Security and the Origins of the People’s Front’, in Fyrth, op. cit., p. 86.
16 Johnstone, op. cit., p. 91.
17 McDermott and Agnew, op. cit., p. 120, citing John Santore, ‘The Comintern’s United Front Initiative of May 1934: French or Soviet Inspiration?’ Canadian Journal of History, 16:3 (1981), pp. 405–421; Jeff Frieden, ‘The Internal Politics of European Communism in the Stalin Era, 1934–1939’, Studies in Comparative Communism, 14:1 (1981), pp. 45–69.
18 Jonathan Haslam, ‘The Comintern and the Origins of the Popular Front, 1934–1935’, Historical Journal, 22:3 (1979), p. 689; and see Jonathan Haslam, ‘The Soviet Union, the Comintern and the Demise of the Popular Front, 1936–1939’ in Graham and Preston, op. cit., pp. 152–160.
19 Eric Hobsbawm, Interesting Times: A Twentieth Century Life (London: Allen Lane, 2002), p. 429, note 1.
20 Tim Rees, ‘The High Point of Comintern Influence? The Communist Party and the Civil War in Spain’ in Tim Rees and Andrew Thorpe (eds) International Communism and the Communist International (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), pp. 143–167; Tim Rees, ‘The People’s Front and the Civil War in Spain’ in Silvio Pons and Stephen A. Smith (eds) The Cambridge History of Communism, vol. 1: World Revolution and Socialism in One Country, 1917–1941 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. 256–276; Helen Graham, The Spanish Republic at War, 1936–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
21 Graham and Preston, ‘Popular Front’, op. cit., p. 4 and passim.
22 Johnstone, op. cit., p. 108; Hobsbawm, ‘Fifty Years’, op. cit., p. 243; Santiago Carrillo, ‘Eurocommunism’ and the State (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977).
23 Tom Kemp, ‘Trotskyist and Left-Wing Critics of the Popular Front’ in Martin S. Alexander and Helen Graham (eds) The French and Spanish Popular Fronts: Comparative Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 104. Kemp largely deals with France. The classic exposition of the case against the Communists and the Popular Front in Spain is Burnett Bolloten, The Spanish Civil War: Revolution and Counter-Revolution (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1991).
24 The 50th anniversary of the coup against the Popular Unity government of Salvador Allende in Chile occasioned debate – see Marcelo Casals, ‘Chile Enters its Thermidorian Period’, Jacobin, 7 May 2023. On the 1970s, see Regis Debray, Conversations with Allende (London: Verso, 1971); Ian Birchall and Chris Harman, ‘Chile: End of the Parliamentary Road’, International Socialism, 62 (September 1973), pp. 9–14, https://www.marxists.org/archive/harman/1973/09/chile.html; Ralph Miliband, ‘The Coup in Chile’ in Ralph Miliband and John Saville (eds) The Socialist Register 1973 (London: Merlin Press, 1974), pp. 451–471; Mike Gonzalez, ‘The Left and the Coup in Chile’, International Socialism, series 2, 22 (Winter 1984), pp. 45–86, https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/gonzalez/1984/xx/chile.html. From 1996, Rifondazione Communista (RF), the more traditional survivor of the dissolution of the Italian Communist Party, supported the centre-left government led by Romani Prodi; in 2006, leading members of RF became ministers in Prodi’s minority administration. At the time of writing, there has been some discussion about the left-wing grouping, People Before Profit, joining a coalition in the 26 counties if Sinn Fein were to form a government.
25 Franz Borkenau, World Communism (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1962 [1939]), p. 386. See also Franz Borkenau, The Spanish Cockpit (London: Pluto Press, 1986 [1937]); C. L. R. James, The Rise and Fall of the Communist International (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1993 [1936]) is also worth consulting. Published in response to Rajani Palme Dutt’s apologia for Stalinism, World Politics, 1918–1936 (London: Victor Gollancz, 1936), James, who was active in the British Trotskyist movement, employed an extensive range of socialist literature critical of Soviet policy to analyse the decline of the Comintern and predict the liquidation of the Old Bolsheviks and the International as well as the development of peaceful co-existence.
26 Borkenau, World Communism, op. cit., pp. 394–395.
27 Ibid., p. 383.
28 Isaac Deutscher, ‘The Comintern Betrayed’, https://www.marxists.org/archive/deutscher/1964/comintern-betrayed.htm.
29 Isaac Deutscher, Stalin (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966 [1949]), pp. 414–415.
30 Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast: Trotsky, 1929–1940 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), p. 277; ‘ … only a few years lay between the triumphs of the Popular Front and the great stench of the 1940 collapse’ (ibid.).
31 E.H. Carr, Twilight of Comintern, 1930–1935 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982), pp. 426–427.
32 Ibid., p. 120.
33 Ibid., p. 5.
34 Ibid., p. 124.
35 Ibid., p. 122.
36 Ibid., pp. 122, 145.
37 Ibid., pp. 204–205.
38 ‘This book is not only a criticism of the Communist movement but also a self-criticism’ (‘Introduction’, Claudin, op. cit., p. 9). In his Preface, Jorge Semprun observed: ‘Claudin has re-discovered the bracing propositions of critical Marxism’ (ibid., p. 4).
39 Ibid., p. 175.
40 Ibid., p. 175.
41 Ibid., p. 175.
42 Ibid., p. 176.
43 Ibid., pp. 184–185.
44 For discussion of France and Spain, see ibid., pp. 199–242.
45 John McIlroy and Alan Campbell, ‘The British and French Representatives to the Communist International, 1920–1939: A Comparative Survey’, International Review of Social History, 50:2 (2005), p. 237; Celié and Albert Vassart, ‘The Moscow Origins of the Popular Front’ in Milorad M. Drachkovitch and Branko Lazitch (eds) The Comintern: Historical Highlights (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution, 1966), pp. 234–252. Vassart quit the PCF around the time of the Hitler-Stalin pact and was subsequently active in revolutionary syndicalist and leftwing anti-Stalinist circles.
46 Roberts, op. cit., p. 83.
47 Ibid., pp. 77, 86.
48 Haslam, ‘The Comintern and the Demise of the Popular Front’, op. cit., pp. 154, 159.
49 McDermott and Agnew, op. cit.
50 Haslam, ‘The Comintern and the Origins of the Popular Front’, op. cit., p. 674. See also Jonathan Haslam, The Soviet Union and the Struggle for Collective Security in Europe, 1933–1939 (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1984).
51 Santore, op. cit., pp. 405–421.
52 McDermott and Agnew, op. cit., p. xxiii.
53 Ibid., p. 121,
54 Ibid., p. 128.
55 Ibid., p. 125.
56 Ibid., p. 128.
57 Ibid., p. 136.
58 Pierre Broué, Histoire de L’Internationale Communiste, 1919–1943 (Paris: Fayard, 1997), p. 652.
59 Ibid., p. 651.
60 Ibid., pp. 652–654.
61 Ibid., pp. 660–665.
62 Julian Jackson, The Popular Front in France: Defending Democracy, 1934–39 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). See also David A. L. Levy, ‘The French Popular Front, 1936–1937’, in Graham and Preston, op. cit., pp. 58–83, and Joel Colton, ‘The Formation of the French Popular Front, 1934–1936’, in Alexander and Graham, op. cit., pp. 9–23, both of which characterise its duration as 13 months, terminated in June 1937 by the fall of the Blum administration. Jacques Danos and Marcel Gibelin, June 1936: Class Struggle and the Popular Front in France (London: Bookmarks, 1986), provides a compelling account of ‘the social explosion’; and see also Daniel Guérin, Front Populaire, Révolution Manquée (Paris: Maspero, 1976); Georges Lefranc, Juin 36, l'explosion sociale du Front Populaire (Paris: Julliard, 1966).
63 Andrew Thorpe, The British Communist Party and Moscow, 1920–43 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), particularly pp. 200–255.
64 Fridrikh I. Firsov, Harvey J. Klehr and John Earl Haynes, Secret Cables of the Comintern, 1933–1943 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2014), p. 55.
65 Ibid., p. 56.
66 Ibid., p. 59.
67 Ibid., p. 60.
68 Ibid., pp. 61–62.
69 From a vast literature with different perspectives, see, for example, Felix Morrow, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Spain (London: New Park, 1963 [1938]); Bolloten, op. cit.; Pierre Broué, Staline et la révolution: le cas espagnol (Paris: Fayard, 1993); Michael Alpert, A New International History of the Spanish Civil War (Basingstoke: Palgave Macmillan, 1994); Graham, Spanish Republic at War, op. cit.; Preston, Concise History, op. cit.
70 Bolloten, op. cit. This work contains a wealth of useful detail and stimulating argument but has been criticised for, inter alia, its use of CIA-funded sources: see Herbert Rutledge Southworth, ‘The Grand Camouflage: Julian Gorkin, Burnett Bolloten and the Spanish Civil War’ in Paul Preston and Ann L. McKenzie (eds) The Republic Besieged: Civil War in Spain, 1936–1939 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996), pp. 261–312.
71 Daniel Kowalski, Stalin and the Spanish Civil War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).
72 Preston, Concise History, op. cit., pp. 104–108.
73 Ibid. p. 172. For the argument that socialist revolution might have strengthened the war effort and discussion of the revolutionary left, see, for example, Noam Chomsky, American Power and the New Mandarins (London: Chatto and Windus, 1969); Pierre Broué and Émile Témime, The Revolution and the Civil War in Spain (London: Faber and Faber, 1972 [1961]); Victor Alba and Stephen Schwarz, Spanish Marxism versus Soviet Communism: A History of the POUM (New Brunswick, NJ and London: Transition Books, 1988); ‘The Spanish Civil War: The View from the Left’, Special Issue, Revolutionary History, 4:1/2 (1992); Chris Ealham, Class, Culture and Conflict in Barcelona, 1898–1937 (London: Routledge, 2004).
74 Graham, Spanish Republic at War, op. cit.
75 Rees, ‘High Point’, op cit.
76 Ronald Radosh, Mary S. Habeck and Grigory Sevostianov (eds) Spain Betrayed: The Soviet Union in the Spanish Civil War (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), 2001.
77 Firsov et al., op. cit., pp. 68–84.
78 Ibid., pp. 85–110.
79 Noreen Branson, ‘Myths from Right and Left’, in Fyrth, op.cit., p. 129.
80 Ibid., p. 129.
81 Ibid., p. 118.
82 Noreen Branson, History of the Communist Party of Great Britain, 1927–1941 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1985), p. 125. For Eurocommunist celebration of Dimitrov, see Marxism Today, July 1976, Special Dimitrov Issue.
83 Fyrth, ‘Introduction’, op. cit., p. 15.
84 Ibid., p. 24.
85 Martin Myant, ‘1935: The Turning Point’ in Fyrth, op.cit., pp. 30, 52. Branson attempts to explain why Communists supported Stalin, the Terror in Russia and Spain and the persecution of the Trotskyists largely on the grounds that they seemed plausible at the time.
86 Hobsbawm, ‘Fifty Years’, op.cit., p. 240. And see Hobsbawm, Interesting Times, op. cit., and Richard J. Evans, Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History (London: Little Brown, 2019), pp. 94–116.
87 Henry Pelling, The British Communist Party: A Historical Profile (London: A. & C. Black, 1958), pp. 73, 75.
88 Ibid., p. 104.
89 Kevin Morgan, Against Fascism and War: Ruptures and Continuities in British Communist Politics, 1935–1941 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), p. 33.
90 Ibid., pp. 33, 35.
91 Ibid., p. 309.
92 Nina Fishman, The British Communist Party and the Trade Unions, 1933–1945 (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1995), p. 83.
93 Ibid., p. 8.
94 Ibid., p. 255.
95 Ibid., p. 8.
96 Ibid., p. 229.
97 Ibid., p. 229.
98 Ibid., p. 337.
99 See, for example, the compilations Geoff Andrews, Nina Fishman and Kevin Morgan (eds), Opening the Books: Essays on the Social and Cultural History of the British Communist Party (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1995); Andy Croft, A Weapon in the Struggle: The Cultural History of the Communist Party in Britain (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1998). And see Valentine Cunningham, British Writers of the Thirties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); Andy Croft, Red Letter Days: British Fiction in the 1930s (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990).
100 Geoff Eley, Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 265.
101 Geoff Eley, ‘From Cultures of Militancy to the Politics of Culture: Writing the History of British Communism’, Science and Society, 61:1 (1997), p. 121.
102 Eley, Forging Democracy, op. cit., p. 266.
103 Ibid., p. 265.
104 Thorpe, op.cit., p. 225.
105 Keith Laybourn and Dylan Murphy, Under the Red Flag: A History of Communism in Britain (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1995), p. 85; see James Eaden and David Renton, The Communist Party of Great Britain since 1920 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), pp. 50–68.
106 For a critical outline of Third Period policies, see John McIlroy and Alan Campbell. ‘“Class Against Class”: The Leadership of the Communist Party of Great Britain during the Comintern’s Third Period, 1928–1934’, Labor History, 63: 2 (2021), pp. 145–152.
107 This essay deals with the Communists. A more complete history would examine socialists, their interaction with Communists, and the contributions they made to the origins and development of the Popular Front – as well as the activities of the bourgeoisie and the Trotskyists and other dissidents who opposed it.
108 Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1889–1936: Hubris (London: Allen Lane, 1998), p. 545; Gerhard L. Weinberg, The Foreign Policy of Hitler’s Germany: Diplomatic Revolution in Europe, 1933–1936 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1970); Haslam, The Soviet Union, op. cit.
109 Haslam, Soviet Union, op. cit.
110 McDermott and Agnew, op. cit., p. 128; Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929–1941 (London: Allen Lane, 2017), p. 239.
111 For manoeuvring within the Second International which rendered it a questionable partner, see Gerd Rainer Horn, European Socialists Respond to Fascism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 40–45.
112 Jackson, op. cit., p. 35.
113 Firsov et al., op. cit., p. 52; Carr, op. cit., p. 305; Thorpe, British Communist Party, op. cit., Appendix 2.
114 McDermott and Agnew, op. cit., p. 128.
115 Daniel R. Brower, The New Jacobins: The French Communist Party and the Popular Front (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1968), pp. 41–42.
116 Andy Durgan, ‘The Spanish Trotskyists and the Foundation of the POUM’, Revolutionary History, Special Issue, pp. 11–53; Sam Bornstein and Al Richardson, Against the Stream: A History of Trotskyism in Britain (London: Socialist Platform, 1986), pp. 62–126.
117 Haslam, ‘The Comintern and the Origins of the Popular Front’, op. cit., p. 134.
118 I am grateful to Ian Birchall for emphasising this point.
119 See Broué, Histoire, pp. 698–705, for its application around the world.
120 Thorez had received a boost from the expulsion of his rival Doriot which continued with the latter’s turn to fascism – he died fighting with the Germans on the Eastern front. Thorez was, however, closely supervised by the Slovak, Evgen Fried, the Comintern representative in Paris from 1931, who lived with Thorez’s first wife. For an illuminating sketch of both, see Jackson, op. cit., pp. 61–7; and see John Bulaitis, Maurice Thorez: A Biography (London: I. B. Tauris, 2018).
121 Firsov et al., op. cit., pp. 53–54. These authors note, p. 58, the Comintern’s desire to obfuscate his subordinate role in decision making: when the SFIO attributed Thorez’s refusal to join the government to the Comintern, Dimitrov further instructed Thorez to announce that as the Seventh Congress had transferred operational leadership to national parties, the decision had been taken in Paris not Moscow.
122 Haslam. ‘The Soviet Union, the Comintern and the Demise of the Popular Front’, op. cit., p. 154.
123 Kotkin, op. cit., p. 177. The Terror, of course, coincided with the 1936 Soviet Constitution guaranteeing civil liberties and the independence of the judiciary– so long as their exercise ‘strengthened the socialist system’.
124 Brigitte Studer and Berthold Unfried, ‘At the Beginning of a History: Visions of the Comintern after the Opening of the Archives’, International Review of Social History, 42:3 (1997), p. 436; and see Mikhail Narinsky and Jurgen Rojahn (eds), Centre and Periphery: The History of the Comintern in the Light of New Documents (Amsterdam: Institute of Social History, 1996).
125 Studer and Unfried, op. cit., pp. 434–435. The reference is to Niels Erik Rosenfeldt, Stalin’s Secret Chancellery and the Comintern (Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen, 1991). Lars T. Li, Oleg V. Naumov and Oleg V. Khlevniuk, Stalin’s Letters to Molotov, 1925–1936 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995); Alexander Dallin and F.I. Firsov, Dimitrov and Stalin: Letters from the Soviet Archives, 1934–1943 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000); Ivo Banac, The Diary of Georgi Dimitrov, 1933–1949 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003).
126 Studer and Unfried, op. cit., p. 135
127 Niels Erik Rosenfeldt, Bent Jensen and Erik Kulavig (eds), Mechanisms of Power in the Soviet Union (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000).
128 Rosenfeldt, op. cit., p. 69. And see also Niels Erik Rosenfeldt, The ‘Special’ World: Stalin’s Power Apparatus and the Soviet System’s Secret Structures of Communication, 2 Vols (Copenhagen, Museum Tuscalanum Press, 2009), which supplements his earlier analysis with extensive evidence from the Russian archives.
129 Carr, op. cit., p. 5.
130 Ibid.
131 The assertion that Stalin’s stasis until early 1934 may be partly explained by the fact ‘he was aware that international matters were not his strong suit’ (Thorpe, op. cit., British Communist Party. p. 209) is not supported by the evidence. Through 1933–1934 he was assiduously developing collective security, turning to sort out the Comintern once foreign policy was in place.
132 The dependence of Dimitrov and change of the Comintern line on Stalin is clear from their correspondence. On 6 October 1934, Dimitrov reflected: ‘I became convinced that such a change is impossible without intervention by and assistance from you and the Politburo’; Stalin responded: ‘’I have no doubt that the Politburo of the CC VKP(b) [Russian Party] will support you’: Firsov and Dallin, op. cit., pp. 18, 22, and see Kotkin, op. cit., pp. 189–190.
133 Stalin spoke disparagingly of Manuilsky – ‘Each year he prophesies proletarian revolution and it doesn’t happen’– Piatnitsky, Kuusinen and Knorin. His authority was displayed when, having pushed Dimitrov with limited success for his estimation, ‘No, don’t dodge!’ (original emphasis), he remarked presciently: ‘Who says that this “foursome” must remain? You speak about history. But one must sometimes correct history’: Banac, op. cit., p. 14.
134 Banac, op. cit., p. 22.
135 Johnstone, op. cit., p. 91.
136 Banac, ‘Introduction’, in Banac, op. cit., p. xliii.
137 McDermott and Agnew, op. cit., p. 121.
138 Ibid., p. 129.
139 Ibid., p. 129.
140 Ibid., p. 121.
141 Ibid., p. 129.
142 The older literature on Stalin supports the point – see, for example, Robert Tucker, Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928–1941 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), pp. 338–362. If later studies inject more detail and complexity, they do not greatly change the picture. Kotkin, op. cit., concludes (p. 909): ‘Coordination of the Soviet leviathan, to the extent it took place, was driven by the party apparatus, the invocation of party discipline, and Stalin’s personal rule. Stalin also directed the operations of the Communist International (the Comintern) for Communist parties around the world, although nominally the body was governed by its infrequent Congresses and in between by an executive committee’.
143 See Firsov et al., op. cit., pp. 51–84. Sometimes he left matters to his acolytes, particularly as the policy ran out of steam and he lost interest. In early 1939, he failed to reply to Dimitrov’s request for his views on a revival of the campaign in France: ‘When no answer was received, Dimitrov pressed Stalin at a meeting and received the brusque response that he was busy and the Comintern should decide on its own’, ibid., p. 61; Radosh et al., op cit., passim.
144 Stalin, Molotov and Voroshilov to Largo Caballero, in Jane Degras (ed.) Documents on Soviet Foreign Policy, Vol. III (London: Oxford University Press, 1953), pp. 230–231; Claudin, op. cit., pp. 707–708. The text reads as if Stalin was talking to Dimitrov or Manuilsky.
145 Rees, ‘High Point’, op. cit., p. 145.
146 Andrew Thorpe, ‘The Communist International and the British Communist Party’ in Rees and Thorpe, op. cit., pp. 74–75.
147 For a critique of this approach which involves constructing a strawman of robotic conformity and an unrealistic command model against which examples of debates and disagreements preceding compliance on the part of members of Comintern affiliates can then be highlighted, see John McIlroy, ‘Rehabilitating Communist History: The Communist International, the Communist Party of Great Britain and Some Revisionist Historians’, Revolutionary History, 8:2 (2001), pp. 195–226; John McIlroy and Alan Campbell, ‘“Nina Ponomareva’s Hats”: The New Revisionism, the Communist International and the Communist Party of Great Britain, 1920–1930’, Labour/Le Travail, 49 (2002), pp. 147–188.
148 Thorpe, British Communist Party, op. cit., pp. 247–248.
149 Ibid., pp. 256–265.
150 See, for example, John McIlroy, ‘Restoring Stalinism to Communist History’, Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory, 41:4 (2013), pp. 599–622; John McIlroy, ‘British Communists and the 1932 Turn to the Trade Unions’, Labor History, 56:5 (2015), pp. 541–565; John McIlroy, ‘The Revival of Rank and File Movements in Britain during the 1930s’, Labor History, 57:3 (2016), pp. 347–373.
151 Thorpe, British Communist Party, op. cit., pp. 212–255, provides archival evidence which invalidates his conclusion (ibid., p. 246) that by 1938 ‘the party it seemed was working out its own lines, its own destiny’; McIlroy, ‘Restoring Stalinism’, op. cit., pp. 610–612. For decrypts of the frequent, often daily, coded radio communications between Moscow and London, 1934–1936, concerning policy, personnel matters and requests for information, see Nigel West, MASK: MI5’s Penetration of the Communist Party of Great Britain (London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 39–200.
152 Bornstein and Richardson, op. cit., pp. 206–210.
153 McIlroy and Campbell, ‘British and French Representatives’, op. cit., pp. 229–238.
154 The group was penetrated by the secret apparatus of the PCF: see Guillaume Bourgeois, ‘French Communism and the Communist International’, in Rees and Thorpe, op. cit., pp. 98–99.
155 Ibid., p. 98.
156 Firsov et al, op. cit., pp. 65–66.
157 Rees, ‘High Point’, op. cit., p. 145.
158 Ibid., p. 150.
159 For Comintern material on the Spanish situation, see Radosh et al., op. cit.
160 Rees, ‘High Point’, op. cit., p. 160.
161 Ibid., p. 145.
162 Ibid., p. 152; Firsov et al., op. cit., pp. 69–70.
163 Rees, ‘High Point’, op. cit., pp. 152–153. His article does not refer to another instance where Stalin’s instruction to the PCE to quit the government on the grounds such action would demoralise the nationalists was disregarded: see Firsov et al., op cit., pp. 78–79.
164 Ibid., p. 155, citing a 1992 Catalan TV documentary and Irene Falcon, Manuel Jiminez and Jesus Montero, Asalto a los cielos: Mi Vida Junto a Pasionaria (Madrid: Temas de Hoy, 1996). For the unreliability of Communist memoirs like the latter, see Radosh et al., op. cit., p. 210, n. 430. Graham, Spanish Republic at War, op. cit., p. 288, states that the documentary ‘raised more questions than it answered’ and is sceptical of ‘sole Soviet authorship’ of an execution usually attributed to Alexandr Orlov, head of the NKVD in Spain: ‘it is quite conceivable that Orlov was assisting the Spanish Communists in an enterprise that also served his general purposes’ (ibid., p. 289). The PCE leaders’ direct involvement remains unproven. In receipt of instructions demanding ‘the final destruction of the Trotskyists’, fingering Nin as a ‘fascist spy’ and vilifying PSOE critics of this agenda, they cannot completely avoid responsibility – see Albert, op. cit., p. 146; Radosh et al., op. cit., p. 107.
165 Rees, ‘High Point’, op. cit., p. 154.
166 Preston, Concise History, op. cit., p. 184, states ‘The PCE began to call for the extermination of the POUM and to denounce as enemies of the USSR, “fascist spies” and “Trotskyist agents”, those who criticised the Moscow trials. Blindly following the Soviet leadership, the Spanish Communists were convinced that the trials were genuinely directed against “enemies of the people”’.
167 Rees, ‘High Point’, op. cit., p. 152.
168 Radosh et al., op cit., p. xix.
169 Ibid.
170 Leon Trotsky, ‘The POUM and the Popular Front’ in Leon Trotsky (ed.), The Spanish Revolution, 1931–39 (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1973), pp. 220–221.
171 Claudin, op. cit., p. 182. For Dimitrov’s – and Togliatti’s – search for precedents, see Carr, op. cit., pp. 412–414.
172 Eric Hobsbawm, ‘“The Moscow Line” and International Communist Policy, 1933–47’ in Chris Wrigley (ed.) Warfare, Diplomacy and Politics: Essays for A.J.P. Taylor (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1986), pp. 163–188.
173 Brian Pearce, ‘Hobsbawm Cooks the Books’, Workers’ Press, 2 August 1986, cited in Terry Brotherstone, ‘Eric Hobsbawm, 1917–2012: Some Questions from a Never Completed Conversation about History’, Critique, 41:2 (2013), pp. 280–282. For the thesis, see https://johnriddell.com/2019/05/17/the-workers-and-peasants-government/; Janes Degras (ed.), The Communist International: Documents. Vol. 3 (London: Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1965), pp. 425–427. Pearce recalled from experience how Communists answering critics would instrumentally conflate the Popular Front and the united front.
174 Hobsbawm, ‘Moscow Line’, op. cit., p. 173.
175 V.I. Lenin, ‘Left-Wing’ Communism: An Infantile Disorder (Peking: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1970 [1920]), pp. 23–25, 66; Branson, ‘Myths’, op. cit., p. 29.
176 Lenin, op. cit., pp. 22, 25.
177 Clara Zetkin, ‘The Struggle Against Fascism’, Report of the Third Plenum ECCI; Resolution on Fascism adopted 23 June 1923, www.marxists.org/subject/fascism/index.htm; David Beetham, Marxists in the Face of Fascism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983), pp. 82–148; Mike Taber and John Riddell (eds), Fighting Fascism: How to Struggle and How to Win (Chicago: Haymarket, 2017).
178 Erik Van Ree, The Political Thought of Joseph Stalin: A Study in Twentieth-Century Revolutionary Patriotism (London: Routledge Curzon, 2002), pp. 216–218; J. Stalin, ‘Concerning the International Situation’, www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1924/09/20.htm.
179 Leon Trotsky, The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), passim; Beetham, op. cit.
180 For the petty bourgeoisie, see, for example, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Manifesto of the Communist Party, www.marxist.org/archive/marx/works; Karl Marx, ‘Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League’, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/communist-league/1850-ad1.htm; Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, ‘Critique of the Gotha Programme’, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/index.htm.
181 See N. Bukharin and E. Preobrazhensky, The ABC of Communism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969 [1919]), pp. 132–137, which would have been familiar to contemporary Communists: ‘it was constantly reprinted and translated, circulating widely in many countries as an authoritative exposition of the aims and tasks of Communism. It has not been reprinted in the Soviet Union since the end of the nineteen-twenties when both its authors had fallen into political disgrace’: E. H. Carr, ‘Introduction’ in Bukharin and Preobrazhensky, op. cit., pp. 17–18.
182 Ibid., p. 135.
183 Ibid., p. 136.
184 Marx and Engels, Manifesto, op. cit., pp. 24–25.
185 Bukharin and Preobrazhensky, op. cit., pp. 32–33.
186 The problems cannot be properly explored here and later debates illuminated the issues – see, for example, Erik Olin Wright, Class Structures and Income Determination (New York: Academic Press, 1983), which developed the concept of ‘contradictory class locations’; Erik Olin Wright, Classes (London: Verso, 1985); Nicholas Abercrombie and John Urry, Capital, Labour and the Middle Classes (London: Routledge, 1983); Alex Callinicos and Chris Harman, The Changing Working Class: Essays on Class Structure Today (London: Bookmarks, 1987).
187 Which is not to suggest that successful implementation of the united front tactic was unproblematic as the earlier history of the Comintern amply demonstrated. Beyond the opportunism of Stalinism, there were considerable tensions between effective unity in action; and criticising and ultimately seeking to outflank one’s partners in action. Difficulties were exacerbated by the tendencies to sectarianism and inflexibility inherent in bureaucratic centralist parties.
188 Writings of Leon Trotsky, 1935–36 (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1977), p. 61.
189 Carr, Twilight, op. cit., p. 206.
190 Jackson, op. cit., pp. 43–48; Daniel A. L. Levy, ‘The French Popular Front, 1936–1937’, in Graham and Preston, op. cit., pp. 60–64; Tom Kemp, Stalinism in France (London: New Park, 1984).
191 Kemp, Stalinism, op. cit., pp. 128–130; Levy, op. cit., pp. 65–66. The success reflected a redistribution of voters between the Popular Front parties; the PCF increased its parliamentary representation from 12 to 72 – gains made at the expense of the Radicals.
192 Jackson, op. cit., p. 46.
193 Claudin, op. cit., p. 210.
194 Preston, Concise History, op. cit., pp. 11–13, 24–25.
195 Leon Trotsky, ‘The Lessons of Spain’, in Leon Trotsky, The Spanish Revolution, op. cit., p. 309.
196 Claudin, op. cit., p. 215.
197 Trotsky, Spanish Revolution, op. cit., p. 309.
198 Ross McKibbin, ‘Class and Conventional Wisdom: The Conservative Party and the “Public” in Inter-War Britain’ in Ross McKibbin (ed.) The Ideologies of Class: Social Relations in Britain, 1880–1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 259–293. Professional, managerial and administrative employees made up less than 10% of the workforce: John Goldthorpe, ‘On the Service Class, its Formation and Future’ in Anthony Giddens and Gavin Mackenzie (eds) Social Class and the Division of Labour (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 172.
199 Stephen Dorril, Black Shirt: Sir Oswald Mosley and British Fascism (London: Viking, 2006), p. 366.
200 Ibid., p. 288.
201 John McIlroy and Alan Campbell, ‘“For Peace and Defence of the Soviet Union”: The Leadership of British Communism in the Popular Front Era’, Labor History, 64:1 (2023), pp. 5–9.
202 See Robert C. Tucker, The Soviet Political Mind: Stalinism and Post-Stalin Change (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1972), pp. 240–261; Van Ree, op. cit., pp212–213, 224–229.
203 Kautsky’s resolution carried at the 1900 Congress of the International, which Lenin described as ‘the India rubber resolution’, stated that ‘this dangerous tactic’ should only be applied after party authorisation in exceptional circumstances: see Julius Braunthal, History of the International, 1864–1914 (London: Nelson, 1966), pp. 271–274.
204 Firsov et al., op. cit., p. 59.
205 Ibid., p. 60.
206 Ibid., p. 69.
207 Ibid., p. 78.
208 Rees, ‘High Point’, op cit.; Rees, ‘The Popular Front’, op. cit.
209 Leon Trotsky, ‘The French Revolution has Begun’, in Leon Trotsky (ed.) Whither France? (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1968), p. 72.
210 Lefranc, Juin 1936, op. cit., pp. 12–22. And see generally Dan La Botz, ‘The Popular Front, A Social and Political Tragedy: The Case of France’, New Politics, 13: 2 (2011), https://newpol.org/issue_post/popular-front-social-and-political-tragedy-case-france/.
211 See Danos and Gibelin, op. cit.; Levy, op. cit., pp. 67–72.
212 Jackson, op. cit., p. 96.
213 Kemp, Stalinism, op. cit., p. 32.
214 A faction in the SFIO. On this see Kemp, ‘Trotskyist and Left-Wing Critics’, op. cit.
215 Jackson, op. cit., p. 95. One militant recalled a speech at a Montrouge strike meeting: ‘we are living in a revolutionary situation … All Power to the Soviets’ which was ‘frenetically applauded except by a few Communists’: cited ibid., p. 100.
216 Quoted Kemp, Stalinism, op. cit., p. 134. The Gauche Revolutionnaire leader, Pivert, had declared, ‘All is possible’ although he may have been talking within the economic framework.
217 Quoted Guérin, op. cit., p. 304. Brower, op. cit., pp. 211–217, documents the PCF’s strike-breaking and suggests that they used their best endeavours to end the metalworkers’ strike of March 1938 once they had elicited assurances about his policy towards the Soviet Union from Daladier.
218 See Pierre Broué, The German Revolution, 1917–1923 (Leiden: Brill, 2005); Bernhard Bayerlein et al., Deutscher Oktober 1923: Ein Revolutionsplan und sein Scheitern (Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 2003).
219 Johnstone, op. cit., – pp. 99–100 and note 69 – which takes this approach.
220 See above, for example, notes 71, 72. Kotkin, op. cit., p. 431, concludes that Stalin ‘had deliberately kept his intervention in the Iberian Peninsula within limits’ and ‘with the Trotskyite POUM crushed by spring-summer 1937, Stalin appears to have lost much of his interest’. By mid-1938 Soviet involvement was being wound down.
221 Preston, Concise History, op. cit., p. 171.
222 Durgan, op. cit., p. 87.
223 Graham, ‘The Spanish Popular Front and the Civil War’, op. cit., p. 113.
224 Durgan, op. cit., p. 79.
225 Claudin, op. cit., pp. 215–220. The accounts of grassroots mobilisation by Preston and Graham on the one hand and Durgan and Claudin on the other broadly agree on its dimensions. The difference lies not over the facts but over the possibilities they presented. It should also be noted, particularly in relation to assumption of realistic outcomes and potential success, that advocates of a conventional war/defence of bourgeois democracy are supporting a failed strategy whose success was always questionable; advocates of revolutionary warfare prefer a counter-factual strategy that was never tested. Moreover, the two approaches are not exclusive. The Russian Civil War suggested it was possible to combine central direction and command structures to defend revolutionary gains with some success. As any student of the literature will be aware, it is difficult for historians of Communism to exclude their own values when making judgements and where Claudin and Durgan approach matters from a critical Marxist perspective, Preston’s values are those of the liberal democrat.
226 Dennis Smyth, ‘“We Are With You”: Solidarity and Self-Interest in Soviet Policy towards Republican Spain, 1036–1939’, in Preston and Mackenzie, op. cit., p. 101.
227 Quoted Leon Trotsky, The Third International After Lenin (New York: Pathfinder, 1996), p. 87.
228 G. Dimitrov, The Working Class Against Fascism: Seventh World Congress of the Communist International (London: Modern Books, 1935), pp. 67–68; McDermott and Agnew, op. cit., p. 131. Half a century later, in a nod to the guide of his youth, Hobsbawm was remarking, ‘It is dangerous to leave patriotism exclusively to the right’: Eric Hobsbawm, ‘Falklands Fallout’ in Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques (eds) The Politics of Thatcherism (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1983), p. 218.
229 See Broué, Histoire de L’Internationale Communiste, op. cit., pp. 17–75; McDermott and Agnew, op. cit., pp. 1–14. Of course, in the countries plundered by imperialism, bourgeois democratic national movements might play a progressive role in coalition with Communists. However, the conception of the anti-imperialist united front in which Communists supported national movements and criticised their politics during the early years of the Comintern was progressively eroded under Stalin.
230 John Riddell (ed.), Workers of the World and Oppressed Peoples, Unite! Proceedings and Documents of the Second Congress, 1920, Vol. 2 (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1991), pp. 765–771.
231 Bukharin and Preobrazhensky, op. cit., p. 193.
232 Maurice Thorez, Son of the People (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1935); McIlroy and Campbell, ‘For Peace and Defence of the Soviet Union’, op. cit., p. 7.
233 News Chronicle, 9 August 1935; Tony Atienza, ‘What the Press Said’, in Fyrth, op. cit., p. 59.
234 Trotsky, ‘Lessons of Spain’, op. cit., p. 308.
235 Jackson, op. cit., pp. 271–287.
236 Annie Kriegel, The French Communists: Profile of a People (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1972), pp. 31–35, 369; Jackson, op. cit., pp. 281–287.
237 Kriegel, op. cit., p. 111.
238 Jean Pierre Besse and Claude Pennetier, Juin 1940: La Négociation Sécrete (Paris: L’Atelier, 2006); D. W. Pike, ‘Between the Junes: The French Communists from the Collapse of France to the Invasion of Russia’, Journal of Contemporary History, 28:3 (1993), pp. 465–483.
239 The wartime PCF maintained much of the Popular Front approach including alliances, nationalism and anti-Trotskyism, on which see Pierre Broué and Raymond Vacheron, Meutres au Maquis: Stalinisme et Résistance (Paris: Grasset, 1997).
240 For a snapshot, see Ian H. Birchall, Workers Against the Monolith: The Communist Parties since 1943 (London: Pluto Press, 1974), pp. 182–195. For different perspectives on Eurocommunism, see Carrillo, op. cit.; Ernest Mandel, From Stalinism to Eurocommunism (London: New Left Books, 1978); Ioannis Balampandis, Eurocommunism: From the Communist to the Radical European Left (London: Routledge, 2020).
241 The International Brigades, an exemplary exercise in working-class solidarity, constituted a poignant symbol of such sacrifice.
242 Rees, op. cit., ‘High Point’, p. 147.
243 Paul Preston, The Last Stalinist: The Life of Santiago Carrillo (London: William Collins, 2014), a vivid portrait of ruthlessness and mass murder during the Civil War and the disintegration of Spanish Stalinism thereafter.
244 Fyrth, op. cit., p. 23.
245 Thorpe, British Communist Party, op. cit., Appendix 2.
246 Branson, op. cit., History, p. 128.
247 Carr’s maxim ‘when we take up a work of history our first concern should not be with the facts which it contains but with the historian who wrote it’ – E. H. Carr, What is History? (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987 [1961]) –is pertinent, although I would prefer to look first at the facts found and then at the author. While they lack a compelling evidential base, most of the judgements criticised above have been delivered by writers whose reformist values chime with the CPGB’s reformist trajectory.
248 Lenin, Works, vol, 11, Part 1, p. 11, quoted in Trotsky, Third International, op. cit., p. 192.
249 Marx and Engels, Selected Correspondence (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1965), p. 327.
250 Van Ree, op. cit., pp. 218–219.
251 Branson, op. cit., History, p. 128.
252 Kriegel, op. cit., p. 110. ‘Ambivalence’ and ‘plurality of vision’ or confusion and disorientation might have been expected given the successive, sometimes 180 degree, changes of line. I think Kriegel is suggesting – and commending – something different – the development of a more nuanced, sophisticated, mature world view, questionable on the evidence. Cf. Branson, ‘Myths’, op. cit., p. 129.
253 Gregory Elliott, Hobsbawm, History and Politics (London: Pluto Press, 2010), p. 53.
254 Neil Davidson, ‘Hobsbawm’s Unanswered Question’, Economic and Political Weekly, 22 September 2012, p. 35.
255 Elliott, op. cit., pp. 66–67; Evans, op. cit., pp. 408–409, 497.
256 Eric Hobsbawm, Politics for a Rational Left: Political Writing, 1977–1987 (London: Verso/Marxism Today, 1989.
257 Quoted Evans, op. cit., p. 517.
258 Elliott, op. cit., p. 84. Evans, op. cit., pp. 512–522. For a contemporary critique of Hobsbawm’s ideas, see Ralph Miliband, ‘The New Revisionism in Britain’, New Left Review, 150, March-April 1985.
259 He disavowed influence on New Labour, claiming only of Blair’s predecessor, ‘my name and writings were useful to Kinnock’ (Evans, op. cit., p. 518).
260 Ibid., p. 561.
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John McIlroy
John McIlroy is Visiting Professor of Employment Relations, Middlesex University Business School. email: [email protected].