The Comintern: Taking the Revolution to the World
Did you know?
Lenin said it was impossible to achieve a socialist revolution in only one country
The American Communist Party was directly controlled—and financed to the tune of millions of dollars a year—by the Soviet Russian government
To join the Communist Party in 1935, Americans had to take an oath “to rally the masses to defend the Soviet Union”
This vast array of violence, destruction, and dissolution that the communist revolution ushered in would have been bad enough in one place. Far worse, however, is that Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, and their cohorts—and Marx long before them—had pledged themselves to world revolution. They wanted their communist vision advanced not just in one country but in every nation. Marx, after all, had exhorted the “workers of the world” to unite.
The Bolsheviks created an organization to carry out their “full-fledged political project: world socialist revolution”: the Soviet Communist International (the Comintern). It was launched by Lenin in March 1919 at a congress in Moscow.1 The objective of the Comintern was self-evident from its title, and made even clearer by Trotsky’s description of it as “the General Staff of the World Revolution.”2
In a March 6 Pravda article, the last day of the congress, Lenin wrote, “The founding of the Third Communist International heralds the international republic of Soviets, the international victory of communism.” In his concluding address at the congress, Lenin proclaimed that with the founding of the Comintern, “the victory of the Proletarian revolution on a world scale is assured. The founding of an international Soviet republic is on the way.”3
Going Global
• “Workers of the world, unite!” —Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 1848
• “It is our interest and our task to make the revolution permanent, until the proletariat has conquered state power and until the association of the proletarians has progressed sufficiently far—not only in one country but in all the leading countries of the world.” —Karl Marx, 1850 Address of the General Council to the Communist League4
• “We have always emphasized that one cannot achieve such a task as a socialist revolution in one country.” —Vladimir Lenin, October 19205
• “We knew that our victory will be a lasting victory only when our undertaking will conquer the whole world, because we had launched it exclusively counting on the world revolution.” —Vladimir Lenin, November 19176
• “We live not only in a state but in a system of states, and the existence of the Soviet Republic side by side with the imperialist states for an extended period is unthinkable. In the end either one or the other will conquer. And before this result, a series of horrible conflicts between the Soviet Republic and the bourgeois states is unavoidable.” —Vladimir Lenin, March 1919 report to the Eighth Party Congress7
• “The ultimate aim of the Communist International is to replace the world capitalist economy by a world system of Communism.”8 —The Communist International (Comintern) Fifth Congress, January 1924
The Bolshevik hierarchy would run the Comintern with an iron fist. It exercised what it deemed “uncontested authority” over the Communist Parties established all over the globe—with centralized control in Moscow.9 Every country with a Communist Party would have a representative in Moscow, and other liaisons connecting them. Moscow would be the physical headquarters, the high command. The leader of the Soviet Union was to be the conductor of the worldwide Marxist-Leninist symphony. The Comintern constituted an international association of national communist parties, all under the leadership of the Soviet government in Russia, and all directed toward sparking a global revolution for worldwide communism.
A Book You’re Not Supposed to Read
Communism: A History by Richard Pipes (New York: Modern Library Chronicles, 2001).
The Bolsheviks wasted no time in agitating revolts and helping to foment full-scale civil wars in other countries. By January 1919, after only one tenuous year in power, the Bolsheviks had already instigated a revolt in post-WWI Germany, though it was quickly quelled. By the time of the second Comintern Congress in July 1920, the communists had sparked uprisings in Poland, Finland, and Hungary.
But the Comintern did not really get down to business until a little over year after its March 1919 founding, once Bolshevik victory in the Russian civil war seemed likely and Lenin and his comrades could focus on the larger prize: the world.10 At that Second Congress, the Bolsheviks issued a manifesto proclaiming that “world Civil War” was the “watchword” and “the order of the day.”11
Richard Pipes has noted that by 1920 Lenin had already left no doubt that he envisioned the Comintern as “a branch of the Russian Communist Party, organized on its model and subject to its orders.” This was made unmistakably clear in the 1920 Comintern Congress, where foreign delegates submitted to “iron military discipline.” Moscow imposed that discipline upon them, and they in turn would impose it upon Party members in their home countries. They were expected to both demonstrate and require complete loyalty and “the fullest comradely confidence.” Their instructions were to take over mass organizations and especially trade unions in their home countries.12
The Comintern dictated that members of foreign communist parties—from Europe to America—who did not give total subservience to Moscow (“who reject in principle the conditions and theses put forward by the Communist International”) were “to be expelled from the party.” This was the infamous “party discipline” that was a hallmark of communist parties everywhere. It was dogmatically enforced within the domestic parties themselves, including in the American party, where the discipline took harsh forms. Wherever any communist party was—in America, Asia, or Africa—full submission to Moscow was obligatory. The 1920 congress was unambiguous. It laid down this line condition for admission and membership to the Comintern: “Every party which wishes to join the Communist International is obligated to give unconditional support to any Soviet republic in its struggle against counter-revolutionary forces.” And befitting the vicious regime that was its source, the congress evoked war rhetoric as central to its mission, stating: “The Communist International has declared war on the entire bourgeois world.”13
From The Washington Post: “America’s Top Communists of All Time”
1. Earl Browder
2. Woody Guthrie
3. W. E. B. DuBois
4. William Foster and Jay Lovestone
5. J. Robert Oppenheimer
6. Alger Hiss
7. Whittaker Chambers
8. Paul Robeson
9. Elizabeth Bentley
10. John Reed
11. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg
12. Howard Fast
13. Eugene Dennis and Gus Hall15
Even before the Second Congress of the Comintern, the United States of America had a homegrown Communist Party. The show opened in America in September 1919, when two Communist Parties were formed in the United States, the “Communist Labor Party” (CLP) and the “Communist Party of America” (CPA), organized at a convention in Chicago during the first week of that month. After mergers and name changes, by 1929 the communists would be united in a single “Communist Party USA” (CPUSA), firmly under the control of the Comintern. The CPUSA was the political party for American communists throughout the Cold War, and it still exists today.14
A Book You’re Not Supposed to Read
American Communism and Soviet Russia: The Formative Period by Theodore Draper (Viking, 1960).
It cannot be emphasized enough that American members of the Communist Party were subservient to the Comintern and to Moscow. The Communist Party in America was founded only months after the Comintern itself had been established in Moscow. The Comintern created an Anglo-American secretariat as its vehicle for micromanaging the Communist Party there, and a representative of the American Communist Party resided in Moscow as the liaison between the secretariat in Russia and the American Party, transferring information between the two and delivering orders from Moscow to American communists.16
As ex-communist Theodore Draper reported in his seminal work on the American Communist Party, when a new member joined the party in the 1920s, he or she signed a party registration card inscribed with these words: “The undersigned, after having read the constitution and program of the Communist Party, declares his adherence to the principles and tactics of the party and the Communist International: agrees to submit to the discipline of the party as stated in its constitution and pledges to engage actively in its work.”17 The mission of American communists who joined the Communist Party was obedience to the Soviets and work to forward the world revolution for communism.
By 1935 new CPUSA members also swore this loyalty oath: “I pledge myself to rally the masses to defend the Soviet Union, the land of victorious socialism. I pledge myself to remain at all times a vigilant and firm defender of the Leninist line of the party, the only line that insures the triumph of Soviet Power in the United States.” That wording was—putting it mildly—difficult to square with the loyalties and duties incumbent upon American citizens. (Not to mention that at that point American Communists were swearing loyalty to Joseph Stalin, then in the midst of perpetrating “the Great Terror,” a campaign of slaughter in which tens of millions would die.)
New York City: Commie Central
J. Edgar Hoover’s boys in the FBI were kept especially busy in New York City, which was commie central.
New York was home to the literal vast majority of American communists. It was the headquarters of Communist Party USA, the Daily Worker, and other publications such as The New Masses. It was the home of commie hot-spots such as Columbia University, not to mention the occasional communist cell at places like, yes, the New York Times.18
This was no secret to the FBI. A declassified March 2, 1948, document, addressed to assistant FBI director D. M. Ladd and titled “Redirection of Communist Investigations,” notes that there were “approximately 30,000” Communist Party members in the New York City area alone. The document reported that “almost 50% of the Communist Party members in the United States are located in the New York area.”
The New York Office of the FBI had accumulated 1,168 Security Index cards on these CPUSA members in New York. Americans placed on the federal government’s Security Index were deemed “dangerous” or “potentially dangerous” because of the possibility of that they might collaborate with a foreign power against the United States—in this case, with Stalin’s Soviet Union. If a war broke out between the United States and USSR, these people could have been placed under immediate arrest because of their loyalty oath to Stalin’s Soviet Union, which they had sworn upon becoming Communist Party members.19
Comintern control of CPUSA was so total that when CPUSA picked leaders for its own Central Committee, a list was first sent to Moscow for approval. You can read these lists today in the declassified Comintern Archives. Other documents in those archives are equally revealing.
Take, for example, “Soviet Power and the Creation of a Communist Party of America,” a so-called “Thesis of the Executive Committee of the Third International,” which was completed in the summer of 1919, just prior to the official formation of the original American communist parties in Chicago in September 1919. “The three-page document carries two important signatures: ‘For the Bureau of the Communist International, N. Bucharin, J. Bersin (Winter).’”20 The signatories are Nikolai Bukharin, one of the infamous Bolshevik founders, and Jan Berzin, later Soviet general and head of Soviet military intelligence, the GRU.
This document begins by establishing that the American party will not be independent from the Soviet Comintern: “1) For the purpose of attaining an immediate success of the revolutionary class struggle, of systematically organizing it, of uniting and co-ordinating all really revolutionary forces, and for the purpose of unifying principles and organizations, it is necessary to form a Communist Party which should be affiliated with the Communist International 2) The cardinal unifying and directing idea should be the recognition of the necessity for proletarian dictatorship, that is, Soviet power.”21
A second key document in the Comintern Archives appears to have been issued at the Chicago convention of September 1–7, 1919. It is on the letterhead of the newly established Communist Party of America, at 1219 Blue Island Avenue, Chicago, Illinois. It is a brief celebratory salutation from the Communist Party of America’s executive secretary, Charles Ruthenberg, along with attestation from two present “International Delegates,” Isaac Ferguson and Alexander Steklitsky.22 It contains four simple sentences:
In the name of the Communist Workers of the United States organized in the Communist Party of America I extend greetings to the Communist Party of Russia.
Hail to the Dictatorship of the Proletariat!
Long live the Russian Socialist Soviet Republic!
Long live the Communist International!
The level of loyalty in this letter, to what and to whom, speaks for itself.
A third revealing document in the archives is the November 24, 1919, application for Comintern membership by the Communist Party of America. The letter, signed by the party’s international secretary, Louis C. Fraina, claimed a total party membership of “approximately 55,000 members.”23 This figure may (or may not) have been exaggerated. Nonetheless it is interesting that, even allowing for some padding of the membership rolls, it is considerably higher than the twenty-five-thousand-membership figure self-reported by CPUSA in 1934,24 in the supposed heyday of the Party during the Great Depression.
The blind loyalty of American Communist Party members to the Soviet Union and its blood-stained leadership would last as long as the Soviet Union itself. As stated by Herb Romerstein, a former communist who for over fifty years was one of America’s leading authorities on domestic communism, “from 1919, when it [CPUSA] was formed, to 1989, when the Soviet Union collapsed, it was under total Soviet control.”25 Romerstein called the American comrades “loyal Soviet patriots.” Their legal citizenship might have been in the United States, but their hearts and minds belonged to the USSR.
Another bit of telling evidence of Soviet control emerged only after the Cold War ended. The CPUSA received funding from the Soviet communist government, beginning in 1919 and continuing until the collapse of the Soviet empire in 1989. These were not piddling sums; the financial support from Moscow was a lifeline that kept CPUSA afloat, to the tune of millions of dollars annually.26
In The Secret World of American Communism, Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes report that the American Communist Party had been “generously funded by the Soviet Union . . . from its inception in 1919.” The subsidies from the Kremlin to CPUSA ultimately “reached $3,000,000 a year by the mid-1980s.”27
Two Books You’re Not Supposed to Read
The Secret World of American Communism by John E. Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2000).
Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America by John E. Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).
Herb Romerstein concluded on the basis of documents from Soviet and CPUSA archives that the “Communist Party USA was receiving two to three million dollars a year until 1988”—essentially, until the end of the Cold War.
The support was there from the outset, even when the Bolsheviks had little cash to spare (as if they ever had). In the 1920s, the Comintern supplied the American communist movement several millions of dollars’ worth of valuables—gold, silver, jewels—which had been stolen by the regime.28
The Daily Worker, the house organ of CPUSA, received heavy cash infusions from the Comintern from the earliest days of its existence.29 The editor of the Daily Worker was approved by the Comintern. Soviet support of American communism was comprehensive, from day one.
A foreign nation, whose government was frankly attempting to overthrow the government and Constitution of the United States, was secretly and illegally funding an American political party. Today, none of this is a secret, but it is rarely taught in America’s universities.
More disturbing facts have emerged from two excellent sources, one in the 1930s and ’40s and the other after the end of the Cold War: Ben Gitlow and Morris Childs.
Gitlow shared tantalizing information in testimony before the U.S. Congress in the 1930s. He had been a top CPUSA figure, running twice as the Communist Party’s candidate for vice president of the United States (1924 and 1928) and serving on the Executive Committee of the Comintern before leaving the party in 1929. After a long silence, Gitlow emerged to testify before Congress (1939) and write two major books, I Confess (1940) and The Whole of Their Lives (1948), in which he laid out a litany of disturbing facts about CPUSA’s relationship with Moscow, from members’ “fanatical zeal” for the Soviet Union and “its ultimate victory over the capitalist world,” to espionage by American communists and Soviet funding of the American party. Gitlow testified that the Comintern had sent the CPUSA $100,000–150,000 annually from 1922 to 1929, given $35,000 to launch the Daily Worker in 1924, and paid tens of thousands of dollars to American union bosses, and that the funding continued at the time he was testifying.
A Book You’re Not Supposed to Read
The Venona Secrets by Herbert Romerstein and Eric Breindel (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2000).
The Rosenbergs
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were the husband-and-wife team convicted of treason and executed for atomic espionage—that is, for helping Stalin’s Soviet Union get the bomb. Sources as diverse as J. Edgar Hoover and the Columbia Law Review would call it “the crime of the century.”30 Predictably, liberals judged the Rosenberg case a travesty of justice and blamed it on the “hysterical” anti-communism of the 1950s. Nonsense.
Soviet espionage in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s was very extensive and successful, as both the Venona papers and the Harvard Cold War International History project have demonstrated. An estimated 350 Americans, including numerous high-level U.S. government officials and key scientists working on the Manhattan Project, were spying for Soviet intelligence. Beyond those was another group of helpers, a list of at least two hundred more.31
Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev recalled hearing Foreign Minister Molotov tell Stalin that “the Rosenbergs had vastly aided production of our atomic bomb.32
The group of Americans most oblivious to the very real threat of such communist spies—including the Rosenbergs—was and remains liberals. Ironically, the Soviet code name for Julius Rosenberg, found throughout the Venona transcripts, was “Liberal.”33
Morris Childs was the ultimate first-person witness to the fact that that funding never stopped. He actually collected the money himself from the Kremlin in person in Moscow. Childs had risen to become the number two man at CPUSA, behind only Gus Hall, the head of CPUSA, who had succeeded previous communist leaders William Z. Foster and Earl Browder. The Soviets came to trust him completely and love him like a comradely brother. They awarded him the highest honors of the state. But Morris Childs had secretly become the highest-ranking informant for the FBI within CPUSA. His remarkable story is laid out in Operation Solo, the 1996 biography by John Barron.
A Book You’re Not Supposed to Read
The Rosenberg File by Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).
Morris Childs and his brother Jack (who also worked undercover for the FBI) were conduits for Soviet funding of CPUSA through all of the 1960s and 1970s. During that period the Kremlin gave CPUSA millions of dollars in annual funding. The total approached $2 million annually by 1976—America’s bicentennial—and rose to $2,775,000 by 1980. Barron’s biography of Childs lists the exact amount each year, down to the penny. The FBI knew the precise amount because it counted every dime at a half-way house before Morris deposited it in a safe for Gus Hall. This was all illegal.
Few parts of history have been rewritten by liberals quite like the story of the communists who penetrated the American film industry. The latest research, particularly by Larry Ceplair, Steven Englund, and Allan Ryskind, shows that there were two to three hundred communists operating in Hollywood in the late 1940s, always under concealment. Indisputably guilty were the screenwriters who made up the so-called Hollywood Ten. They were all card-carrying members of the Communist Party.
Disinformation
The Soviets had spies in America and throughout the West—in fact, all over the world. And they also engaged in propaganda campaigns to foment conflict and smear the critics of communism. Pope Pius XII, who was such a formidable enemy to Soviet communism that Stalin and his goons labeled him “Hitler’s Pope,” was a chief target. In their 2013 book Disinformation, Ion Mihai Pacepa and Ron Rychlak chronicle the crass art of Kremlin deception, detailing communist campaigns to defame, malign, and slander religious individuals. Pacepa, a former Romanian general, was the highest-ranking intelligence official to defect from the Soviet bloc, and a witness to many of the events the book describes. As Pacepa and Rychlak show, so patently dishonest was the Soviet use of disinformation that even the Soviet definition of disinformation, published in the 1952 edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, was itself a form of disinformation.
Pacepa and Rychlak gave special attention to the scandalously successful case against the vehemently anti-communist Pope Pius XII, who was public enemy number one to Stalin at the start of the Cold War. They show that the attack against Pius was launched with a 1945 Radio Moscow broadcast that first promoted the bald-faced “Hitler’s Pope” smear. The Soviets understood that Pius XII was a mortal threat to their ideology and thus manufactured the big lie that Pius had been pro-Hitler. They embarked on an unholy crusade to destroy the pope’s reputation, scandalize his flock, and foment division among Christians.
This was a standard tactic for the Soviets. They would sling the pro-Nazi charge at numerous Church figures including Cardinals Mindszenty of Hungary, Stepinac of Yugoslavia, and Wyszynski and Wojtyla of Poland.
And not just Catholic officials were targets. Pacepa and Rychlak revealed the loathsome anti-Semitism of the very conspirators behind the original “Hitler’s Pope” campaign. The Kremlin deliberately spread the insidious Protocols of the Elders of Zion conspiracy theory. Pacepa and Rychlak detailed Yuri Andropov’s anti-Zionism campaign, support of Islamic terrorism, and promotion of virulent anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism among Middle East Arabs. By 1978, the Soviet bloc had planted some four thousand agents of influence in the Islamic world, armed with hundreds of thousands of copies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion—and military weapons.34
These comrades literally swore themselves to Stalin’s Kremlin. Several of them followed Stalin even after the signing of the Hitler-Stalin Pact in 1939. Thus Allan Ryskind, son of Morrie Ryskind, an anti-communist screenwriter of the era, calls these dutiful comrades “Agents of Stalin, Allies of Hitler.” Here are the Ten, along with the Communist Party card numbers of each:
John Howard Lawson: 47275.
Dalton Trumbo: 47187.
Albert Maltz: 47196.
Alvah Bessie: 47279.
Samuel Ornitz: 47181.
Herbert Biberman: 47267.
Edward Dmytryk: 46859. (He had two additional numbers on other cards.)
Adrian Scott: 47200. (He had an additional number.)
Ring Lardner Jr.: 47180.
Lester Cole: 47226.35
Communists knew that the film industry could be tremendously useful for propagating communist propaganda. Vladimir Lenin said that “of all the arts, for us the most important is cinema.” Grigory Zinoviev, head of the Soviet Comintern, ordered that motion pictures “must become a mighty weapon of communist propaganda and for the enlightening of the widest working masses.” In March 1928, the Soviets held their first Party Conference on Cinema.36
The Bolsheviks realized that nowhere was the movie industry as advanced and influential as the United States, especially in Hollywood’s Golden Age. Their American comrades wholeheartedly agreed.
Two Books You’re Not Supposed to Read
Red Star over Hollywood: The Film Colony’s Long Romance with the Left by Ronald Radosh and Allis Radosh (New York City: Encounter Books, 2006).
Hollywood Traitors: Blacklisted Screenwriters—Agents of Stalin, Allies of Hitler by Allan Ryskind (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2015).
Working for a “Soviet America”
American communists were not dedicated to America. Their loyalty lay elsewhere. One of their first American general secretaries, William Z. Foster, openly advocated a “Soviet American Republic” as part of a “world Soviet Union.” Foster spoke frankly of American communists’ goal of creating a “Soviet America.” In fact, the title of his 1932 book was Toward Soviet America.37
Members of communist parties around the world, including in the United States, saw themselves as loyal Soviet foot-soldiers. It was Moscow first. These communists served not America but the Soviet Union.
In the unforgettable words of Lincoln Steffens, the popular journalist for the New Republic, “I am a patriot for Russia; the Future is there; Russia will win out and it will save the world.”38 Langston Hughes, the celebrated African-American poet, agreed emphatically. “Put one more ‘S’ in the USA to make it Soviet,” declared Hughes. “The USA when we take control will be the USSA.”39
Herb Romerstein repeatedly stressed American communists’ loyalty to Soviet Russia: “Communist Party members were loyal Soviet patriots. . . . Most were not qualified to be spies, but those who were qualified were recruited through Party channels and made available to Soviet intelligence for classic espionage, agent-of-influence operations, or as couriers.” He said that “almost every spy” tapped by the Soviets was a communist and a member of the American Party.40
A telling display of this loyalty to the Soviet Union was a 1930 exchange between Republican Congressman Hamilton Fish of New York and William Z. Foster, longtime head of CPUSA and twice the presidential candidate of the Communist Party:
Fish: Now, if I understand you, the workers in this country [America] look upon the Soviet Union as their country; is that right?
Foster: The more advanced workers do.
Fish: Look upon the Soviet Union as their country?
Foster: Yes.
Fish: They look upon the Soviet flag as their flag?
Foster: The workers of this country and the workers of every country have only one flag and that is the red flag. That is the flag of the proletarian revolution. . . .
Fish: Well, the workers of this country consider, then, the Soviet Government to be their country. Do they also consider the red flag to be their flag?
Foster: I have answered quite clearly.
Fish: Do you owe allegiance to the American flag; does the Communist Party owe allegiance to the American flag?
Foster: The workers, the revolutionary workers, in all the capitalist countries are an oppressed class who are held in subjection by their respective capitalist governments and their attitude toward these governments is the abolition of these governments and the establishment of soviet governments.
Fish: Well, they do not claim any allegiance, then, to the American flag in this country?
Foster: That is, you mean, the support of capitalism in America—no.
Fish: I mean if they had to choose between the red flag and the American flag, I take it from you that you would choose the red flag; is that correct?
Foster: I have stated my answer.
Fish: I do not want to force you to answer if it embarrasses you, Mr. Foster.
Foster: It does not embarrass me at all. I stated very clearly the red flag is the flag of the revolutionary class, and we are part of the revolutionary class.
Fish: I understood that.
Foster: And all capitalist flags are flags of the capitalist class, and we owe no allegiance to them.
Fish: Well, that answers the question.41
It did indeed.
Representative Fish also elicited other interesting information from Foster:
Fish: Have you been to Russia?
Foster: Yes. Eight or nine times. . . .
Fish: Do the Communists in this country advocate world revolution?
Foster: Yes; the Communists in this country realize that America is connected up with the whole world system, and the capitalist system displays the same characteristics everywhere—everywhere it makes for the misery and exploitation of the workers—and it must be abolished, not only on an American scale but on a world scale.
Fish: So that they do advocate world revolution; and do they advocate revolution in this country?
Foster: I have stated that the Communists advocate the abolition of the capitalist system in this country and every other country; that this must develop out of the sharpening of the class struggle and the struggle of the workers for bread and butter. . . .
Fish: Now, are the Communists in this country opposed to our republican form of government?
Foster: The capitalist democracy—most assuredly. We stand for a workers’ and farmers’ government; a government of producers, not a government of exploiters. The American capitalist Government is built and controlled in the interests of those who own the industries and we say that the Government must be built and controlled by those who work in the industries and who produce.
Fish: They are opposed to our republican form of government?
Foster: Most assuredly.
Fish: And they desire to overthrow it through revolutionary methods?
Foster: I would like to read from the program of the Communist International at this point. The Communist International program says. . . .42
At this point in his testimony, Foster paused to read from the Comintern document that he was holding: “The conquest of power by the proletariat does not mean peaceful capturing of ready-made bourgeois state machinery by means of a parliamentary majority. The bourgeoisie resorts to every means of violence and terror to safeguard and strengthen its predatory property and political domination. Like the feudal nobility of the past, the bourgeoisie cannot abandon its historical position to the new class without a desperate and frantic struggle; hence the violence of the bourgeoisie can only be suppressed by the stern violence of the proletariat.”
Commie Kingpins
The Communist Party USA’s chairmen:
William Z. Foster (1929–1934)
Earl Browder (1934–1945)
Eugene Dennis (1945–1959)
Gus Hall (1959–2000)
Sam Webb (2000–2014)
John Bachtell (2014–present)
Foster’s successor as head of the American Communist Party was Earl Browder, who was general secretary of CPUSA from 1934 to 1945. He, too, did not shirk from expressing where his true loyalties resided. “Above all,” Browder stated in his 1934 CPUSA convention report, “we arm ourselves with the political weapons forged by the victorious Communist Party of the Soviet Union, with the mighty sword of Marxism-Leninism, and are strengthened and inspired by the victories of socialist construction won under its Bolshevik leadership headed by Stalin.” The pro-Stalin, pro-Soviet patriot continued: “Our World Communist Party, the Communist International, provides us the guarantee not only of our victory in America, but of the victory of the proletariat throughout the world.”43
His Communist Party colleague M. J. Olgin had written in 1933, “The Communist Party of the U.S.A. is thus part of a worldwide organization which gives it guidance and enhances its fighting power. Under the leadership of the Communist Party the workers of the U.S.A. will proceed from struggle to struggle, from victory to victory, until, rising in a revolution, they will crush the capitalist State, establish a Soviet State, abolish the cruel and bloody system of capitalism and proceed to the upbuilding of Socialism.”44
The Comintern of the 1930s, during Browder’s time, candidly told its members—which, of course, included CPUSA—that they “must render every possible assistance to the Soviet Republics in their struggles against counter-revolutionary forces. They should conduct an organized and definite propaganda to induce the workers to refuse to make or handle any kind of military equipment intended for use against the Soviet Republics, and should also carry on, by legal or illegal means, a propaganda among any troops sent against the Workers’ Republics.”45
The CPUSA itself said, “We want our Party to become like an army, a Bolshevik army, who while understanding the policy behind each decision is prepared to carry it out with military promptness, without any hesitation or question, and further, to carry out the decisions with Bolshevik judgment and maximum effectiveness.”46
A Bolshevik army inside of America. Forward!
It’s clear whose side the American communists were on, and it wasn’t America’s.