The task for Britain, said its prime minister, David Lloyd George, in November 1918, was to create ‘a fit country for heroes to live in’. Soldiers returning from the horrors of the trenches of the First World War found that no European country lived up to this level of aspiration. Workers, who had been quiescent during the war, became increasingly restless in its aftermath. At almost no time in the twentieth century did revolution in the West seem even a remote possibility. The main exception was the period between 1918 and 1920.1 For a significant number of industrial workers, especially those mobilized in trade unions, the Russian Revolution was an inspiration, raising hopes that society could be rebuilt on new foundations. Manual workers formed the largest social group in developed Western countries, and one natural outcome of the war was an enhanced interest in the world beyond national boundaries. In welcoming the overthrow of tsarism and approving the fall of the Russian Empire, even politically conscious workers were, however, vague about the realities of the Bolshevik revolution. Although romanticized as the working class taking power into its own hands, this had been a seizure of power by professional revolutionaries who were a minority not only in Russian society but even among Russian socialists. Yet what was subsequently in the Soviet Union to be called ‘Great October’ could be regarded, and by many was initially regarded, as the first serious attempt, on the landscape of an entire country, to build socialism.
The Bolsheviks, for their part, had hoped, and initially expected, that their revolution would trigger a series of revolutions further west in Europe. No other lastingly successful Communist takeover, in fact, took place in Europe until after World War Two. However, in 1921 a Soviet protectorate was established by the Red Army in Mongolia – a country lying between Russia and China, greater in size than France, Germany, Italy and Britain put together, but with a population no bigger than Jamaica’s. As the Mongolian People’s Republic, this became in 1924 the world’s second Communist state.2 It was, though, essentially a Soviet satellite and, as such, a forerunner, in its relationship with Moscow, of a number of states that were to be established after World War Two as a result of the success of the Soviet army.
Immediately after the First World War there was revolutionary turmoil in Germany, whose fate mattered much more for the Communist project than that of Outer Mongolia. Ever since the 1870s there had been tensions within the social democratic movement in Germany between its reformist and revolutionary wings. The war had added to the strains and the Bolshevik revolution meant that every party of the left had to define where it stood in relation to that ostensible attempt to build a socialist state.3 This became all the more salient an issue with the creation in 1919 of the Third International, or Comintern, to which more attention will be paid later in this chapter.
The German social democratic movement, the largest in Europe, split three ways at the end of the First World War. The most substantial part retained the name of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). A more radical group established the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD), while those committed to revolution formed the Spartacus League, of which the highly educated militant Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were the most prominent leaders. It was formally established on 11 November 1918, two days after Luxemburg had been released from prison and one day after a predominantly socialist government had taken office in Germany. The Spartacists, who were made up of skilled manual workers, intellectuals, and white-collar workers, changed their name to that of the German Communist Party (KPD) at a founding congress, held from 30 December 1918 to 1 January 1919.4
Revolutionary uprisings had taken place in different parts of Germany in November 1918. The Emperor Wilhelm II was forced to abdicate and the two moderate socialist parties seized the initiative and became major partners, alongside other democratic parties, in the coalition government which was formed following elections in January 1919. Prominent army generals, alarmed by the possibility of a Soviet-style revolution in Germany, transferred their allegiance from the emperor to the new government, offering their help in maintaining order and suppressing revolution. Shortly before the elections, when a spontaneous rising in Berlin came under the control of Communist leaders, the government, already dominated by the SPD and USPD, called on the support of paramilitary groups of demobilized soldiers to put down the revolt by force. They did so brutally, in the process assassinating both Luxemberg and Liebknecht on 15 January. The later inability of Communists and social democrats to co-operate when faced by the rise of fascism, although largely determined by policy emanating from Moscow, had an added bitterness in Germany which owed much to the suppression of the Spartacists and the deaths of two of their most revered leaders.5 Throughout February, March and April 1919 there was unrest in Germany, with the Communists reacting to what they saw as ‘White terror’ in January. For a period of just under a month in April a Soviet republic was even established in Bavaria. But it too was suppressed.6
Apart from their local and temporary successes in Germany, Communists succeeded also in seizing power in Hungary, establishing the Hungarian Soviet Republic, which lasted for 133 days in 1919. The end of the war and the loss of Hungarian territory, following the defeat of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, had led in 1918 to a largely bloodless revolution against Hungary’s traditional aristocratic rulers and the formation of a government, including socialists, headed by a liberal member of the nobility, Count Mihály Károlyi, who was prepared to introduce democracy to Hungary. A number of Hungarian socialists had been among the half-million prisoners of war in Russia, and they included a politically significant minority who converted to Communism in the Russia of 1917 and 1918.7 Among them was the Hungarian Jew Bela Kun, who was arrested by the Károlyist – socialist government and charged with conspiracy against public order and incitement to riot.8
When Kun was released from prison, those who rallied to his cause cut across class boundaries. Numerous Hungarian patriots, resentful of the loss of territory at the end of the war, as well as radicalized workers and intellectuals welcomed the Communists’ coming to power. Most of the socialist leadership agreed in March 1919 to a merger of their party with the Communists. The middle-class support which the Communists briefly enjoyed was based on the assumption that the new leadership was going to defend Hungarian borders against the encroachment of the victorious allies, while the peasantry hoped for land distribution. In fact, the Communists quickly alienated the first group by attacking symbols of Hungarian nationhood, confiscating Church property, and allowing priests to continue to function only if they used their pulpits to express support for the government. All classes of Hungarian society came to resent the extreme anticlericalism of the new regime as well as the fact that thirty-two of the Kun government’s forty-five commissars were Jewish.9 Bela Kun’s radical measures included taking into public ownership industrial enterprises employing more than twenty-five people. The peasants were rapidly disillusioned by the Communists’ land policy – in particular, their intention to move as rapidly as possible to the collectivization of agriculture and in the meantime to nationalize all landholdings of over one hundred acres.10
The Bela Kun government had a brief respite when it attempted to link the spread of its brand of socialism with the reconquest of territory that had formerly belonged to the Hungarian part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Its army conquered two thirds of Slovakia. There they were welcomed by the large Hungarian minority, though not by the Slovaks. An attempted coup against the Hungarian Soviet Republic on 24 June 1919 failed, prompting Kun to declare a dictatorship of the proletariat and to step up the use of terror against ‘internal enemies’.11 A military offensive against Romanians occupying formerly Hungarian territory was unsuccessful, and opinion began to swing strongly against the Kun regime. The old ruling elite of Hungary reasserted itself, enjoying now widespread lower-middle-class and unskilled worker support, and the Hungarian Soviet Republic disappeared as suddenly as it had arisen.12 Kun fled to Austria, where he was interned. On his release in 1920 he emigrated to Russia and remained there until his death. The Soviet Union in the 1930s was an even more dangerous place for foreign Communists than a conservative authoritarian regime, of the kind which was to be established in Hungary. Like many revolutionaries who sought refuge in the USSR, Kun became a victim of the Great Purge. He was arrested in 1937 and killed in 1939.
While many Communists took pride in the fact that a Communist government had been established, however briefly, in a European country which did not have a border with Russia, the short-lived regime was highly damaging for the development of Hungarian democracy. As Joseph Rothschild observed:
…a final tragedy of the Kun episode was that, by the manner of its rise and fall, it appeared to discredit by association the Károly experiment that had preceded and given birth to it, and hence allowed the counterrevolutionary white regime that followed it to equate liberalism with Communism. Social and political democratization could thus be resisted henceforth as allegedly treasonable to the Hungarian way of life.13
The end of the First World War saw the re-creation of Poland, which had been part of the Russian Empire, as an independent state. War between Soviet Russia and Poland in 1919–20 has been interpreted as an attempt both ‘to recreate that Empire in socialist guise, and to spread the Revolution to the advanced countries of Europe’.14 For Lenin, the latter desire was the more important, but optimism about the forces of history being on his side blinded him to political realities in other countries. The Red Army, facing tough resistance from the Poles, was in disarray by the summer of 1920, and Lenin realized that to attempt to continue the fight would endanger the Soviet regime itself. In September of that year the Russian government conceded victory to the Poles, offering them ‘as much territory on the borderlands as they cared to take, on the one condition that a halt to the fighting was called within ten days’.15 In that same month, Karl Radek, a Polish Jewish Communist renowned for sharp wit combined with serious knowledge of Europe, was sarcastic about Lenin allowing himself to be governed by revolutionary optimism, remarking: ‘Now comrade Lenin is demonstrating a new method of information gathering: not knowing what is going on in a given country, he sends an army there.’16 (Lenin was not, of course, the first or the last politician to make that mistake.) A failed attempt at revolution by the German Communists in 1921 was a further setback for the Bolshevik leadership, as was the suppression of Communist-inspired uprisings in Saxony and Hamburg during the German hyper-inflation of 1923.
The Comintern
Radek (who had joined the Bolshevik Party in 1917) was active both in Russia and in Germany. While under arrest in Germany in 1919, following the failure of the German Communists’ insurrection in January of that year, he was elected in absentia to the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party. He was a natural choice to become, in March 1920, a secretary of, and a leading figure in, the Third International. That organization had been formed at a congress held in Moscow exactly one year earlier. It was to become better known as the Communist International, or Comintern. Not all delegates believed that the time was ripe for the creation of this body. The sole delegate from the German Communist Party, Hugo Eberlein, objected that ‘Real Communist parties exist in only a few countries, and most of these were created only in the last few weeks.’17 Nevertheless, the Bolsheviks were determined to press ahead with the creation of a new organization which would simultaneously further revolution worldwide and enhance the security of Soviet Russia. That these Communist desiderata did not necessarily go together was to become increasingly plain over the years, and when there was a conflict, the Comintern normally had to place the interests of the Soviet Union ahead of the aspirations of any other section of the international Communist movement.18 There was also a tension within the Soviet government between their desire to support revolution elsewhere and their need to have a working relationship with the governments of other countries. This was manifested as early as 1921, when the Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Georgy Chicherin, wrote to Party Secretary Vyacheslav Molotov saying: ‘I do not understand why, thanks to the Comintern, we have to fall out with Afghanistan, Persia and China.’19
The Comintern was a much more serious political organization than the First or Second Socialist Internationals precisely because it had a major state power at its centre. Yet that was a weakness as well as a strength, given that Communist parties would often have fared better in their own countries had they not had to bend to the will of Moscow. It did, however, make for unity of action. Lenin produced nineteen (later twenty-one) conditions for membership of the Third International for its Second Congress held in August 1919. The essence of them, in the words of Donald Sassoon, was: ‘expel all reformists and centrists, accept the discipline which the new international organization will demand, support the Soviet Republic, be prepared for illegal political work and call yourselves communists’.20 Ironically, one of the two conditions added to Lenin’s original nineteen came from an Italian Communist, Amadeo Bordigo, and it had the effect of strengthening still further the centralized, disciplined nature of the movement.21 The addition was that any party members who opposed the enumerated conditions should be expelled from the Communist Party. The irony lay in the fact that in later years the Italian Communist Party (PCI)–which after the Second World War was (along with the French) one of the two largest Communist parties in western Europe – turned out to be among the least orthodox within the international Communist movement.
From 1919 onwards the distinction between Communists and non-Communist socialists was clearer than ever before, though the degree of hostility between them varied over time, partly in response to the policies of the Comintern. The staff of the Comintern were mainly Russian and even most of the foreign Communists who were to play a prominent role in it – among them the Finn Otto Kuusinen, the Hungarian Mátyás Rákosi, the Bulgarian Georgi Dimitrov, and the Italian Palmiro Togliatti – were long-term residents in the Soviet Union. Two of them – Kuusinen and Togliatti – were in the post-Stalin era to display some capacity for innovative thought. Their views had been close to Bukharin’s in the 1920s,22 but both were loyal Stalinists throughout the 1930s and 1940s. There were five distinct periods in the life of the Comintern between its foundation in 1919 and the Soviet Union’s entry into the Second World War in 1941. They very closely reflected changes in Soviet domestic policy, and illustrate the extent to which the Comintern became an instrument of the Kremlin leadership, with strict limits on its autonomy.
THE ‘RED WAVE’
The first period, known also as the ‘Red Wave’, lasted from 1919 to 1923. The earliest head of the Comintern was Grigory Zinoviev, who by the mid-1920s was in sharp disagreement with Stalin. (The danger of such a course of action became fully clear only in the 1930s. In Zinoviev’s case, it eventuated in his arrest in 1935, followed by a show trial, and execution in 1936.) By 1923 it was evident that Communists were not about to come to power in any European country apart from the European republics of the Soviet Union, where their hegemony was now being strengthened. (The USSR – the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics – had been formed on 30 December 1922.) A reassessment of foreign policy – to parallel the New Economic Policy – was required. As a result of the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power in 1917, Soviet Russia had been excluded from the Paris peace talks of 1919, but for a time it looked as if an agreement might be reached between the new Soviet state and the western European powers when they met at Genoa in 1922. Lenin, however, was unwilling to accept the terms on offer and instructed the Soviet Commissar for Foreign Affairs not to underwrite the Treaty of Versailles’ territorial arrangements. Instead Chicherin was urged to secure a separate agreement with Germany (which, along with the other defeated powers, had been excluded from participation in the post-war settlement). Some of the ground had been prepared before the Genoa conference began, and Chicherin, continuing to work discreetly, reached agreement with the German delegation. Just one week into the Genoa conference, the Soviet delegation signed the Rapallo Treaty, the basis of which was ‘a mutual repudiation of debts and claims, the granting of unconditional recognition, the promise of expanded economic relations and continuation of their surreptitious military ties’.23 As Carole Fink has observed: ‘The Soviet Union subsequently employed the Rapallo model to conclude bilateral agreements with individual Western governments. But, from a multinational perspective Genoa also became a model of failure, because neither side in 1922 was willing or able to desist from exploiting the other’s weakness.’24
‘THE PARTIAL STABILIZATION OF CAPITALISM’
The second period of Comintern’s history was that which they termed ‘the partial stabilization of capitalism’. In major pronouncements in April 1924, Stalin not only attacked Trotsky’s notion of ‘permanent revolution’ and made the case for ‘socialism in one country’ but also recognized the failure of revolution elsewhere – Germany, in particular. Accordingly, he held, the Soviet state had to accept a temporary accommodation between Communism and capitalism. The doctrine of ‘peaceful co-existence’ (a concept earlier enunciated by Lenin) became the foreign policy counterpart of ‘socialism in one country’.25 There was, as a result, some improvement in state-to-state relations, even though the Comintern retained the long-term goal of Communist takeover in western Europe. The minority Labour government in Britain, headed by Ramsay MacDonald, officially recognized the Soviet Union in 1924. Benito Mussolini, a former socialist turned fascist, had hoped that Italy would initiate the breaking of the isolation of the Bolshevik state, but Britain, with the encouragement of the Soviet authorities, got in first. Other countries – with the major exception of the United States – followed quite rapidly. The USA delayed its recognition of the Soviet Union longer than any other major state, not doing so until November 1933.
THE ‘THIRD PERIOD’—‘CLASS AGAINST CLASS’
If throughout most of the 1920s there had been a desire within the Soviet leadership – for tactical reasons and especially in the light of their economic difficulties – for rapprochement with the West, this altered with a change of Comintern policy that coincided with the end of NEP in the Soviet Union. The Comintern’s ‘Third Period’, or that of ‘Class against Class’, began in 1928. Already, in December 1927, Stalin had spoken of a ‘new revolutionary upsurge’, and at the Sixth World Congress of the Comintern in the summer of 1928 ‘right deviationists’ were identified by him as the principal threat to the Communist movement. Communists went on the offensive against social democrats.26 Communist parties throughout the world were expected not to co-operate with non-Communist socialists. In Germany, which had at the time the largest Communist Party in western Europe, this was an especially fateful decision.
Parties of major states, even when they were relatively unimportant in the context of the domestic politics of their countries, such as those of the United States and Britain, were forced to remove party officials thought to be lukewarm at best about the new Comintern line. The British comrades did this rather reluctantly. Dmitry Manuilsky, the son of a Ukrainian Orthodox priest who had become a leading figure in the Comintern and acted as an overseer of Western European Communist parties, made clear his dissatisfaction. The British Communist Party, he said in 1928, had not learned that in a revolution ‘it will perhaps be necessary to chop some heads off’. Whereas ‘the German comrades’ were adept at organizing a purge–‘they attack the least deviation’ – the party in Britain seemed like ‘a society of great friends’.27 Nevertheless, among those removed from high positions within the CPGB were some of the most popular party officials – notably Tom Bell, J.R. Campbell, Arthur Horner and Albert Inkpin – and the result of toeing the Moscow line was loss of membership and the still greater isolation of the Communist Party within British society.28
The German Communists’ willingness to follow more unquestioningly the Comintern line – which meant, increasingly, Stalin’s line – was especially disastrous for the party and its members. Whether, if the KPD had acted together with the social democrats, the rise to power of Hitler could have been prevented remains extremely uncertain. But by treating the social democrats, who were a still larger party than the Communists, as more dangerous enemies than the fascists, and by even taking comfort in the idea that the Nazi advance meant that the Weimar Republic was weakening, the German Communists were paving the way for their own destruction. The opening of the Soviet archives in the 1990s provides documentary evidence of the instructions being issued to the German party by the Comintern which most of the leaders of the KPD loyally accepted. The term ‘social fascist’ was used as a synonym for social democrat, with the former virtually replacing the latter in Comintern correspondence.29 The Nazis won more votes than the Communists in the Reichstag elections of 1929 and twice as many in November 1932. In March 1933, after the Nazis had come to power, their electoral support (43.9 per cent) was substantially greater than that of the social democrats (18.3 per cent) and the Communists (12.3 per cent) put together.30 The KPD leader, Ernst Thälmann, who had been backed by the Comintern to replace two more intellectual Communists, Ruth Fischer and Arkadi Maslow (who was of Russian parentage, but born in Germany), was himself almost replaced as party leader when he attempted to cover up embezzlement of party funds by his brother-in-law in 1928. With only one abstention, the Central Committee of the KPD voted to relieve him from his functions. The special significance of this episode was its illustration of where true power lay within the international Communist movement. The support of Stalin and the Comintern for Thälmann meant that he was reinstated and it was his KPD Central Committee opponents who began to be removed from the leadership.31
In March 1933, one German Communist Party activist broke ranks not only by warning that the policy of eschewing possible allies in the struggle against Hitler was leading to disaster but also by writing directly to Stalin. This KPD member, Karl Gröhl, using his party pseudonym, Karl Friedberg, recognized where real power lay in the international Communist movement. His letter to Stalin, which began ‘Dear Comrade’ and closed ‘With Communist greetings’, insisted that it was necessary for the German Communist Party to join forces with worker members of the Social Democratic Party and their organizations in a ‘united front and combined struggle’. The Communist Party itself needed to create a parallel underground apparatus to continue the work of the activists who had been arrested. The national question – the Treaty of Versailles of 1919 (which had disadvantaged Germany)–should be treated as a second-order question. The top priority was the struggle for bread and work and against fascism. ‘Today’, Friedberg/Gröhl concluded his letter to Stalin, ‘we are talking about the life or death of the party. If the party in these days is not able to open up a mass struggle, it will be smashed for many years. Not only the result of fascism, but also the undermining of faith in the party within the working class.’32 Being correct ahead of the party line – with the Comintern taking a further two years before embracing the idea of a Popular Front – seldom did a Communist activist much good. Gröhl was wise that when he went into exile from Germany he spent only a short time in the Soviet Union. Otherwise he would have met the same fate as did many other German Communists who sought refuge in Moscow.33
Even after the Nazis had come to power in Germany in early 1933, a much more prominent Communist than Friedberg ‘anticipated the resistance to fascism that the Communists squandered in the ultra-leftist atmosphere of the “Third Period” (1928–1935)’.34 This was Georgi Dimitrov who succeeded in overcoming the bias of a courtroom in Leipzig, using it as a forum to attack fascism, thus turning the tables, rhetorically, on his accusers. Dimitrov won, thereby, admiration from party members throughout Europe, and this enabled him to receive also cautious approval from the Comintern. Dimitrov was born in 1882 into a Bulgarian Protestant family. His mother had wanted him to become a pastor, but he was expelled from Sunday school at the age of twelve for distributing anti-religious literature. A militant socialist before the Bolshevik revolution, he became a significant figure in the international Communist movement after it. Dimitrov was used by the Comintern as an emissary to various western European countries, but was arrested in Germany in 1933 and accused (falsely), with others, of setting fire to the Reichstag.35 He denied the charges, defended ‘Communist ideology, my ideals’, and, during a trial which lasted from 21 September to 23 December 1933, portrayed himself as a patriotic Bulgarian, indignantly rejecting the Nazi charge that he came from a ‘savage and barbarous country’. That description, he said, applied to Bulgarian fascism but not to the Bulgarian people. Dimitrov, along with fellow Bulgarian co-defendants, was acquitted for lack of evidence, though all of them were in danger of being executed if returned to Bulgaria. After a further two months in prison, they were released to the USSR and granted Soviet citizenship.36 Dimitrov rose rapidly through the higher echelons of the Comintern to become its head, and unlike many of his Comintern colleagues, survived Stalin’s Great Purge of 1937–38.
The German Communists he left behind were much less fortunate. By the end of 1933, between 60,000 and 100,000 had been interned by the Nazis. By 1945, more than half of those who were party members in 1932–and party membership was then approximately 300,000–had been in Nazi jails or concentration camps.37 Thälmann was arrested in March 1933 and spent the rest of his life as a prisoner of the Nazi regime. During the Second World War he was transferred from jail to Buchenwald concentration camp and executed there in August 1944. In all, some 20,000 German Communists were killed by the Nazis. Many German Communists, including some of the more senior party members, managed to make their way to the Soviet Union. Approximately 60 per cent of them met their deaths in the Stalin terror. (At a time of Soviet – Nazi rapprochement, hundreds of them were even handed over to the Gestapo by the Soviet secret police.) More members of the Politburo of the German Communist Party were killed in the Soviet Union at Stalin’s behest than in Germany on the orders of Hitler.38
POPULAR FRONT
Even the arrest of German Communists by the Nazis on such a massive scale did not jolt the Comintern into an immediate change of course. Belatedly, the leadership in Moscow was waking up to the threat which the rise of Hitler and Nazism represented for the Soviet Union, but this was still played down in 1934. It was in the summer of 1935 at the Seventh Congress of the Comintern – with Dimitrov making a major speech entitled ‘The United Front Against Fascism and War’ – that the policy of creating a Popular Front was fully enunciated. As ever, a changing perception of Soviet needs determined the policy of the Comintern. Thus began its fourth period, in which social democrats could be allies, as could even liberals and members of religious groups, provided they were ready to unite against fascism. This period, which lasted until the Nazi – Soviet Pact of 1939, was the time in the history of the Comintern when its international appeal was greatest to many idealists and staunch anti-fascists. The nature of Stalin’s Soviet Union was poorly understood by them, but even if it had been better known, there was a case for an alliance with the Soviet Union to prevent Hitler’s expansionist plans from being implemented. Western democracies were more than content to be in alliance with the Soviet Union during the Second World War when the Soviet army made a disproportionately great contribution to the victory in Europe. Though Stalin was no more to be trusted than was Hitler, and though he was responsible for the deaths of more citizens of his own country than Hitler in Germany, he was a much more cautious actor on the international stage. The threat of Soviet expansion by military means was less – certainly less immediate – than that from Nazi Germany.
The high point of the Popular Front era for the international Communist movement was the Spanish Civil War, waged between 1936 and 1939. For the Soviet Union it presented both an opportunity and a dilemma, as the inauguration of the Popular Front ‘coincided with the total polarization of Spanish society’.39 The Comintern had welcomed the strengthening of the left in Spain and, in particular, the progress of the Spanish Communist Party. Much less welcome was the onset of civil war. The growing strength of Communists within the coalition of republicans, anarchists, socialists and Communists that emerged victorious in elections in 1936 was entirely positive from the standpoint of the Comintern and the Soviet Union. When, however, this victory was threatened by a military revolt, supported by conservative forces and the Catholic Church, leading to full-scale civil war, there was a tension between the need for the Comintern to be seen to be supporting the revolutionary left and the desire of the Soviet leadership to bring Western democracies, and Britain and France in particular, into a united front against the threat from Hitler’s Germany. To the extent to which the Soviet Union was perceived as aiding and abetting a Communist takeover in Spain, this had little appeal for other West European governments and the Conservative-dominated ‘National’ government in Britain, in particular.
Both sides in the Spanish Civil War had internal differences in addition to their hatred of each other. These were especially pronounced on the republican side, where liberal republicans, a variety of socialists (including the anti-Stalinist party, POUM, which was substantially Leninist and ‘half-Trotskyist’)40 and anarchists vied for supremacy with the Spanish Communist Party. The Soviet Union sent military support, both equipment and people. The latter were supposedly ‘volunteers’, but the nature of the Soviet system did not allow such matters to be left to chance. The Soviet Union sent not only airmen and tank specialists but also many intelligence officers, both from the NKVD and from military intelligence (the GRU). It did not do this without recompense – all the aid was charged for. Since the Soviet Union had taken possession of the greater part of the Spanish gold reserves, each piece of equipment as well as the salaries and expenses of the Soviet personnel in Spain was registered and billed, resulting in the Spanish republican government being told in mid-1938 that their gold supply in Moscow was now exhausted.41
Many Communists in a wide range of countries were genuine volunteers in the Spanish Civil War, joining the International Brigades, whose recruits included also non-Communist socialists, and whose total number was in the region of 50,000.42 Later in the war they came under the command of the government of the Spanish republic and also became less international and increasingly composed of Spaniards. In the first year of the Brigades’ existence, however, they ‘constituted a semi-autonomous Comintern force’ under the direction of Comintern advisers and Soviet military commanders.43 The direct Soviet contribution included 800 pilots, of whom 17 per cent were killed in the conflict, and 584 advisers.44 Since the Spanish Civil War also coincided with the period when the purges reached their height in the Soviet Union–1937–38–there were times when the NKVD was as intent on seeking out and killing Trotskyists, supposedly their allies in Spain, as in fighting their conservative and fascist enemies. The contribution of the Soviet Union to the republican cause in Spain was glorified in Soviet propaganda, but this did not mean that the citizens who fought there were all acclaimed when they arrived home. Many of the Soviet advisers and military men who served in Spain were shot in the Great Purge. The head of the NKVD in Spain, Alexander Orlov, when he was told in July 1938 to report to Paris, from where he would be taken to a Soviet ship in Antwerp harbour, realized what fate would be awaiting him and succeeded in fleeing to the United States via Canada.45 (Orlov’s cousin, Zinovy Katsnelson, the deputy head of the NKVD in Ukraine, had already been arrested the previous year and subsequently executed.)46
The Spanish Civil War resulted in the deaths of about half a million people and ended in defeat for the republican, socialist and Communist forces and victory for the nationalists led by General Francisco Franco. The victorious side had also been a coalition, in which fascists played a prominent part, and they had more foreign military assistance than had the republicans. Hitler and especially Mussolini committed far more troops to this struggle than did Stalin. Approximately 16,000 Germans and 70,000 Italians served at one point or another in the Spanish Civil War.47 The Soviet Union, with Comintern as a pliable instrument, had attempted to square the circle in Spain by seeking a ‘democracy of a new type’, meaning one in which Communists would gradually assume full control, while simultaneously pursuing an anti-fascist alliance with Western democracies. That project failed, since they did enough, militarily, to arouse concern that they were going to install a pro-Soviet government in Spain, while being unprepared to commit sufficient troops to secure actual victory, fearing that this might precipitate war with Germany.48
THE NAZI—SOVIET PACT
The fifth and final stage in the activity of the Comintern before Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941–and the Soviet Union’s entry into the Second World War – was that which began with the 1939 Nazi – Soviet Pact. Partly as a result of his failure to secure an anti-German military alliance with Britain and France, Stalin decided to seek an understanding with Hitler. He did not rule out a future attack by Nazi Germany on the Soviet Union, but thought that there was much to be said for the major capitalist states destroying each other while, in the meantime, the Soviet Union gathered strength for a future conflict.49 Taking the rest of the world, not least Communists and admirers of the Soviet Union, by surprise, the Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov and his German counterpart Joachim von Ribbentrop signed the Nazi – Soviet Non-Aggression Pact in late August 1939. It contained secret clauses agreeing to the partition of Poland, and to Soviet repossession of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Earlier, the two leading military powers among Europe’s democratic states, Britain and France, had come to an agreement with Nazi Germany and Italy of a much more limited nature, but one which tarnished the anti-fascist credentials of the democracies. The Munich Pact of September 1938 ceded Sudetenland – the north-western territory of Czechoslovakia, with its large German population – to Hitler’s Germany. By this agreement the British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, believed that the negotiators had saved ‘Czechoslovakia from destruction, and Europe from Armageddon’.50 Stalin’s pact with Hitler was much more far-reaching and, as distinct from Chamberlain’s attitude to the Munich agreement, it was not intended by either Stalin or Hitler to be a substitute for eventual armed conflict.
The Popular Front period had seen the successful recruitment of Communists in the democracies. Many people on the radical wing of the political spectrum in Europe and, to a lesser extent, also in North America, worried by the rise of militaristic fascism, came to view the Communists as the most determined opponents of Hitler, Mussolini and Franco. The about-turn signalled by the Nazi – Soviet Pact came, accordingly, as a profound shock to tens of thousands of Communists in different continents. The Comintern policy up to the moment at which the Molotov – Ribbentrop pact was signed was to emphasize, on the one hand, the imperative need to defend the world’s ‘first socialist state’ and, on the other, to combat fascism.51
On the first day of September 1939, Nazi Germany attacked Poland both by land and air, and in response, Britain and France two days later declared war on Germany. The Soviet Union, meantime, was given a relatively free hand by Germany to deal with its near neighbours. It incorporated what had been part of Poland into Ukraine and launched an attack on Finland. The Soviet – Finnish war of 1939–40, known as the Winter War, was far costlier than Stalin had bargained for. The Finns put up a ferocious resistance, and though some 24,000 of them were killed and 420,000 were made homeless, it is likely that as many as 200,000 Soviet troops lost their lives. Estimates of the war dead vary hugely. The figure given to the Soviet leadership at the time was 52,000 dead on the Soviet side.52 The estimate of Finnish fatalities given to the same plenary session of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party was 70,000. Finnish sources, however, had no incentive to underestimate their losses, and so the figure of 24,000 is likely to be much more accurate. Stalin, in contrast, had every incentive to make Finnish deaths higher than Soviet losses. Nikita Khrushchev, in his later years when he had turned decisively against Stalin, went to the opposite extreme and suggested, implausibly, that as many as a million Soviet troops died in the Winter War.53 A peace was signed in March 1940, in which Finland had to cede territory, including Finnish Karelia, to the Soviet Union, but the remainder of Finland was able to stay independent.54
In the first three weeks after the Second World War began, western Communists had continued to attack fascism as the main enemy, but when on 24 September the Comintern declared that the war was not primarily anti-fascist but ‘imperialist’, most of the highly disciplined Communist parties swung into line, condemning the war as such and making no distinction between the guilt of the fascist countries and the democracies. The Italian Communist Party (PCI) was largely an honourable exception, being especially condemnatory after Mussolini brought Italy into the war in June 1940.55 In that same month, the Soviet Union, as part of its secret agreement with Nazi Germany, seized the three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. These countries had been lost to the Russian Empire by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, following the Paris Peace Conference in which Bolshevik Russia had not been allowed to take part. The Nazi – Soviet Pact had given Stalin the opportunity to restore this part of the old imperial borders. Opponents in the Baltic states, real or potential, of the 1940 Soviet takeover were dealt with ruthlessly. Tens of thousands were killed or deported to Siberia, the arm of the Soviet secret police falling especially heavily on the political and intellectual elites.
The National Communist Parties between the Wars
The relative strength of German Communism until it was comprehensively crushed by the Nazis has already been noted. Fascism in Italy and authoritarian regimes throughout most of Eastern Europe also drove the Communist parties underground. The strongest party in Europe became that in France. The success of recruitment in Western democracies depended both on economic depression in these countries and on Comintern policy, with the years of the Popular Front against fascism providing much more fertile ground for the parties than the sectarian ‘Third Period’. During that time, the most influential of Italian Communist theorists (over the long run), Antonio Gramsci, was in prison. Arrested in Italy in November 1926, he remained a prisoner of the fascist regime until, with his physical health destroyed, he was allowed in August 1935 to move to a clinic in Rome, where he died in 1937.56 But between 1929 and 1935 he was writing his Prison Notebooks,57 which were to exercise a posthumous influence on international Marxism, including the ‘Eurocommunist’ movement of the 1970s. Although not incompatible with much of the thinking of Lenin, the ideas were sufficiently different from the Marxism-Leninism of Stalin’s Russia that Gramsci would not have been able to express them had he been with his PCI colleague Togliatti at the Comintern headquarters in Moscow rather than in an Italian prison. It has been correctly observed that Gramsci’s writing ‘contained approaches, particularly to political culture, that were foreign to the classical Marxist and the Leninist traditions’.58 These included the role of ‘organic intellectuals’, in Gramsci’s terminology, people who could ‘construct an intellectual-moral bloc which can make politically possible the intellectual progress of the mass and not only of small intellectual groups’.59 Similarly distinctive within the spectrum of Marxist thought was his view that ‘the hegemony of the bourgeoisie lay in its dominance of civil society rather than its control of the repressive force of state power’.60
Promising members of foreign Communist parties were sent to the Lenin School of the Comintern in Moscow for training, among them in 1929–30 a future Secretary-General of the French Communist Party of working-class origin, Waldeck Rochet. When some of these students were directed to a Soviet factory for additional experience, the discussion within the group no longer focused on the superiority of the Soviet to the capitalist system but on the disparity between the theory of socialist production they had imbibed at the Leninist school and the reality of factory life in the Soviet Union they had just witnessed. The one student who was not impressed by this intrusion of real life was Rochet. Rather like Groucho (as distinct from Karl) Marx–‘Who are you going to believe? Me, or your own eyes?’ – Rochet simply refused to accept the factual information the students had brought back from the factory.61
The French Communists had more success than any other western European party after the German Communists fell victim to Hitler. As early as 1928 they attracted more than a million votes (just over 11 per cent of the total) in elections for the French parliament. This declined in 1932, but rose during the period of the Popular Front to 1,487,000 votes (15.3 per cent) in 1936.62 In that year 72 out of 608 deputies elected to the National Assembly were from the PCF.63 Between 1933 and 1937 the size of the PCF grew fivefold, with workers constituting the bulk of the new members.64 The strong showing of the French Communists in the parliamentary elections of 1936, in this period of co-operation with other parties of the left, allowed a government to be formed in France in that year which was headed by the Socialist Léon Blum.
During these years the PCF had a capable leader. A prominent figure in the French Communist Party from the early 1930s, and its definitive leader (with Moscow’s blessing) from 1934, Maurice Thorez was a wily and secretive politician of working-class background who spent a lot of time in his study. He worked briefly as a miner, but in 1923 (when he was only twenty-three) he became a full-time party functionary. His ‘endless desire to learn’, in the words of the historian of the PCF, Annie Kriegel, led him to acquire a knowledge of Latin, German and Russian.65 Given the relationship between his party and the Soviet Union, it was the last of these languages which was of much the most practical use. The PCF, however, did not have to deal with Moscow on a day-to-day basis. The party, and Thorez personally, also received a great deal of guidance from the Comintern’s permanent representative in France during the 1930s, Eugen Fried, who had been a founder member of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. A talented Communist intellectual, who also possessed organizational skills, Fried had in 1919 liaised between the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic and Slovak revolutionary groups. For much of the 1930s he lived in Paris under the pseudonym Clément and met with Thorez almost daily.66
Another moderately successful European Communist Party was that of Czechoslovakia. Although a state founded only in 1918, Czechoslovakia was alone among central European countries in remaining a democracy throughout the inter-war period. In the first election after the Communist Party and the Social Democrats had split – that of 1925–the Communist Party polled 943,000 votes and secured 41 out of 300 seats in the legislature. By the end of the twenties the Communists’ support had declined drastically, largely as a result of following the intransigent Moscow line, but a combination of the economic depression of the 1930s and the party’s greater attractiveness in the era of the Popular Front saw it gain just under 850,000 votes in 1935 and over 10 per cent of all votes. While even at its most successful in the inter-war period the voting strength of the Czechoslovak Communist Party never exceeded 13 per cent, it was always one of the country’s four strongest parties.67 Its actual membership ranged from a high of 150,000 in 1925 to a low of 28,000 in 1930.68
COMMUNISM IN AMERICA AND BRITAIN
In contrast with the relative, though still fairly modest, success of the French and Czechoslovak parties (with the party’s strength in the latter case much greater in the Czech lands of Bohemia and Moravia than in Slovakia), Communist parties made little or no electoral progress in the English-speaking world. In the United States, they spent the early years after the Bolshevik revolution in faction-fighting and splits. Two Communist parties were founded in 1919, the Communist Party of America, headed by Charles Ruthenberg, and the Communist Labor League, which numbered among its leaders John Reed, who witnessed the Bolshevik seizure of power in Moscow and wrote an enthusiastic and vivid account of it, Ten Days that Shook the World (1919). Lenin himself wrote a short introduction to the Russian edition, recommending it unreservedly ‘to the workers of the world’ and adding that he would like to see the book ‘published in millions of copies and translated into all languages’. Reed took an active part in the Second Congress of the Comintern in 1920, but died later that year in Moscow. He is the only American whose ashes are buried beside the Kremlin wall with a plaque there honouring his memory.
The American Communists, in the second half of the 1920s, split along lines similar to those of the Soviet party, with followers of Bukharin and followers of Trotsky both being expelled from the party, which had a legal existence from 1923, having earlier been repressed by the government for several years. Even before enormous pressure to conform to Soviet orthodoxy was exerted from Moscow, copying Russia was voluntarily carried to absurd extremes by some American Communists. Even though he belonged to the small minority of early members of the Communist Party in the United States who had actually been born in America, Israel Amter (who, in his writings, sometimes used the pseudonym John Ford) began a speech in New York with the immortal words: ‘Workers and peasants of Brooklyn’!69 Among the leading American Bukharinites was Bertram D. Wolfe, who later became a prominent analyst of Communism and the author of a notable book on the Russian revolutionary movement, published in 1948, Three Who Made a Revolution (the three being Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin). Wolfe was one of the leading figures in the Communist Party of the USA who spent weeks in Moscow in 1929 trying to defend the autonomy of their party. They were, however, outmanoeuvred by Stalin, who took a close personal interest in even such an insignificantly small party, since it was situated in the world’s foremost capitalist state.70 This was in the Third Period when, in Wolfe’s words, the Comintern was turned into ‘the Stalintern’.71 From 1930 until 1945 the undisputed leader of the party was Earl Browder, appointed at Stalin’s behest. Browder contested the presidential elections of 1936 and 1940 as the Communist candidate. He was, however, imprisoned in the United States from 1940 until 1942 and at the end of the war fell foul of the Soviet leadership. At Moscow’s instigation he was expelled from the Communist Party in 1946. The American Communist Party faithfully followed the Comintern line, so that, especially during its Third Period, not only the CPUSA’s hated Trotskyist rivals (who had formed the Communist League of America in 1929) but also Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal Democrats were dismissed as ‘social fascists’.
As was the case in other democracies, the period of the Popular Front saw a rise in support for the American Communist Party, although it was on a very small scale compared with France or Czechoslovakia during those years. Even at its highest point in the inter-war period – in 1939–membership of the CPUSA did not rise above 75,000. It had, however, many more sympathizers. When the party was founded, the great majority of its members were first-generation immigrants from the Russian Empire and it was as late as 1936 before a majority of the party’s members had been born in the United States.72 The attraction of the party grew in response to the Great Depression and to the rise of fascism. It won support from some leading writers and film-makers, especially Hollywood screenwriters, although the films which made it to the screen seldom showed much sign of radicalism, still less Communism. Anti-Communism in the United States was always a very much stronger force, backed not only by those in charge of funding (a bigger issue for film-makers than for writers of books) but also by the full authority of the state.73
The British Communist Party in its earliest years was, like its American counterpart, torn by factionalism but by 1924 was a disciplined organization. Its policy in the first half of the 1920s was both to establish itself as an institution in its own right and to infiltrate the British Labour Party, an organization which already had strong working-class support. Although the Labour Party, at the time of its first period in office (as a minority government) in 1924, was more sympathetic to the Soviet state than were its Conservative opponents, it took care to curtail Communist influence within the party. Labour refused to allow individual membership of the Labour Party to Communists or to permit their endorsement as Labour candidates. The British Communist Party hesitated to characterize the Labour Party as ‘proto-fascist’, when that became the Comintern’s Third Period line, but made the personnel changes demanded of it in 1929. They removed Andrew Rothstein, the son of a Russian revolutionary – who stayed on in Britain when his father was sent back to Russia in 1920–from the top leadership group, although Rothstein remained a prominent member of the party for the rest of his life. Another leading member to be accused of deviation, in response to the Comintern’s proddings, was John (J.R.) Campbell, a Scottish trade unionist who had fought, and been decorated, in the First World War, before becoming a founding member of the British Communist Party. He was removed from the inner leadership of the party but kept his Central Committee membership. When, in the next zig-zag of the Comintern, the focus shifted to fighting against fascism, Campbell regained his former prominence and became editor of the party newspaper, the Daily Worker.
While a few secret Communists were able at various times to acquire membership of the Labour Party, they remained an insignificant minority. Such influence as Communists wielded within Britain was mainly through the trade union movement. Since the Trade Union Congress did not infringe the autonomy of individual trade unions, Communists could – and in many cases did – come to the fore as activists and leaders in the inter-war period and especially in the early post-Second World War decades. The two leading figures in the British Communist Party for a generation were Harry Pollitt and Rajani Palme Dutt. The Stalinization of the party was completed in 1929 and thereafter the leadership did not suffer fluctuations and expulsions to the extent of many other Communist parties. Born into an English working-class family in 1890, Pollitt became in 1929, on the prompting of the Comintern, the CPGB’s secretary-general. Palme Dutt had a still keener nose for the way the wind was blowing in Moscow, possibly aided in this by his Estonian wife, Salme Dutt (née Pekkala), who was rumoured to be a NKVD agent.74 Born in 1896, the son of an Indian doctor and a Swedish mother, Dutt did not inspire the same affection among the party rank-and-file as Pollitt, but he was inexhaustible in producing a stream of literature which elaborated whatever was the current Kremlin line. Neither Pollitt nor Palme Dutt spoke out against the Moscow trials of old Bolsheviks between 1936 and 1938 but Pollitt, unlike Dutt, did object in the Politburo of the British party when the Stalin – Hitler pact was announced. As a result, he was removed from the party leadership and dispatched to a subordinate position in South Wales. After the Soviet Union entered the war and the party line changed, Pollitt was reinstated as party leader.
In the inter-war period the highest membership attained by the British Communist Party was in 1939, when it reached 17,756–in 1930, during the ‘Class against Class’ era of the Comintern, it was as low as two and a half thousand.75 Party membership was to become higher during the war and early post-war years. If the 1930s were the ‘heyday of American Communism’, that term is more applicable to the 1940s in Britain.76 Nevertheless, if that was true of party membership in absolute numbers, the 1930s were the time when many idealists of a radical disposition were drawn to Communism, believing that the Soviet Union had overcome the problems of economic slump which were affecting Britain and the rest of the capitalist world. The attraction of the Communist Party also reflected deep concern about the rise of fascism. The aggressive activity of the British Union of Fascists, led by Oswald Mosley, was an important contributory factor in bringing numerous Jewish recruits, in particular, into the CPGB. The Communists were perceived to be the people who were doing most to stand up to Mosley and his followers, including physically resisting them on the streets.77 During the period between the signing of the Nazi – Soviet Pact and the German attack on the Soviet Union, the British Communist Party, like its counterparts in other democracies, lost members and supporters. Many were disillusioned or outraged at this about-turn by the people whom they had regarded as the most dedicated anti-fascists.
THE ORIGINS OF CHINESE COMMUNISM
The most prominent Asian Communist at the time of the founding of the Comintern in 1919 was the Indian M.N. Roy. At the Second Congress of the Comintern his view that the most decisive advances of the movement would be made in Asia was greeted with scepticism. Roy, in turn, was pessimistic about the prospects for revolution in the advanced industrial countries.78 When Lenin was writing on national and colonial issues, he consulted with Roy and valued his advice. For some years after Lenin’s death, Roy continued to be a prominent member of the Comintern. However, in the period of the Stalinization of that organization, he was accused of being a ‘right-wing deviationist’ and expelled from it. Still a revolutionary, he returned in secret to India, which remained under imperial British rule, but was arrested in 1930 and spent the next six years in prison.
It was, however, in China, not India, that the foundations were laid for Communist success. A nationalist revolution in 1911 had overthrown the imperial dynasty. It was given further impetus by the First World War – in particular, when in a secret deal made in 1917, Britain and France agreed that German colonies in China would become Japanese possessions after the allies had won.79 Chinese students in Paris prevented the Chinese delegates to the Versailles conference from physically taking part in the signing of what they saw as a humiliating treaty, while in Beijing on 4 May 1919 3,000 students demonstrated in Tiananmen Square against the Chinese government’s docility.80 Few of the students at this time were Communists but the Comintern had taken a keen interest in setting up a Communist Party in China and succeeded in establishing a socialist youth league and a monthly magazine. One of those influenced by these developments was Mao Zedong, who formed a Communist group in Hunan. Two other of the most important Chinese Communists of the twentieth century were among the young students who went to Paris in 1920–Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping. It was in France that they were attracted to Communist youth groups, after which they became active proselytizers for the cause among the Chinese in Europe.81
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was founded in 1921, but was incomparably weaker than Sun Yat-sen’s Nationalist movement – the Kuomintang. Excluding overseas members, the CCP had only some 200 people within its ranks in 1922.82 In that same year it was agreed that Communists should enter the Kuomintang as individuals, although the CCP would retain its separate and independent identity. The Communists became part of the May Fourth Movement, which sought national unification that involved defeating hundreds of local warlords. Disappointed by the Western powers, Sun Yat-sen gained support from the Soviet state. This made the alliance between Chinese Communists and the Nationalists viable in the short run, although the CCP leader Chen Duxiu expressed nervousness about it.83 A Comintern emissary, Mikhail Borodin, played an important part in liaising not only with the Chinese Communists but with Sun Yat-sen. The three principles of the Kuomintang were declared to be anti-imperialist nationalism, democracy, and socialism, but Borodin succeeded in introducing into the movement the Leninist principle of ‘democratic centralism’, making majority decisions binding on all party members.84
The links between the Chinese nationalist and socialist movement, on the one hand, and the Soviet Union, on the other, were close in the mid-1920s, especially before the death of Sun Yat-sen in 1925. The Soviet leadership set about strengthening the Kuomintang military. One of Sun’s allies, Chiang Kai-shek, was a member of a delegation which spent several months in Moscow studying military organization. On his return to China he was appointed commandant of a new military academy. Thanks to the influence of Borodin, the future Communist prime minister Zhou Enlai, recently returned to China from Paris, became director of the political department of the academy.85 Tensions, however, arose between the Kuomintang and the CCP in 1926–27. The Soviet Union had been keen to maintain good relations with China, which it saw as an ally against British imperialism, and they encouraged the CCP to keep in with the Kuomintang for longer than was in their interests. Chiang Kai-shek turned against the Communists, and when anti-leftist regional leaders killed large groups of them, Chiang not only sympathized but ordered some of the killings himself. M.N. Roy and Mikhail Borodin returned to the Soviet Union, disillusioned with the prospects of the Communists in China.
Borodin had a chequered career. His real name was Mikhail Gruzenberg. In the early years of the twentieth century he was a member of the Jewish Bund in Russia and also an early convert to the Communist cause. Following the failure of the 1905 revolution in Russia, he spent most of the years between then and the Bolshevik revolution in the United States, becoming a school teacher in Chicago. By 1922 he was a Comintern secret agent in Britain – using the name George Brown – before being sent, with greater success, to China the following year. Sun Yat-sen named him ‘special adviser’ to the Kuomintang.86 After his return to Moscow in 1927, Borodin’s political work was of a more modest nature – on foreign-language Soviet propaganda publications. He was not among the Cominternists to be rounded up during the Great Terror of the late 1930s. However, he did eventually die in a Soviet labour camp – in 1951–having been arrested in 1949 as part of Stalin’s anti-semitic onslaught of that period.
The Nationalists, headed by Chiang Kai-shek, set up their government in Nanjing in 1928. Although Chiang had got the better of the Communists, and disappointed the hopes that Stalin had placed in him, those Communists who survived, Mao Zedong notable among them, retreated into the countryside and staked their hopes on the peasantry. Mao, in particular, developed the idea that a rural-based revolution was strategically preferable to the more orthodox Marxist and Leninist notion of city-based seizure of power.87 Mao, the son of a relatively well-off farmer against whom he rebelled early in life, was by the mid-1930s the de facto leader of the Chinese Communists. Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government by the early 1930s regarded the Communists as one of the main threats to their central authority and pursued ‘extermination campaigns’ against the main base of the CCP in Jiangxi province. This led to the Communists’ retreat to the north-western province of Shaanxi in the ‘Long March’ of 1934–35. Although some 80,000 men and 2,000 women embarked on the march, only 8,000 reached their destination.88 The Long March itself, and the role of Mao in the inter-war years, has become the subject of much myth-making and huge controversy, but what is not in dispute is that a nucleus of Communists lived to fight another day and, in due course, to stage the first successful Communist Party-led revolution in Asia.89