The internal politics of European Communism in the Stalin Era: 1934?1949*1

JEFF FRIEDEN

The Internal Politics of European Communism in the Stalin Era: 1934-1949"

For nearly fifty years most Western political scientists, historians, and politicians have viewed the Comintern after 1930 as a tool of Soviet foreign policy.~ Certainly the connection between the international Communist movement and the Soviet Foreign Ministry in the 1930s and 1940s explains some of the turbulent history of the Communist International. Yet recently published material indicates that an overemphasis on this connection masks the complexity of internal Comintern politics. Further, the development of European Communism since the death of Stalin forces us to reexamine the

*This is the tenth in our series of graduate student essays. [Ed.] An earlier version of this essay was presented at the 1979 annual meeting of the Ameri-

can Political Science Association, at a panel on ~Stalin and StalinismY The author would like to thank the panel participants--John Ehrenberg, Sheila Fitzpatrick, William O. McCagg, Jr., Robert C. Tucker, and Lynn Turgeon--as well as Charles Gati and Sidney Tarrow for their comments and assistance.

I. For a most influential example, see Franz Borkenau, The Communist lnternaiional (London: Faber, 1938), p. 419; first published in the United States in 1939 as World Communism and republished with that title in 1962 by the University of Michigan Press.

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46 STUDIES IN C OM P AR AT IVE C O M M U N I S M

years in which most of the continent's Communist Parties took their present form.

By the late 1950s, indeed, the European Communist movement had begun to disintegrate. From the CPSU's Twentieth Congress to polycentrism, from Prague 1968 to Eurocommunism, we have seen the close-knit unity of Europe's Communist Parties unravel. Most striking is the emergence of Eurocommunism, a more or less categorical rejection of all that international Communism stood for in the Stalin era: the need for an insurrectionary vanguard party, the dictatorship of the proletariat, and unswerving devotion to the Soviet Union. To speak today of a single European Communist movement is virtually meaningless: there are almost as many shades of opinion as there are national parties, and within each party political disagreements are often open and heated.

In this paper, I explore the development of differences among European and Soviet Communists between 1934 and 1949, using material published over the past fifteen years from the archives of the Soviet and European Communist Parties, and memoirs of Communists and ex-Communists. Because the Soviet foreign policy aspects of Comintern policy have been so amply discussed for forty years, I concentrate on the internal political dynamics of the Com- intern and the European Communist Parties themselves. A study of internal Comintern politics indicates that the seeds of today's Com- munist disunity were sown in the preceding period of apparent monolithic unity. Beneath the seeming uniformity of the 1934-1953 period, the "Stalin era," individual Communist leaders and often whole parties were developing varying analyses, interpretations, and implementations of what was ostensibly one general strategic and tactical line. It was precisely in European Communism's two most successful periods--the Popular Front period of the 1930s and the People's Democracy period of the 1940s--that current debates began, only to be squelched, first by World War II and then by the Cold War.

Investigation and discussion in the 1930s and 1940s centered on two key interrelated topics: Communist attitudes toward political alliances, and the various possible forms of the transition from capitalism to socialism, from the "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie" to that of the proletariat. Throughout international Communism's "Stalin era," there was a fairly coherent "Right," gradualist line, which we might call Eurocommunism in embryo. Also present, if much less influential and of less current relevance, was an intransigent, maximalist "ultra-Left" position. Dominant, of course, were the political positions of Stalin and his followers, whose conceptions

INTERNAL POLITICS OF EUROPEAN COMMUNISM 47

of alliance policy and the transition to socialism were closely linked to the Bolshevik experience and their place in it. 2

Let us turn, then, to the 1934-1949 period itself, to clarify the origin and development of the Popular Front and People's Demo- cracy policies, the historical evolution of "Eurocommunism," and the place of Stalin in the development of the European Communist movement.

Background to the Popular Front: 1928-1933

The Comintern's practical and theoretical adoption of the broad United Front and Popular Front policies in 1934-1936 had two sources. First, and undoubtedly most important, the Comintern "Stalinists" (Georgi Dimitrov, Otto Kuusinen, Dimitri Manuilsky) gradually realized the inadequacy of their earlier, more rigid projections. By 1933 it was clear that the long-predicted revolutionary crisis in Europe would not materialize, that the economic crisis of the early 1930s was not leading inevitably, as anticipated, to the revolu- tionization of the continent's working class, but rather to the rise of fascism, and that this unexpected turn of events called for a modifi- cation of the Comintern's tactics.

The second source of the Comintern's tactical shift in the mid 1930s was the persistence in most of the European Communist Par- ties of a significant Right wing, made up of former followers of Nikolai Bukharin who--like Bukharin himself--may have lost influence or broken publicly with "Right opportunism," but remained active in their respective parties and continued to believe in the inherent correctness of the Right line. For an understanding of the complex interplay of these two trends we must look at the period from the Comintern's Sixth World Congress (July 17 - September 1, 1928) through the Thirteenth Plenum of the Executive Committee of the Comintern (ECCI) in November and December of 1933.

The Sixth Congress and the Tenth Plenum: The Right Purged

The Comintern's Sixth Congress marked the beginning of its "Stalinization." The Congress took place against the backdrop of the developing--but still secret--struggle within the Soviet Com- munist Party between the Bukharinite Right and the Stalinist Left, and at the Congress the Bukharinites-suffered a general (but not

2. Throughout this paper, I use the terms "Right," "Stalinist," and "ultra-Left" to de- scribe the three wings dealt with. This terminology is essentially that of the Comintern

48 STUDIES IN COMPARATIVE COMMUNISM

conclusive) defeat, sanctioned and consolidated at the Tenth ECCI Plenum a year later.

The details of the struggle at the Sixth Congress are far too complex to explain here. Suffice it to say that, while the Bukharinites predicted a relative radicalization of the European working class on the basis of the contradictions of capitalism, the Stalinists forecast a full-blown capitalist economic crisis and a resulting revolutioniza- tion of Europe's workers, a real revolutionary crisis, a Thus Bukharin stood for a moderate left turn in Comintern policy, a turn which had already begun 4, while Stalin called for a much more extreme left turn to prepare the way for the coming revolutionary eventsP

But, since the Stalin-Bukharin split was still in embryo in the summer of 1928, the Sixth Congress's final documents represented something of a compromise, a fact which later, when the Right-Left split had matured, allowed both Bukharinites and Stalinists to quote the Congress resolutions in support of their respective positions. Nevertheless, the mood of the Congress was decidedly favorable to the Leftists.

Only after the Sixth Congress did the Stalinist assault on the Right begin, triggered by a crisis in the Communist Party of Ger- many (KPD). In late September 1928 the KPD's Right wing forced Leftist leader Ernst Thaelmann to resign in the wake of a financial scandal involving one of Thaelmann's followers. Although the ECCI quickly moved to reinstate Thaelmann, it was torn by dissension for months afterwards. Stalin insisted on Thaelmann as Party leader, while Bukharin and his followers in the ECCI, Jules Humbert-Droz and Angelo Tasca, urged Thaelmann's removal in favor of the KPD Right. The issue was resolved in December 1928

itself, and is anything but satisfactory in defining the various trends. 1 hope that a more exact definition is made clear in the article itself. Russian names are usually transliterated as they appeared in Comintern literature of the period, thus I use "Manuilsky" instead of the more correct ~Manuil'skii."

3. A reliable, complete account of the Sixth Congress period has yet to be written. For an interesting interchange among Italian Communists on the Congress, see the debate between Giuseppe Berti and Luigi Amadesi in Rinascita June 18, September 3 and October 8, 1966; also the contributions of Pietro Secehia in his "L'azione svolta dal partito comunista in Italia durante il fascismo 1926-1932," Istituto Giangiacomo Feltri- nelli, Annali 1969 (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1970), pp. 156-164, and in Critiea marxista, V, 3 (May-June 1967).

4. See especially Theodore Draper, "The Strange Case of the Comintern," Survey, Vol. 18, No. 3 (Summer 1972), pp. 91-137.

5. See, for a clear expression of this, Stalin's Speeches on the American Communist Party (New York: Central Committee, Communist Party, U.S.A., 1931), pp. 34-35.


when the ECCI Presidium, after hearing a long speech by Stalin which was highly critical of Tasea and Humbert-Droz, came down on the side of Thaelmann and the KPD Left.

Meanwhile, in October 1928 Bukharin had published his "Notes of an Economist," and the battle within the Russian Party exploded. By early 1929 Stalin had emerged victorious, and in April a joint plenary session of the Soviet Central Committee and Central Con- trol Commission censured Bukharin and removed him from the Comintern.

The decisive and public defeat of the leading light of the Corn- intern's Right wing had immediate repercussions within the Euro- pean parties. We have already mentioned events in the KPD, which were both a cause and a result of Bukharin's decline. In the Com- munist Party of France (PCF) the ECCI sponsored a group of leftist leaders of the Young Communists (Henri Barb6, Pierre C61or, Raymond Guyot) against the Party's Right wing. From early in 1928 until April 1929, a heated struggle went on, culminating in the victory of the Left at the PCF's Sixth Congress (March 31 - April 7, 1929). Throughout 1929 the victors continued to attack the Rightists (Jacques Doriot, R6naud Jean, Louis Sellier, Camille Renault, and many others) and expelled dozens of. Party leaders. Firmly in control by the end of 1929, the PCF Left pursued a remarkably sectarian policy whose extremism was perhaps egged on by a wave of government repression. 6

In the Communist Party of Italy (PCI), the Right-Left battle had been joined as early as 1927. The Left, headed by Young Commu- nist leaders Luigi Longo and Pietro Secchia, accused Party chief Palmiro Togliatti of opportunism, attacked the Party's various transitional slogans, and insisted that the PCI throw its forces more decisively into the underground struggle against fascism. Togliatti and his allies, unlike the Leftists, believed that a non-Communist but anti-fascist uprising and government were both possible and desirable in Italy. In their view, transitional slogans served both to spur anti-fascist sentiment in general and to position the PCI to take advantage of any ensuing revolutionary upsurge. 7 After the defeat of

6. L'Humanit~ of December 24, 1929 reported that in the current wave of repression 1,127 PCF members had been indicted; 597 had been convicted and sentenced to a total of 260 years imprisonment and fined over a million francs. See also Nicole Racine and Louis Bodin, Le Parti Communiste Franfais Pendant L'Entre-Deux-Guerres (Paris: Arraand Colin, 1972), p. 291.

7. For a detailed explanation of these disputes, s¢¢ Joan Barth Urban, "Italian Com- munism and the 'Opportunism of Conciliation,' 1927-1929," Studies in Comparative Communism, VI, 4 (Winter 1973), pp. 362-396.


Bukharin, with whom Togliatti had been linked, the ECCI entered the fray on the side of the Left.

Right after the ECCrs Tenth Plenum in July of 1929, the Comintern leadership, worried about Togliatti's Bukharinite leanings and the PCIs apparent Rightism, and aware of the dissension in the Party, called Togliatti, Ruggiero Grieco and Giuseppe Di Vittorio before a special "Italian Commission" headed by Manuilsky. The Commission attacked the PCI for "Right opportunism," and urged it to reform along the lines indicated by the Left. 8 The PCI leaders fought back, but the die was cast: over the next year Togliatti aligned himself with Longo and Secchia, expelled Ignazio Silone and the so-called "group of three" (Paolo Ravazzoli, Pietro Tresso, and Alfonso Leonetti) for Rightism, and moved the PCI rapidly to the Left. 9

By 1930, then, the Right had been defeated. But there are two important features of the 1928 - 1930 attack on the Comintern's Right wing. First, although many Rightists were expelled from their respective parties, quite a few remained in important positions in the European Communist movement; in virtually every European CP a "hidden" Right wing held out. In the PCF, for example, Jacques Doriot made the requisite self-criticism and remained a leader. In the PCI, as Jules Humbert-Droz, who was certainly in a position to know, told one of Togliatti's biographers, "My opinion is that Togliatti always remained a Bukharinite, even in the years of obe- dience to Stalin. ''~0 And the Comintern's Stalinists were to use these Rightists later, against the "ultra-Leftists," in their fight to implement the new Popular Front line.

For this is, in a sense, the second critical point: in the anti-Right campaign, Stalin and Manuilsky allied themselves with Communists who were to their left, both in the Comintern apparatus (Bela Kun, Solomon Lozovsky) and in the various European parties (Barb6 and C61or in the PCF, for example). When the time came for a tactical shift towards broad political alliances, the Stalinists would drop their "ultra-Left" allies as quickly as they had embraced them in the common battle against the Right.

8. See Ernesto Ragionieri, "Togliatti, Grieco e Di Vittorio alia Commissione italiana del X Plenum della Internazionale comunista," Studi Storici, XII, 1 (January-March 1971).

9. See, for example, Ferdinando Ormea, Le origini dello stalinisrno nel PCI. Storia della "svolta" comunista degli anni Trenta (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1978), and Giorgio Boeea, Palmiro Togliatti (Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1973), pp. 165-220.

10. Bocca, Palmiro Togllatti, p. 268.


From the Eleventh to the Thirteenth Plenum

The culmination of the attack on the Comintern Right in the last part of 1929 coincided with another event which could only gladden the Stalinists: the American stock-market crash of October 1929. Here at last was the confirmation of the Stalinist predictions; Buk- harin had been wrong after all, capitalist stabilization had ended and a new economic crisis begun. Yet if the Stalinists had been right in their political projections, the first years of the thirties were a disappointing test of their tactical conclusions. The capitalist world economy had indeed collapsed, but against all the experience and all the expectations of the Comintern, the response of the working class was sluggish at best. Far from bringing on a wave of revolutions, the economic crisis had given rise to a powerful reactionary movement in all of Europe.

By 1931 the more prescient Stalinists had realized that the predicted revolutionary crisis simply was not materializing; the pre- mises for it were present, but it was being stifled by a combination of the Social Democrats' firm hold over the majority of Europe's workers and the onslaught of fascism. Thus the Comintern's Stali- nists began a gradual but significant movement away from the apo- calyptic prescriptions of 1928 - 1929, a movement that reached its logical conclusion in the Popular Front.

Indicative of the early stages of this evolution was Manuilsky's report to the ECCI's Eleventh Plenum in April 1931. In this long report, to be sure, the usual "third period" equations of fascism with bourgeois democracy and Social Democracy with "social-fascism" recur; but one of the themes of the report is a warning to the Euro- pean Communists of the dangers of sectarian Leftism. First Manuil- sky, in the strongest possible terms, opposed the ultra-Left view that a revolutionary crisis had already begun: "unfortunately we do not yet have in any country a fully developed revolutionary crisis."~ On the question of fascism, Manuilsky, although often ambiguous, did distinguish between fascism and bourgeois democracy, and branded as "opportunist fatalism" the view that the only alternative to fascism was the proletarian revolution. ~2 As for the fight against Social Democracy, the Comintern's leading Stalinist ridiculed the name- calling sectarianism of the ultra-Left:

11. Manuilsky, I Partiti Comunisti e la Crisi del Capitalismo (Bruxelles: Edizioni di Cultura Soeiale, 1931), pp. 91-92.

12. Ibid., pp. 174-182.


At one of the Plenums of the Norwegian C.C. it was said, for example, that "The workers' [socialist] party is the leading party of capitalism not only politically but also in its social composition." Such a tactical position is radically mistaken and has no other effect than to separate us completely from the mass of Social- Democratic workers. It is also proof of sectarianism as regards non-Party workers. It is a position of desperation, of passivity, a product of the period of stabilization, a position which has nothing to do with Leninism... The masses feel instinctively that this position is simplistic and does not conform to reality... This is not the class against class tactic, but a tactic to isolate the Communists from the working class, t3

By the end of 1933, with Hitler in power and Dimitrov, head of the Comintern's Western European Bureau, on trial in Leipzig, the European political scene was such as to provoke even more pessi- mism than that expressed b y Manuilsky in 1931. The enormity of the defeat suffered by the German labor movement had become clear, along with the German Communists ' record of sectarianism and the implications of the Nazi victory for the rest of Europe and, significantly, for Soviet foreign policy. In this context, the Thir- teenth ECCI Plenum met in December 1933. And although the Ple- num's resolutions were again full of references to "social-fascism" and predictions of a revolutionary crisis, the threat of fascism received its broadest treatment yet.

The Plenum adopted the well-known definition of fascism, usually attributed to Stalin, as "the open terroristic dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinist, and most imperialist elements of finance capital." This formulation made clear that a fascist victory was a real defeat for the Communists and not just a passing phase. It also posited a split in Capital itself which meant that fascism was something quite different from bourgeois democracy and indeed might be opposed by sections of the bourgeoisie. The leading Soviet historians of the Seventh Congress correctly point out the importance (and limitations) of the Plenum: it "laid the basis for the understanding that the struggle against fascism would be a general democratic struggle of the broad masses. But at that time such an understanding had not yet matured."14

While Stalinists in the Comintern apparatus were moving slowly away from their earlier, more rigid, positions, a similar process was

13. Ibid., pp. 124-125. 14. B.M. Leibzon and K.K. Shirlnia, Povorot v pofitike komintema(Moscow: Mysl',

i975), pp. 63-64.


taking place in the Comintern's European sections. As we have seen, in most of the European parties the anti-Right campaign of 1928 and 1929 had unleashed a wave of "ultra-Leftism," of individual leaders and political positions to the Left of the Stalinists. By late 1930 the pendulum began to swing back.

In the French Party 1930 saw the gradual decline of the leftist Young Communists whose promotion to leadership had been virtually sponsored by the Comintern; Maurice Thorez, a more moderate ally of the Left, became Secretary of the Politburo in October 1930. Through the first part of 1931 the International continued to criti- cize the PCF for ultra-Leftism and for a stifling inner-Party atmosphere. Finally, in July 1931, at a Politburo meeting attended by Manuilsky, the "Barb6-C61or group," as it came to be known, was denounced by one of its members for factional activity. Thorez took the reins of the Party, proclaimed a tournant in inner-Party life and began to move away from some of the PCF's more radical sectarianism. The immediate political significance of the tournant should not be exaggerated: the Party's line changed only slightly. But the ECCI, in the person of Manuilsky, had clearly shown its displeasure with the "ultra-Left," and set the stage for further evolution. ~s

The PCI made a similar shift. In July 1930, a year after the Tenth Plenum's Commission had pushed the PCI to the left, Manuilsky again headed an "Italian Commission" but now pushed the Italian Communists to the right. The PCI, Manuilsky asserted, had under- estimated the strength of Italian Fascism, and the Party's false optimism had created a sectarian separation from the masses. The Party played no role in Italian politics, it was simply a circle of propagandists, and barely that; the country's mass movement was entirely beyond the reach of the Communists. Manuilsky attacked the PCI leadership for poor handling of the expulsion of the Right- ist "group of three," whom Manuilsky had wanted to invite to Mos- cow for discussions even after their expulsion--an invitation that Togliatti vetoed. In short, as Secehia noted years later, "there was an obvious fear that the PCI leadership and Togliatti in particular wanted to make up for their slowness in combatting Right opportunism by reconstituting their virginity, by now exaggerating to the Left .... ,,t6

This journey through a five-year maze of meetings and resolutions demonstrates the two principal sources of the Popular Front

15. Racine and Bodin, Le Parti Communiste Franca~, pp. 97-98, 188-192, 291-294. 16. Secchia, "L'azione svolta," p. 326. For Manuilsky's speech, see L'imernationale

communiste, No. 25 (September l, 1930).


policy. First, there was a general evolution of the Stalinists away from the most sectarian tactics of the 1928-1930 period, an evolution which did not however call into question Stalin's interpretation of the fundamental political precepts of the Sixth Congress. Second, on the eve of the Popular Front, the supposedly monolithic Com- intern comprised three wings: a Right, purged but still present in every Party; an ultra-Left, generally influential and often in positions of leadership; and a Stalinist Left, dominant and constantly maneuvering to wm support for its tactical positions from forces to its Right or to its Left. Since 1928, the Stalinists and their ultra-Left allies had been, generally speaking, in command; the events of 1934 destroyed this alliance and created a new one, unleashing a Right which had been "under control" for years.

The Popular Front: 1934- 1939

The importance of Soviet foreign policy in determining Com- intern policy cannot, of course, be minimized. Yet, for the purposes of this study, I am more interested in another impetus for a change which came from within the Comintern apparatus and the Euro- pean Communist Parties. In this regard, the Seventh Congress's shift in Comintern policy can be traced to two occurrences in 1934: the February events in Paris, in which Communist and Socialist workers and leaders demonstrated jointly, for the first time, against the French fascists; and the arrival in Moscow on February 27, straight from a German prison cell, of the hero of Leipzig, Georgi Dimitrov. Dimitrov's belief in the need for a policy shift can be traced both to his experiences in Germany and to his bitter battle within the Bulgarian Communist Party with an ultra-Left faction, t7

In the middle of March 1934 Dimitrov wrote to Stalin, expressing his conviction that the German fiasco and the situation in France proved the need for a shift in Comintern tactics. In a series of meetings with Stalin, Manuilsky and other members of the Soviet Polit- buro, Dimitrov explained his views: "Why, in the decisive moment, were the masses in their millions not with us, but with the Social- Democrats or, as in Germany, with the Nazis? I think that the main

17. Joseph Rothschild, The Communist Party of Bulgaria: Origins and Development, 1883-1936 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), pp. 287-299. For an excellent discuLsion of the evolution of the popular front policy see Jonathap Haslam, "The Comintern and the Origins of the Popular Front 1934-1935," The Historical Journal, Vol. 22, No. 3 (September 1979), pp. 673-691.


reason lies in our system of propaganda, in our incorrect approach to the European workers. ''ts Stalin and Manuilsky were convinced of the need for a change, and at their insistence Dimitrov was coopted onto the ECCI's Political Commission on April 22.19 Meanwhile, events in France demanded immediate attention; Doriot, the old Right-wing Communist, was agitating both inside and outside the PCF for broader unity with the Socialists (SFIO) and Thorez was resisting. Thorez and Doriot were summoned to Mos- cow, and it appears that Manuilsky was willing to support Doriot against Thorez in the interests of turning the French Party decisively towards unity with the Socialists. But Doriot refused to go to Mos- cow, concentrating instead on consolidating his strength in the local Party federation he headed and in winning re-election as the area's mayor. With this Manuilsky and Dimitrov met with Thorez alone in an effort to push him onto the tactical road that they and Stalin had already agreed upon. 2o On May 11, Dimitrov told Thorez:

The wall separating the Communist and Socialist workers must be torn down. Any means to this end is good. . . The united front policy should break with the old Zinovievite schemes of "from above, from the middle, or from below..." We must prove that the Communist Party actually and concretely wishes to wage a joint fight and that it can do so. . . All joint struggles involving Commu- nist, Socialist, and other workers against the bourgeoisie are always beneficial, even if at the start things do not develop strictly according to our slogans. Anyway, the objective results are what count. 21

A month later, in the midst of the PCF's preparation for its National Conference at Ivry and on the same day that PCF-SFIO negotiations began, the ECCI's Political Commission advised the French Party to broaden the united front:

You must pose the question of forming a united front more broadly than any other working-class party or organization in

18. Leibzon and Shirinia, Povorot, p. 93; see also Jean Merot, Dimitrov (Paris: Edi- tions Sociales, 1972), pp. 184-189.

19. Leibzon and Shirinia, Povorot, p. 90. 20. Celie and Albert Vassart, ~The Moscow Origins of the French 'Popular Front" in

Milorad Draehkovitch and Branko Laziteh (eds.), The Comintern: Historical Highlights (New York: Praeger, 1966), pp. 242-248, and Racine and Bodin, Le Patti Communiste Franfais, pp. 206-207.

21. "Intervention de Rouben Avramov," Cahiers de I'institut Maurice Thorez, II, 3-4 (October 1966-March 1967), p. 185; see also Leibzon and Shirinia, Povorot, p. 93.


France. All the force of the working class's mass actions must be concentrated against fascism. For the formation of the anti-fascist front it is necessary to work out a program of demands that will be supported by the broadest masses...

It is necessary to put an end to statements, often found in the Party press or in the speeches of Party orators, which say that the Party is fighting for the elimination of bourgeois democracy. Such bare and completely one-sided statements are politically mistaken. 22

Thorez was quick to follow, and at the Ivry Conference (June 23-26, 1934) and in the month following it, the French Party committed itself to unity of action: on July 27 the SFIO and the PCF signed a "unity pact" which committed each party to united action against fascism and to a cessation of attacks on the other.

But in the ECCI itself a heated debate was going on which pitted Stalin, Dimitrov, Manuilsky and Kuusinen against the ultra-Leftists whose positions had been unassailable for so long. Those to the left of the Stalinists included the Hungarian Bela Kun, the Soviet head of the Red Trade Union International Solomon Lozovsky, Com- intern financial secretary Osip Piatnitsky, the Latvian V.G. Knorin, KPD representative Fritz Heckert, and the Chinese Communist Wang Ming--an impressive and influential group of Comintern leaders. These "ultra-Leftists" maintained that the revolutionary crisis was still at hand or had begun and called for a deepening of the struggle against Social Democracy, for independent Communist-led unions, for a further radicalization of Comintern policy. 23

The first meeting of the Program Commission took place on June 14, 1934 and through June, July, and August a running battle between the Stalinists and the ultra-Leftists went on; according to some sources Stalin, Dimitrov and Manuilsky were in the minority for much of the summer. 24 But the initiative was clearly with Dim- itrov; on July I and 2, in a letter to Stalin and the Program Com- mission and in a speech to the Commission, he insisted on the need for a major change in Communist tactics:

I think that a revision of our tactics, our projections, our methods of work on the basis of the experience of recent events must be carried out boldly and rapidly and, I should say, without regard to the existing tactical projections which have bound us

22. A.P. Dimitriev and K.K. Shirinia, "Vopreki istorichcskoi pravde," Voprosy istorii KPSS, No. 3 (March 1972), p. 128.

23. See, for e×ample, Kommunisticheskii internatsional: kratkii istoricheskii ocherk (Moscow: Politizdat, 1969), pp. 379-380.

24. Bocca, Palmiro Togliatti, pp. 237-238.


hand and foot. What needs to be changed must be changed. What needs to be made more precise must rapidly be made more precise...

I have in mind above all our relations with Social Democracy, with the reformist unions and with other non-Communist working- class organizations. I have in mind our approach to the masses of Social-Democratic workers and to the masses of other non- Communist organizations. I have in mind, even more concretely, our united front tactic and the adoption of this tactic in various countries.

A week later attention shifted to the KPD once more: a year and a half after Hitler's rise to power, the ultra-Left remained extremely strong in the German Party, controlling the Party's underground press. For weeks the ultra-Left majority of the KPD leadership and the ultra-Leftists in the ECCI fought tenaciously against the Stalin- ist KPD minority and their ECCI allies. The ultra-Leftists balked at a Socialist-Communist rapprochement, while the Stalinists insisted, in the words of Dimitrov, on "the need for unity between our Ger- man Communist Party and the Social-Democratic workers' organization of Germany. "26 By the end of July the Stalinists had won out; on August I the German Central Committee agreed to change tactics. But the battle continued behind the scenes, and it was only in late October, with an ECCI Political Commission condemnation of sectarianism in the KPD, that Stalinist Walter Ulbricht gained control of the Party leadership, and even then the ultra-Left ran the KPD press well into 1935. 27

On August 20, three days after the signing of a unity pact between Italian Communists and Socialists, the first draft of the proposed Seventh Comintern Congress theses was presented. Over the next several weeks, the ECCI Stalinists reworked the theses, eliminating all traces of the ultra-Left positions. By October 1934 the shift had been made; a November 8 article in Pravda by Dimitrov signalled to the outside world the change in Comintern policy.

For ten days in December 1934, in what was to mark the definitive approval of the new policy of anti-fascist unity and political alliances, the ECCI's Presidium met to.consider the new tactics of

25. ~Dokumenty G.M. Dimitrova k VII Kongressu Kommunisticheskogo Internatsion- ala," Voprosy istorii KPSS, No. 7 (July 1965), p. 87.

26. Prof. Pospielov, "Les conclusions du VII congres de l'Internationale communiste," Cahiers de 17nstitut Maurice Thorez, II, 3--4 (October 1966-March 1967), p. 135.

27. For this period see, for example, D. Michev, "Georgii Dimitrov i revoliutsionnoe rabochee dvizhenie v Germanii (1933-1935 gg.)" in Georgii Dimitrov--vydaiushchiisia deiatel' kommunisticheskogo dvizheniia (Moscow: Politizdat, 1972), pp 320-321.

58 STUDIES 1N COMPARATIVE COMMUNISM

the French Communists. Thorez, in an enlarged session attended by over 170 foreign and Soviet Communists, reported on the PCF's successes and although the ultra-Leftist Lozovsky again raised his disagreements with the new alliance policy, the atmosphere was highly favorable to the PCF. Manuilsky, with his usual forcefulness, lashed out at reliance on outmoded "sacred formulas" and emphasized the pressing need to "learn how to analyze the concrete situation and act in it" in the light of Bolshevik experience. "We are predict- ing," said Manuilsky, "a new wave of fascist attacks in the next few months, and we must prepare for them now. ''2s And a month later the ECCrs Political Secretariat lent its unequivocal support to the PCF and its "correctly posed task of elaborating a program of immediate demands for the 'Popular Front,' capable of rallying the broadest strata of the working masses. ''29

In 1934, then, Dimitrov, Manuilsky, Kuusinen, and Stalin turned the Comintern towards political alliances with non-Communist organizations. Convinced that the intransigent tactics of the preceding "third period" were not equal to the tasks posed by the Nazi victory and the general threat of fascism in Europe the Comintern Stalinists discarded the old slogans. The new policy virtually ended the ultra-Left's influence in the Comintern; within five years, indeed, most of the leaders of the ultra-Left were dead, victims of the purges of 1937 and 1938. And just as the Stalinists had used the ultra-Left to combat the Bukharinite Right wing in the late 1920s, now the former Bukharinites were rehabilitated---first, to help defeat the ultra-Leftists, then to help implement the new tactical line. By the summer of 1934 Togliatti was participating actively in working out the new line. By late 1934 he was acting as a Comintern representative in Western Europe, helping and encouraging the various national parties in the implementation of the united front and popular front policies. 30 Indicative of this new alliance was the following interchange between Manuilsky and Humbert-Droz which took place after the Seventh Congress had codified the new policy:

"Comrade Humbert-Droz," said Manuilsky, "are you in agreement with the decisions of the Seventh World Congress?"

28. ~Dokumenty Ispoikoma Kominterna o bor'be za edinyi raboehii i narodnyi front, protiv fashizma i voiny," Voprosy istorii KPSS, No. 3 (March 1969), pp. 5-6.

29. Pospielov, ~Les conclusions," p. 136. For a good account of the PCF in this period, see Dan Brower, The New Jacobins: The French Communist Party in the Popular Front (Ithaca: CorneU University Press, 1968).

30. For a detailed account of Togliatti's activities in this period, see Ernesto Ragionie- ri's introduction to Palmiro Togliatti, Opere, III, 1 (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1973), pp. cliii.-ccxxxiii.


"You know, comrade Manuilsky, that I fought for this same policy in 1928 and in 1932. I am therefore in agreement with the tactical revision decided at the Seventh World Congress."

"Comrade Humbert-Droz, one is never in the right against one's own party. In 1928 and 1932 that policy was wrong. Today it is correct. Are you today in agreement with the decisions of the Sev- enth CongressT'

"I was in agreement in 1928, in 1932, and in 1933 and today I am more in agreement than ever."

"We have decided to once again place you at the head of the Swiss Communist Party to apply the new policy of the Interna- tional. You will take charge of the party secretariat and reorganize its leadership."3J

Popular Front Government and People's Democracy: 1935 - 1949

If 1934 saw the decisive proof of the Comintern Stalinists' wil- lingness to engage in tactical political alliances, in temporary coalitions, the following years presented them with a far more serious problem which has been, ever since, at the center of inner-Party disputes. Indeed, as the Communist Parties entered the mainstream of European political life for the first time, the Comintern was forced to evaluate the problems and prospects of Communist governmental participation. For if a Socialist-Communist alliance could decisively change the national political scene, it was only natural to contemplate the effects that a Socialist-Communist government might have. From the United and Popular Fronts it was only a short jump to the United Front government and a new, People's Democracy. I will telescope the two important episodes in the elab- oration of the People's Democracy theory--the mid-1930s, when attention focused on France and Spain, and the 1940s, with the rise of a whole series of Popular or National Front governments in Eastern and Western Europe.

The Comintern distinguished between two possible contexts for Communist governmental participation. In one, there was no revolutionary situation, conditions were not mature for a struggle for socialism, yet a political crisis and working-class pressure for a struggle against fascism were present. In these conditions, the Comintern foresaw the possibility of the establishment of a United Front government, "a government," as Dimitrov said, "of struggle

31. Jules Humbert-Droz, Dix Ans de Lutte Antifasciste, 1931-1941 (Neuchatel: La Baconniere, 1972), p. 139.


against fascism and reaction."32 This would be primarily a government charged with preventing a fascist takeover or overthrowing an existing fascist regime. In itself the United Front government could perform no revolutionary socialist function, but, if properly used by the Communists, it might, in the words of Manuilsky, "clear the way for the victory of the working class. ''33 Over and over the Comintern leaders emphasized the tactical, defensive nature of the united front government, repeating, like Dimitrov at the Seventh Congress, that "final salvation this government cannot bring... Soviet power and only Soviet power can bring salvation! "34

But there was another possible context in which Communists might play a governmental role. In Spain in 1936 and in Eastern Europe after World War II a revolutionary situation did exist, but the character of the revolution was either anti-feudal or anti-fascist. In both cases, the united front government could be a much more active, positive, offensive force, helping to link the bourgeois- democratic or anti-fascist stage of the revolution with its proletarian socialist stage. In this Dimitrov and Manuilsky often referred to Lenin's writing on the relationship between the bourgeois-democratic and socialist revolutions in Russia; at the Seventh Congress Dim- itrov said, "In the countries where the bourgeois-democratic revolution is developing, a People's Front government may become the government of the democratic dictatorship of the working class and the peasantry. ''35 And of the countries in which the socialist revolution might begin with an anti-fascist uprising, Dimitrov wrote even before the Congress:

The character of the revolution in Germany, France, and even in Poland and Italy where there are many semi-feudal vestiges, will be proletarian. But the fact that fascism has destroyed the most elementary democratic rights of the broadest masses of the people greatly increases the general democratic tasks of the proletarian revolution, and the revolution--proletarian in character and in its leading forces--may begin as a popular anti-fascist revolution led by the proletariat. 3s

32. Georgi Dimitrov, The United Front (New York: International Publishers, 1937), p. 70.

33. D.Z. Manuilsky, "Results of the Seventh Congress of the Communist Interna- tional. Report at Meetings of Leading Party Workers in Moscow and Leningrad," The Communist International, XII, 23-24 (December 20, 1935), p. 1591.

34. Dimitrov, The United Front, p. 76. Emphasis in the original. 35. Ibid., p. 108. Emphasis added. 36. K.K. Shirinia, "Iz istorii podgotovki VII kongressa Kommunistieheskogo Internat-

sionala," Voprosy istorii KPSS, No. 8 (August 1975), p. 60.


In September 1936 the ECCI Secretariat considered the Spanish question, and Dimitrov further developed these ideas. Now, with the existence of the Soviet state on the one hand and the fascist dicta- torships on the other, Dimitrov said, "the question of the bourgeois- democratic state is not the same as before." A bourgeois-democratic revolution led by a Popular Front, like that in Spain, would be "a special state with a genuinely people's democracy. It would not yet be Soviet democracy, but an anti-fascist, Left-wing state, with the participation of the genuinely Left-wing section of the bourgeoisie." A government of the type being formed in Spain, Dimitrov continued, would be "in the present transitional stage, a democratic state where the Popular Front has decisive influence yet where the bourgeois system still exists... Theoretically it might be correct to define this as a special form of the democratic dictatorship of the working class and peasantry."37

In this view of the Comintern Stalinists, then, the united front government could prepare the way for the proletarian revolution. The united front government could not itself carry out the transition to socialism; it was transitional only in the sense that it prepared the proletariat for the definitive seizure of power. This was true both in a non-revolutionary situation, in which the government would simply defeat fascism and allow the proletariat to rally its forces for the final assault on Capital, and in a revolutionary situation, in which case the new government would lead the bourgeois-democratic or anti-fascist revolution, providing the best possible conditions for the proletariat to move on to the socialist revolutionary transition. Implicit or explicit in the Stalinist projections on this topic was the belief that the united front government itself could not implement the transition to socialism; for this a Soviet-style dictatorship of the proletariat was necessary.

For the Communist Right--as represented today, for example, by the Eurocommunists--this position of Dimitrov's caused problems. For key to the Right position has been the belief that these intermediate state forms--whether they be called democracies of a new type, progressive democracies, or advanced democracies----could themselves begin the transition to socialism. And, indeed, Togliatti subtly voiced his disagreements with Dimitrov almost immediately. In an article which appeared only a few weeks after the September 1936 ECCI Secretariat session on the. Spanish question, Togliatti gives a more detailed restatement of the ideas of Dimitrov, but indicates his disagreement with the central point of Dimitrov's argument:

37. "Dokumenty Ispolkoma," pp. 12-13.


The true character of the Spanish Popular Front cannot be defined purely and simply as "a democratic dictatorship of the workers and peasants." First, the Spanish Popular Front is based not only on workers and peasants, it has a much broader social base; second, pushed by the civil war itself, the Popular Front is taking a series o f measures which go substantially beyond the program o f a government of the revolutionary-democratic dictatorship. as

The significance of this 1936 exchange goes well beyond the historically interesting point that Dimitrov's September 1936 speech is the first known use by a Communist of the term "People's Democracy." The debate shows that as early as 1936 the Comintern was considering the possibility that an anti-fascist revolution might bring to power a coalition government involving the Communists. For such Stalinists as Dimitrov, such an anti-fascist revolutionary government, progressive as it might be, was still only a means to an end, and that end remained the proletarian dictatorship, the only true road to socialism. For such Rightists as Togliatti, on the other hand, the anti-fascist government itself could both eliminate fascism and move on to socialism; a proletarian dictatorship, in these conditions, was unnecessary. For the Stalinists, the Popular Front government was primarily defensive, with the socialist revolutionary offensive yet to come; for the Rightists, the Popular Front regime was both defensive, anti-fascist, and offensive, socialist. The 1936 position of the Rightists, then, contained all the necessary pre- conditions for a vision of peaceful transition from capitalism to socialism by way of a coalition government, a vision the Stalinists generally rejected.

These differences, embryonic at best in the 1930s, became significant in the politically explosive period during and immediately after World War II, when Communists rose to positions of power in a dozen European countries. For, even before the war ended, Com- munists of the Right were pushing for a revision of the doctrine of the proletarian dictatorship, for recognition of a democracy of a new, special, progressive, or advanced type.

In the Soviet Union, such leading Party figures as Eugen Varga, head of the Institute of World Economics and World Politics, and I.P. Trainin, editor of the leading Soviet law journal "Soviet State and Law," argued that the new regimes in Eastern Europe were, in the words of Varga, "neither a bourgeois dictatorship nor a

38. "Sulle particolarit/~ della rivoluzione spagnola" in Palmiro Togliatti, Sul movimento operaio internazionale (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1964). Emphasis added.


proletarian dictatorship. ''39 In the view of the Right-wing, gradualist Communists, the People's Democracies of Eastern Europe were a new, intermediate state form which could carry out a gradual, peaceful transition to socialism without a Soviet-style dictatorship of the proletariat; as Trainin put it, "bourgeois (capitalist) relations will ever more fade into the past and new, socialist relations will ever more ripen and take life. ''40 Varga summarized the Right position succinctly in a 1947 article:

The social structure of these States differs from all those hitherto known to us; it is something totally new in the history of man- kind... They are not capitalist states in the ordinary sense of the word. Neither, however, are they Socialist states... They may, with the maintenance of the present State apparatus, gradually pass over to Socialism...4t

Throughout Eastern Europe an analogous position was cham- pioned by many national Communist leaders. Typical, if extreme, was the statement by the Polish Party's General Secretary Wladis- law Gomulka in November 1946 that "under the present conditions no dictatorship of the working class, and even less a dictatorship of one party is necessary or intended... Our democracy and the social system which we are building here has no precedent in history... We are not a state with a socialist system. ''42 Indeed, Communist leaders throughout Eastern Europe--including many Stafinists-- originally supported the new line, only to change their minds (or at least their public statements) as the Soviet Party leaders made clear their disapproval of such "Right-nationalist deviators" as Gomulka.

In Western Europe the participation of the Communist Parties of France, Italy and Belgium in National Front governments gave rise to similar extensions of the Rightist projections. In Italy, Togliatti fought for two doctrinal changes: a new, mass Party (as opposed to an old Bolshevik-style Party of cadres), and a progressive, advanced democracy similar to that proposed by the gradualists in East Europe. "Our task," Togliatti told a National Party Conference in 1947, "is to find our own, Italian, road, a road dictated by the par-

39. E. Varga, "Demokratiia novogo tipa," Mirovoe khoziaistvo i mirovaia politika, No. 3 (March 1947), p. 3.

40. I.P. Trainin, "Demokratiia osobogo tipa," Sovetskoe gosudarstvo i pravo, No. 3 (March 1947), p. 14.

41. Varga, "Demokratiia," p. 3. For o n e study of this period, see William O. McCagg, Jr., Stalin Embattled, 1943-1948 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1978).

42. Quoted in Francis Kase, People's Democracy (Leyden: Sijthoff, 1968), p. 20.


ticularities, traditions, and conditions of our country, a road of democratic development and struggle for the realization of the most advanced democratic reforms and for socialism. "4a

In France, Thorez, Guyot and others spoke along similar lines, although Thorez was a bit less categorical. "The progress of democracy around the world," Thorez told a correspondent for the Lon- don 7~mes in November 1946, "permits one to hypothesize a march to socialism along roads different from that followed by the Russian Communists. In any case, the road is necessarily different in each country."44

For a while the Soviet Communist leadership gave free rein to the Rightists, probably for reasons of foreign policy. But by the end of 1947 the Cold War had begun, and the pace of social transforma- tions in Eastern Europe had quickened; the Stalinists thus began a systematic assault on the Rightist line. In the Soviet Union a series of articles set forth Stalinist hostility to the Right's "revisions of Marxism." In late 1947, for example, Andrei Vyshinsky, prosecutor of the purge trials and soon to succeed Molotov in the Foreign Ministry, attacked the Right--the "Kautskyites, Mensheviks, Labor- ites, SRs and other opportunists"mfor their "base renunciation of Marxism," for their failure to "extend the recognition of the class struggle through to the period of the transition from capitalism to socialism, to the recognition of the necessity of the dictatorship of the proletariat. ''45

At the same time, in September 1947, the Soviets sponsored the establishment of the Cominform, at whose founding conference the PCF and the PCI were roundly criticized for reformism, and, in the case of the PCI, for "parliamentary cretinism. ''46 Within a few months came the excoriation of the Yugoslav Communists, then of a whole cohort of "Right-nationalist deviators" throughout Eastern Europe (Gomulka was purged in November 1948).

The Stalinist position, made clear in both theory and practice,

43. Quoted in Luciano Gruppi, Togliatti e la via italiana al socialismo (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1974), p. 105.

44. "Interview de Maurice Thorez au 2q'mes," Cahiers du communisme, No. I I (November 1946), p. 1015; see also Raymond Guyot, "Les ehemins du socialisme," Ca- hiers du communisme, No. 1 (January 1947).

45. Andrei Vyshinsky, "Uchenie Lenina Stalina o proletarskoi revoliutsii i gosudarstve," Sovetskoe gosudarstvo i pravo, No. I I (November 1947), p. 2. For another similar statement by Vyshinsky, see his "Voprosy gosudarstva i prava v 'Manifeste Kommunisticheskoi Partii'," Sovetskoe gosudarstvo ipravo, No. 2 (February 1948).

46. Eugenio Reale, Avec Jacques Duclos au banc des accuses ~ la r~union constitutive du Kominform h Szklarska Poreba (22-27 sept. 1947) (Paris: Librairie Plon, 1958), p. 139.


was that the multi-party governments in the People's Democracies were little more than tactical means to the strategic end, the proletarian dictatorship. Governmental alliances were fine, said the Stalin- ists, as long as their temporary nature was clearly understood. While participating in such coalitions, Communists had to systematically infiltrate and cut the ground out from underneath their Socialist and other allies. Only thus could the Communists capitalize on the transitional nature of the coalitions, guiding them rapidly towards a proletarian dictatorship.

The Stalinists in Eastern and Western Europe were quick to move to attack the Rightists. By December 1948 Dimitrov and Klement Gottwald signalled the end of the "national roads to socialism" period in which both of them, indeed, had been public participants. Dimitrov's speech of December 9, 1948 to the Bulgarian Party became the rallying cry of the Stalinists:

According to Marxist-Leninist principles, the Soviet regime and the people's democracy are two forms of one and the same rule . . . They are two forms of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The particular form of transition from capitalism to socialism in Bulgaria does not and cannot alter the basic laws of the transition period from capitalism to socialism which are valid for all countries. 47

In Western Europe, too, the Stalinists--always restless in the earlier collaborationist period--struck out at the Right. Indeed, one of the two Italian delegates to the Cominform's founding conference, Pietro Secchia, was himself on the Party's Left wing and was in personal agreement with the Cominform criticisms of Togliatti's policies. In December 1947, three months after the Cominform met, Secchia traveled to Moscow to present Stalin and the Soviet leadership with a thirty-page report highly critical of Togliatti's policies; the direct result was Secehia's meteoric rise, at Stalin's "suggestion," to the number two position in the PCI, as head of party organization. Years later Secchia, removed from leadership by Togliatti in 1954 but a Party member until his recent death, was to say, "I knew for certain that Stalin saw the Italian road to socialism as a policy of submission, I knew that he did not like it. ''4s

47. Georgi Dimitrov, Political Report to the V Congress of the Bulgarian Communist Party (Sofia: Press Department, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 1949).

48. Bocca, Palmiro Togliatti, p. 542. For Secchia's Moscow trip see Gianni Corbi, "Quando denunciai Togliatti a Stalin. Dall'archivio segreto di Pietro Secchia," L'Es- presso, February 19, 1978, pp. 24-27. In this context Stalin's 1951 attempt to move Togliatti from Italy to Prague in order to head the Cominform seems to have been a clear attempt to bring Secchia to power.


As for the PCF, the struggle had begun during the Resistance. Here Thorez, who had generally walked a thin line between the Rightists and the Stalinists, found himself under attack by Andr6 Marty, Charles Tillon, Auguste Lecoeur, and other leaders of the Communist underground. The Resistance leaders, who tended toward ultra-Leftism, demanded a more radical policy of Thorez, condemned his concessions to De Gaulle, and wanted a more mil- itantly anti-colonial Party policy. The details of the dispute, which surfaced publicly only in 1952 with the famous "Marty-Tillon affair," are still obscure, but it does seem clear that the Cominform's reassertion of Stalinist principles convinced Thorez to abandon gradualism, which he might well have done in any case. 49

The Two Lines Restated

Before moving on to some more general conclusions, I should like to restate the essential differences between the two political positions on which I have focused.

The Stalinists insisted on the centrality of the violent break with the past, of the proletarian seizure of power. For them there was only one strategic line; as Stalin wrote in 1921, "all work must be directed towards the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat. "s0 Within this strategic line there was the possibility of end- less tactical shifts and maneuvers, but these maneuvers were always subordinate to the needs of the preparation for the seizure of power. Fascism--like imperialism and the peculiar nature of the bourgeois- democratic revolution in Russia for Lenin--could and did change the demands of the moment, but it could not alter the Stalinist insistence on the need for a dictatorship of the proletariat on the Soviet model.

The faults of the Sixth Comintern Congress, for the Stalinists, were tactical; its intransigent strategic line was correct and was not changed by the tactical shift of the Seventh Congress. As Secchia, long the PCI's leading Stalinist, wrote years later:

No one will ever succeed in disproving the analyses and the perspectives set forth by the Sixth Congress, by the Tenth Plenum

49. For the struggle in the PCF, see Alfred Rieber, Stalin and the French Communists 1941-1947 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962), pp. 159-191 and 308-330; Yves le Braz, Les rejet~es: I'affaire Marty-~llon (Paris: La Table Ronde, 1974), esp. pp. 117-138, 163-175 and 199--206; Ruth Fischer, The French Commun~t Party Versus Andre Marty (New York: n.p., n.d.--19527).

50. Stalin, Works, Vol. 5, p. 81.


and by those which followed, for they were confirmed by the facts. The Comintern and Stalin were right, and certainly not Bukharin, Humbert-Droz, and Tasca. . . The Communist Parties, it has been said, were unable to draw valid political conclusions from their correct predictions. But while with a correct perspective one may make errors and lose battles, with an incorrect perspective one is on the the road to disaster, the war is lost. 5j

What is characteristic of the Stalinist line in European and :international Communism, then, was a strategic intransigence coupled with a great tactical agility, a theoretical and political rigidity combined with practical flexibility.

For the Communist Right, the conditions of modern Europe called for a search for more gradualist roads to socialism, a search which foresaw a relatively long intermediate stage between capitalism and socialism. This progressive or advanced democracy could itself carry out the transition to socialism; a Soviet-style proletarian dictatorship was unnecessary. For such Right-wing Communists as Togliatti, the united front policy was itself "not only a tactic but a strategy. ''52 The Right saw (and sees) many more possibilities for a socialist transformation in the context of a democratic regime, of a state that was not the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The Right welcomed the Popular Front policy, but in a different spirit than the Stalinists. While Dimitrov and Manuilsky saw in the new line a tactical adaptation, the Right saw in it a long-term strategy for a socialist revolution broader in social support, and more gradual in implementation, than that of the Russian Bolshe- viks. The Right was characterized on this as on other issues, then, by a sense of strategic flexibility for which the Stalinists had no use; in the Right we find both theoretical-political and tactical agility. Yet time and again, throughout the period under examination, the Right caved in to the Stalinists, primarily because of Stalin's preponderance within the Comintern and his great prestige within the various national Parties.

These two lines might be said to represent the two poles in the dialectic of the Communist movement itself. On the one hand, much of the working-class appeal of Communism can be traced to its revolutionary doctrine, to the inflexible insistence on the need for an insurrection and a proletarian dictatorship. On the other hand, in those European countries where Communist parties are a real

51. Pietro Secchia in Critica marxism, V, 3 (see footnote 3). 52. "Alcuni problemi della storia dell'lnternazionale" in Palmiro Togliatti, Sul

movimento~ p. 307.


political force they are constantly drawn into the day-to-day work- ings of the political process, they are constantly exposed to the very flexibility of the political and social institutions of advanced capitalist society. As long as this flexibility is present there will be those who see a possibility of using it to change society itself; and as long as the Communist Parties maintain their working-class base and their revolutionary doctrine there will be those for whom bourgeois institutions must be rejected on principle.

Conclusions

This study has focused on three themes. The first is of primarily historical interest: at any given point the political line of the Comintern can be traced both to the line of the dominant Soviet Communists led by Stalin and to the line of the Communists to their Right or to their Left with whom the Stalinists formed temporary alliances. During and after the Sixth Congress Stalin and Manuilsky joined with ultra-Leftists Lozovsky, Kun, and Piatnitsky to combat what both the Stalinists and the ultra-Left saw as the main, Right-reformist, Bukharinite danger. But almost as soon as this alliance had served its purpose, and as their failures in Europe pushed the Stalinists toward more flexible tactics, Manuilsky and Dimitrov joined with the Right to end the influence of the ultra-Left.

My second theme is the essential continuity of the Rightist, "reformist" line in European Communism, a continuity which runs back at least to the Sixth Congress. It is clear why today's Com- munists of the Right, the Eurocommunists, are consistent in referring back, like Santiago Carrillo, to "the popular fronts in Europe as antecedents of 'Eurocommunism'. ''53 And it is also clear why the Eurocommunist critique of Stalin focuses on the two periods which saw him in political conflict with the Communist Right: the suppres- sion of the Rightists at and after the Comintern's Sixth Congress, and, in the words of the PCrs Giorgio Napolitano, "The fact that,

53. Santiago Carrillo, Eurocommunism and the State (Westport: Lawrence Hill, 1978), p. 110. For other, similar arguments, see especially Manuel Azcarate, "Quclques aspects des repercussions intcrnationales du Front Populaire," Cahiers de I'institut Mau- rice Thorez, II, 3-4 (October 1966-March 1967), pp. 200-201; Giorgio Amendola, "Inseg- namenti del VII Congresso," Critica marxista, III, 4 (July-August 1965), pp. 27-28; Gior- gio Amendola, Intervista sull'antifascismo (Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1976), pp. 77-98; Jean Elleinstein, The Stalin Phenomenon (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1976), pp. i24-126 and his conversation with Bernardo VaUi in Valli's Gli Eurocomunisti (Milan: Bompiani, 1976), pp. 66-69; for an early statement by Togliatti in one of his last articles, see "Viag- gio in Jugoslavia," Rinascita, February 1, 1964, pp. 1-2.


in 1947, on an international level, the search for new roads to socialism [was] abruptly cut off by the Communist movement. TM For 25 years before 1953, the Right wing of European Communism fought the political positions of Stalin; polycentrism and Euro- communism are simply a full-blown and extreme continuation of this opposition.

This brings us to the third point: Stalin's politics. Communists from Khrushchev on have attempted to stifle a discussion of Stalin's politics with talk of the personality cult or the Stalin myth. And although we cannot underestimate the importance of the uses of blind loyalty to the needs of Soviet foreign policy, coercion and repression for an understanding of the development of international Communism, neither should we ignore the significance of the political trend which Stalin represented. This trend in the international Communist movement, to repeat, is one of strategic intransigence, rigid insistence on the world-wide validity of Bolshevism, and inflexible assertion that all roads to socialism lead through the proletarian dictatorship--all coupled with great tactical agility. An understanding of the political role Stalin and his followers played within the international Communist movement will allow us both to clarify the history of international Communism and to view current developments in European Communism in proper historical perspective.

54. Erie Hobsbawm, The Italian Road to Socialism: An Interview with Giorgio Napo- litano (Westport: Lawrence Hill, 1977), p. 26.

The internal politics of European Communism in the Stalin Era: 1934?1949*1

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