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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 September 2017
The opening chapters of Brown, Archie, The Rise and Fall of Communism (London: Bodley Head, 2009), 9–39, and Priestland, David, The Red Flag: A History of Communism (New York: Grove Press, 2009), 16–102, provide helpful introductions. For the political thinking of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in their own time, see Lichtheim, George, Marxism: An Historical and Critical Study (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961), along with Hunt, Richard N., The Political Ideas of Marx and Engels, vol. II, Classical Marxism, 1850–1895 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1984), and several of the essays in Hobsbawm, Eric, How to Change the World: Reflections on Marx and Marxism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), especially the following: “Marx, Engels and Politics” (48–88); “On the Communist Manifesto” (101–20); “The Fortunes of Marx’s and Engels’ Writings” (176–96); and “The Influence of Marxism 1889–1914” (211–60). For the debates among German Social Democrats, see Geary, Dick, Karl Kautsky (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987); Gay, Peter, The Dilemmas of Democratic Socialism: Eduard Bernstein’s Challenge to Marx (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952); and Tudor, Henry and Tudor, J. M. (eds.), Marxism and Social Democracy: The Revisionist Debate 1896–1898 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). For French socialism, see Stuart, Robert, Marxism at Work: Ideology, Class and French Socialism During the Third Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). For the general context, see Joll, James, The Second International 1889–1914 (New York: Routledge, 1966). Global dimensions are treated by Anderson, Kevin B., Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), while van der Linden, Marcel and Rojahn, Jürgen (eds.), The Formation of Labour Movements 1870–1914: An International Perspective, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1990), offer comprehensive coverage. Mishra, Pankaj, From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia (New York: Picador, 2012), surveys the global moment of anti-colonial rebellion in 1919. Together, Gruber, Helmut, International Communism in the Era of Lenin: A Documentary History (New York: Anchor Books, 1972), and Jacobson, Jon, When the Soviet Union Entered World Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), are an excellent introduction. Anderson, Perry, Considerations on Western Marxism (London: Verso, 1976), remains a brilliant general conspectus. For the overall context, see Eley, Geoff, Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850–2000 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), especially 3–229.
There is an immense historiography of excellent works on the revolution and civil war. Browder, Robert and Kerensky, Alexander provide a remarkable document collection in the three large volumes of The Russian Provisional Government, 1917 (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1961) while the first two volumes of Wade, Rex A., Documents of Soviet History (Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic International Press, 1991, 1993), give documents on the civil war era.
Some consider Wade, Rex A., The Russian Revolution, 1917, 3rd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), the best one-volume history of the 1917 revolution, Mawdsley, while Evan, The Russian Civil War (Boston and London: Allen & Unwin, 1987) provides an excellent account of the civil war. Read, Christopher, From Tsar to Soviets: The Russian People and their Revolution, 1917–21 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), is an exemplary one-volume history of both the revolution and civil war.
Excellent works on specific topics are many and listing only a small number here involves very difficult decisions. Hasegawa, Tsuyoshi, The February Revolution: Petrograd 1917 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1981), provides the best account of that important event. Smith, Steve, Red Petrograd: Revolution in the Factories, 1917–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), stands out among the “social histories” that refocused the historiography of the revolution. Wildman, Alan’s The End of the Russian Imperial Army, two volumes published by Princeton University Press in 1980 and 1987, provides by far the best work on the army in 1917 and early 1918 and its impact on the revolution. The definitive study of the Bolsheviks in the revolution is found in Rabinowitch, Alexander’s three volumes: Prelude to Revolution: The Petrograd Bolsheviks and the July 1917 Uprising (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), The Bolsheviks Come to Power: The Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd (New York: Norton, 1976) and The Bolsheviks in Power: The First Year of Soviet Rule in Petrograd (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), while Rosenberg, William’s Liberals in the Russian Revolution: The Constitutional Democratic Party, 1917–1921 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974) is essential reading. Interpreting the Russian Revolution: The Language and Symbols of 1917 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999) by Orlando Figes and Boris Kolonitskii has had a strong impact on the way scholars look at it.
There is a long history of looking at the events in or from the perspective of the provinces. Suny, Ronald’s The Baku Commune, 1917–1918: Class and Nationality in the Russian Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972) is an early and particularly excellent example. Raleigh, Donald’s two volumes on Saratov, Revolution on the Volga: 1917 in Saratov (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986) and Experiencing Russia’s Civil War: Politics, Society, and Revolutionary Culture in Saratov, 1917–1922 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), have been very influential in shaping the contemporary approach to writing about the revolution and civil war, as has Holquist, Peter’s excellent, very original Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia’s Continuum of Crisis, 1914–1921 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), which uses the Don Cossacks as its focus. Baker, Mark looks at peasants and Ukraine in Peasants, Power, and Place: Revolution in the Villages of Kharkiv Province, 1914–1921 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). Khalid, Adeeb’s excellent The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998) reflects the growing interest in non-Slavic peoples during the revolution. Michael Hickey’s works on revolution and civil war in Smolensk, of which “The Rise and Fall of Smolensk’s Moderate Socialists: The Politics of Class and the Rhetoric of Crisis in 1917,” in Wade, Rex A. (ed.), Revolutionary Russia: New Approaches (New York: Routledge, 2004), is a fine example from among others by him, represent the enormous number of excellent articles that are too often overlooked in reading lists. The ongoing multivolume “Russia’s Great War and Revolution” series (Bloomington: Slavica, 2014–) provides essays on a wide range of revolution and civil war topics.
Works focused specifically on the civil war would start with Mawdsley and Kenez, noted above, and continue with Hagen, Mark von, Soldiers in the Proletarian Dictatorship: The Red Army and the Soviet Socialist State, 1917–1930 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1990), while Benvenuti, Francesco traces the controversies within the communist party about the army in The Bolsheviks and the Red Army, 1918–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Leggett, George, The Cheka: Lenin’s Political Police – The All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage (December 1917 to February 1922) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), traces the origins of that important feature of the communist system, while Silvana Malle gives an excellent examination of the Soviet regime under war communism in The Economic Organization of War Communism, 1918–1921 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
Foreign affairs were central to the revolution and early Soviet thinking. On the impact of the war and foreign relations on the outcome of 1917, see Wade, Rex A., The Russian Search for Peace, February–October 1917 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1969). For civil war times, see Debo, Richard K., Revolution and Survival: The Foreign Policy of Soviet Russia, 1917–18 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979) and Survival and Consolidation: The Foreign Policy of Soviet Russia, 1918–1921 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992).
Smele, Jonathan D., The Russian Revolution and Civil War, 1917–1921: An Annotated Bibliography (London: Continuum, 2003), provides an excellent extensive annotated bibliography, while the “Further Readings” section of the 2017 edition of The Russian Revolution, 1917 (Rex A. Wade, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) gives an extensive list with more recent works included.
For works on Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and the Comintern, see the essays on those topics.
There are several excellent general and comparative accounts of the violence and revolution during the period 1917–23: See especially Kramer, Alan, Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Gerwarth, Robert and Horne, John (eds.), War in Peace: Paramilitary Violence in Europe After the Great War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); and Gerwarth, Robert, The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End, 1917–1923 (London: Allen Lane, 2016). Two first-class studies of the ramifications of the collapse of empire in the European borderlands are Roshwald, Aviel, Ethnic Nationalism and the Fall of Empires: Central Europe, Russia, and the Middle East, 1914–1923 (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), and Bartov, Omer and Weitz, Eric D. (eds.), Shatterzones of Empires: Coexistence and Violence in the German, Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman Borderlands (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013). A good narrative of the experiment in Wilsonian peacemaking at the end of World War I is Macmillan, Margaret, Peacemakers – Six Months that Changed the World: The Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and its Attempt to End War (London: John Murray, 2001). On Germany during and after World War I, see Ziemann, Benjamin, War Experiences in Rural Germany, 1914–1923 (Oxford and New York: Berg Publishers, 2007); Liulevicius, Vejas Gabriel, War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity, and German Occupation in World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); and Jones, Mark, Founding Weimar: The German Revolution of 1918–1919 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). D’Annunzio’s attempt to redefine politics in Fiume under the watchful and concerned eyes of the peacemakers is covered in Ledeen, Michael Arthur, The First Duce: D’Annunzio at Fiume (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977). Hungary’s red revolution and white counterrevolution are analyzed in Carsten, Francis L., Revolution in Central Europe, 1918–1919 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), and Bodó, Béla, Pál Prónay: Paramilitary Violence and Anti-Semitism in Hungary, 1919–1922 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010). For a recent and revisionist study of the longer-term legacies of the counterrevolution in the Austrian capital, see Wasserman, Janek, Black Vienna: The Radical Right in the Red City, 1918–1938 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014). Communist revolution in East Central Europe and the Balkans is covered in the still generally valid Jackson, George D. Jr., Comintern and Peasant in East Europe, 1919–1930 (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1966), and the volume of essays edited by Banac, Ivo, The Effects of World War One: The Class War After the Great War – The Rise of the Communist Parties in East Central Europe, 1918–1921 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). The importance of the ending of the Polish–Soviet war in setting the demarcation lines between the communist and noncommunist world is covered by Borzęcki, Jerzy in The Soviet–Polish Peace of 1921 and the Creation of Interwar Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).
A firm grasp of revolutionary social democracy and the SPD model is necessary for any student of Bolshevism. Standard works in English are Lidtke, Vernon, The Alternative Culture: Socialist Labor in Imperial Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Steenson, Gary, “Not One Man! Not One Penny!” German Social Democracy, 1863–1914 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981); Schorske, Carl, German Social Democracy, 1905–1917: The Development of the Great Schism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970); and Callahan, Kevin J., Demonstration Culture: European Socialism and the Second International, 1889–1914 (Leicester: Troubador Publishing, 2010). More and more of the works of Karl Kautsky are becoming available in English. Fundamental to understanding the Bolshevik class scenario is Kautsky’s 1906 article “The Driving Forces of the Russian Revolution and Its Prospects”; this seminal text can be read in Day, Richard B. and Gaido, Daniel (eds.), Witnesses to Permanent Revolution (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 567–608, along with commentaries by Lenin and Trotsky (the young Stalin also wrote one). Lenin, greatly admired Kautsky’s 1909 book The Road to Power (Chicago: Bloch, 1909) even after he considered Kautsky as a political enemy. Kautsky’s views on the global context of revolution and their impact on the Bolsheviks is set forth in Lars T. Lih, “‘A New Era of War and Revolution’: Lenin, Kautsky, Hegel and the Outbreak of World War I,” in Anievas, Alexander (ed.), Cataclysm 1914: The First World War and the Making of Modern World Politics (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 366–412.
The best way to get a feel for the Bolshevik outlook is to read their writings and speeches. Lenin is of course fundamental, but other Bolshevik writers are often more representative of the Bolshevik movement as a whole. Lenin’s most famous works are discussed briefly in this chapter (To the Rural Poor, What Is To Be Done?, Two Tactics, Imperialism, State and Revolution, “On Cooperation”), but often he is more revealing in his speeches, especially during the years in power. His addresses to party audiences each year on the anniversary of the revolution are particularly instructive. Anthologies of his writings include Tucker, Robert C., The Lenin Anthology (New York: Norton, 1975), and Blanc, Paul Le (ed.), Revolution, Democracy, Socialism: Selected Writings of V. I. Lenin (London: Pluto, 2008) (each contains an important introduction).
The website Marxists Internet Archive has extensive English-language texts for a wide range of Bolshevik writers. An underused source for Old Bolshevism is the first three volumes of Stalin’s Collected Works: try to think of him as just a typical Bolshevik propagandist rather than a future dictator. Trotsky’s writings from 1917 to 1921 often give a different impression than the retrospective picture found in his later writings. Zinoviev’s History of the Bolshevik Party (1924) tells the story of Old Bolshevism from the point of view of Lenin’s closest lieutenant. A four-hour speech Zinoviev gave in late 1920 in Halle has recently been translated in Lewis, Ben and Lih, Lars T. (eds.), Zinoviev and Martov: Head to Head in Halle (London: November Publications, 2011); Zinoviev’s remarks on this occasion throw much light on the rapidly evolving Bolshevik view of the global context as well as on domestic policy (Zinoviev is far from “euphoric”). Nikolai Bukharin’s Program of the Communist Party (1918) and The ABC of Communism (1920) that he co-authored with Yevgenii Preobrazhenskii were semi-official statements of the ambitious Bolshevik aims and the results achieved to date. The essential reading for the early years of the Communist International are the series of Congress proceedings edited by John Riddell.
The views set forth here about the Bolshevik outlook are thoroughly documented in Lih, Lars T., Lenin Rediscovered: What Is to Be Done? In Context (Leiden: Brill, 2006) and Deferred Dreams (forthcoming); both books have a full review of the relevant literature. A thankfully shorter overview is Lih, Lars T., Lenin (London: Reaktion Books, 2011). Representative Cold War interpretations of Bolshevism are Meyer, Alfred, Leninism (New York: Praeger, 1962), and Malia, Martin, The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917–1991 (New York: Free Press, 1994); a more idiosyncratic reading can be found in Harding, Neil, Leninism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996). Besides the ongoing series from Alexander Rabinowitch about the Bolsheviks in Petrograd, recent scholarship has little to say about Bolshevism per se. The exceptions to this observation are excellent biographies of lesser-known Bolsheviks. A recent example is Allen, Barbara, Alexander Shlyapnikov, 1885–1937: Life of an Old Bolshevik (Leiden: Brill, 2015); a biography of Mikhail Tomskii by Charters Wynn is in preparation.
The Soviet state always carefully controlled information about its leaders and the functioning of the political system. Writing the history of Stalin’s rule was a daunting task further complicated by the political sympathies of readerships split between a left broadly sympathizing with the aims of the revolution and a right convinced of its evils. Early biographers of Stalin include Trotsky, ’s excoriating Stalin: An Appraisal of the Man and his Influence (London: Harper & Brothers, 1941) and Barbusse, Henri’s hagiographic Stalin: A New World Seen through One Man (London: John Lane, 1935). In the context of the early Cold War, Trotsky’s influence on the historiography was palpable, most notably in Deutscher, Isaac, Stalin: A Political Biography (London: Oxford University Press, 1949).
After Stalin’s death, Khrushchev presided over a release of information intended to reinforce his program of “de-Stalinization,” in which the violence of the Stalin era was blamed on the excessive concentration of power in the hands of the dictator. It was a political sleight of hand. Khrushchev was reinforcing his own power by reassuring the Soviet political elite that their roles in the horrors of the Stalin era would remain secret. Conquest, Robert’s The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties (London: Macmillan, 1968) fell for the trick. Personalizing the story of Soviet political violence made compelling popular history, and more than any other work it cemented the simplistic “Stalin as monster” narrative in the public imagination.
In the 1970s and 1980s, “revisionist” historians chipped away at this dominant view. In Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union, 1921–1934 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979) Sheila Fitzpatrick established that the Stalin regime had significant social support. Lewin, Moshe, The Making of the Soviet System: Essays in the Social History of Interwar Russia (London: Methuen, 1985), examined the social and cultural roots of Stalinism. In The Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933–1938 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), J. Arch Getty explained the violence of the 1930s in terms of a response to bureaucratic recalcitrance and political chaos.
The opening of the archives in 1991 transformed the study of the Stalin era. In place of a relatively narrow body of primary sources, historians suddenly had access to tens of millions of files in central and regional archives. Such was the volume of material, it was inevitable that it would take generations to digest. In those first years, the most significant works on the subject were collections of documents. Some of the best in English were published by Yale University Press in the “Annals of Communism” series, for example, Getty, J. Arch and Naumov, Oleg (eds.), Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932–1939 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999); Viola, Lynne, Danilov, V. P., Ivnitskii, N. A. and Kozlov, Denis (eds.), The War Against the Peasantry, 1927–1930: The Tragedy of the Soviet Countryside (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005); and Lenoe, Matthew E., The Kirov Murder and Soviet History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).
More recent studies of Stalin, such as van Ree, Erik, The Political Thought of Joseph Stalin: A Study in Twentieth-Century Revolutionary Patriotism (London: Routledge, 2002), and Davies, Sarah and Harris, James (eds.), Stalin: A New History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), have departed from the Trotskyist mold, to take the leader more seriously as a Marxist thinker. Some studies, such as Kotkin, Stephen, Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928 (New York: Allen Lane, 2015), and Khlevniuk, Oleg, Master of the House: Stalin and His Inner Circle (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), continue to emphasize Stalin’s impulse to build a personal dictatorship in the shaping of the Soviet political system, while others assert that Stalin was focused on realizing his vision of the revolution rather than seeking power for its own sake: Fitzpatrick, Sheila, On Stalin’s Team: The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015); Davies, Sarah and Harris, James, Stalin’s World: Dictating the Soviet Order (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015).
We are still a long way from digesting the contents of archives, though recent work has advanced our knowledge of Stalinism in important respects. Plamper, Jan’s The Stalin Cult: A Study in the Alchemy of Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012) is a masterful exploration of one critical instrument of Stalinist rule. Rittersporn, Gábor’s Anger, Anguish and Folkways in Soviet Russia (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014) and Goldman, Wendy’s Terror and Democracy in the Age of Stalin: The Social Dynamics of Repression (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) and her Inventing the Enemy: Denunciation and Terror in Stalin’s Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) examine the social and political tensions that intensified the political violence of the era, Stalin. In Practicing Stalinism: Bolsheviks, Boyars and the Persistence of Tradition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), J. Arch Getty has argued that the roots of Stalin should be sought in prerevolutionary traditions and patterns of leadership.
Trotsky is the subject of a celebrated biography by Deutscher, Isaac: The Prophet Armed: Trotsky, 1879–1921 (1954), The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky, 1921–1929 (1959), and The Prophet Outcast: Trotsky, 1929–1940 (1964). All three volumes were republished by Verso in 2003. Deutscher’s trilogy is magnificent, but also deeply flawed due to its hagiographic treatment of Trotsky’s ideas, actions and personality. Time and again, the author is too willing to give Trotsky, his tragic hero, the benefit of the doubt. Nonetheless, Deutscher’s influential biography is one of a kind and not to be missed. Biographies of Trotsky in English or English translation abound. The best starting place is Rubenstein, Joshua’s intelligent brief overview, Leon Trotsky: A Revolutionary’s Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011). Volkogonov, Dmitri, Trotsky: The Eternal Revolutionary, trans. and ed. Shukman, Harold (New York: Free Press, 1996), draws on Russian archival sources available only to the author to create a portrait quite unlike any other.
Knei-Paz, Baruch, The Social and Political Thought of Leon Trotsky (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), offers an exhaustive, acutely observant and indispensable analysis of Trotsky, ’s theoretical writing. Trotsky’s works available in English translation and worth reading include My Life: An Attempt at an Autobiography (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2007); Literature and Revolution (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2005); The Revolution Betrayed, trans. Eastman, Max (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1937); and In Defense of Marxism: Against the Petty-Bourgeois Opposition (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970). Trotsky, ’s History of the Russian Revolution, trans. Eastman, Max (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2008), is a hugely detailed account of 1917 that is unmistakably Marxist in its interpretation of events and best appreciated as a work of literature. Trotsky, ’s Balkan war reporting has been compiled in The War Correspondence of Leon Trotsky: The Balkan Wars 1912–13 (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1981).
Among the best memoirs by people who knew Trotsky well is that of van Heijenoort, Jean, With Trotsky in Exile: From Prinkipo to Coyoacán (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), written by his closest secretary/comrade during his years in exile. Max Eastman, an American socialist who knew Trotsky in the early Soviet years and wrote a portrait of his youth, offers fascinating character sketches of him in “Great in a Time of Storm: The Character and Fate of Trotsky, Leon,” in Heroes I Have Known: Twelve Who Lived Great Lives (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1942), 239–59; and “Problems of Friendship with Trotsky,” in Great Companions: Critical Memoirs of Some Famous Friends (New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1959). For a critical assessment of Trotsky by an American Trotskyist who served as his secretary in Turkey, see Glotzer, Albert, Trotsky: Memoir and Critique (New York: Prometheus Books, 1989). Soviet people’s commissar of education Anatoly Lunacharsky profiled Trotsky in a 1923 volume translated into English as Revolutionary Silhouettes, trans. Glenny, Michael (New York: Penguin, 1967).
Exhaustive coverage of the myriad groupings that populated the international Trotskyist movement, tracing their evolution from Trotsky’s exile years through to the final phase of the USSR, is provided in Alexander, Robert J., International Trotskyism, 1929–1985: A Documented Analysis of the Movement (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991).
For a documentary understanding of the Comintern and the colonial question between 1919 and 1922 the most authentic works are Riddell, John (ed.), Founding the Communist International: Proceedings and Documents of the First Congress, March 1919 (New York: Anchor Foundation, 1987); The Communist International in Lenin’s Time: Proceedings and Documents of the Second Congress, 1920, 2 vols. (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1991); To the Masses: Proceedings of the Third Congress of the Communist International, 1921 (Leiden: Brill Nijhoff and Hotel Publishing, 2014); Toward the United Front: Proceedings of the Fourth Congress of the Communist International, 1922 (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2011). Duiker, William’s The Communist Road to Power in Vietnam (Boulder: Westview Press, 1981) and McVey, Ruth M.’s The Rise of Indonesian Communism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1965) still are the two best volumes on communism in Vietnam and Indonesia respectively. On the French Communist Party’s understanding of the colonial question The French Empire Between the Wars: Imperialism, Politics and Society (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005) by Martin Thomas is full of deep insights. On the Portuguese Communist Party’s understanding of the colonial question literature is lacking. However, one very good reading is Neves, José, “The Role of Portugal on the Stage of Imperialism: Communism, Nationalism and Colonialism (1930–1960),” Nationalities Papers 37, 4 (1991), 485–99. On communism in India, the Comintern, and the role of the CPGB, two important contributions are Neil Redfern, Class or Nation: Communists, Imperialism and Two World Wars (London and New York: Tauris Academic Studies, 2005), and Gupta, Sobhanlal Datta, Comintern and the Destiny of Communism in India 1919–1943: Dialectics of Real and a Possible History, 2nd revised and enlarged edn. (Kolkata: Seribaan, 2011). On the League against Imperialism and Münzenberg, Willi the best work is the monumental two-volume study “We Are Neither Visionaries Nor Utopian Dreamers”: Willi Münzenberg, the League Against Imperialism, and the Comintern, 1925–1933 (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 2013) by Fredrik Petersson. On communism and anti-colonial struggle in Africa and the Arab world in the interwar period literature is rather scanty. Still Kosach, G. G.’s “The Comintern and the Communist Parties of Arab Countries in the 1920s and 1930s,” in Ulyanovsky, R. A. (ed.), The Comintern and the East: A Critique of the Critique (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1981), and Reznikov, A.’s The Comintern and the East: Strategy and Tactics in the National Liberation Movement (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1984) would enlighten the reader.
For a long time, the history of the Comintern focused on directions and discussions in governing bodies which were published and aired in weekly or monthly magazines that translated official documents into several languages. The general history of the Comintern described central strategy considered in this documentation and party tactics analyzed through the positions and interventions at events including the Chinese Revolution, the English general strike, the war in Spain and the election of European communist parties. For studies of the early 1900s, general works include: Agosti, Aldo, La Terza Internazionale: Storia Documentaria (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1974); Iurevich Vatlin, Aleksandr, Die Komintern 1919–1929: Historische Studien (Mainz: Decaton Verlag, 1993); McDermott, Kevin and Agnew, Jeremy, The Comintern: A History of International Communism from Lenin to Stalin (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996); Broué, P., Histoire de l’Internationale communiste (Paris: Fayard, 1997); and Lebedeva, Natal’ia and Narinskii, Mikhail, Il Komintern e la seconda guerra mondiale (Perugia: Guerra, 1996).
With the opening of the archives, valuable histories of the Comintern include: Wolikow, Serge (ed.), Une histoire en révolution? Du bon usage des archives de Moscou et d’ailleurs (Dijon: Éditions Universitaires de Dijon, 1996); Adibekov, G., Charnazarova, E. and Chirinia, K., Organizatsionnaia struktura Kominterna, 1919–1943 (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1997); Wolikow, Serge, Bayerlein, Bernhard H., Mouradian, Georges and Studer, Brigitte, “Les archives du Komintern à Moscou,” Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’histoire 61 (1999), 126–32; Wolikow, Serge, with Bayerlein, Bernhard, Narinskii, Mikhail, and Studer, Brigitte, Moscou, Paris, Berlin, 1939–1941: Télégrammes chiffrés du Komintern (Paris: Tallandier, 2003); Wolikow, Serge, “Historia del comunismo. Nuevos archivos y nuevas miradas,” in Concheiro, Elvira, Modonesi, Massimo and Crespo, Horacio Gutiérrez (eds.), El Comunismo: otras miradas desde América Latina (Mexico: UNAM, 2007); and Wolikow, Serge, Courban, Alexandre and François, David, Guide des archives de l’Internationale communiste, 1919–1943 (Dijon: Archives Nationales-MSH Dijon, 2009).
Over the 1990s and 2000s, many publications have highlighted the functioning of the governing bodies of the Comintern and analyzed more accurately the internal activity of the central organization and its relationship with national sections, and the policy of the USSR. See Wolikow, Serge, “Le regard de l’autre, le Komintern et le PCF,” in Narinsky, Mikhail and Rojahn, Jürgen (eds.), Centre and Periphery: The History of the Comintern in the Light of New Documents (Amsterdam: International Institute of Social History, 1996), 189–202; and Elorza, Antonio and Bizcarrondo, Marta, Queridos camaradas: La Internacional Comunista y España, 1919–1939 (Barcelona: Planeta-De Agostini, 2006).
Much light has been shed on the interactions between center and periphery as well as the terms of the Comintern’s global approach. The opening of the Stalin archives has led to renewed analysis of the links between the policy of the Soviet Union and the Comintern, incorporating the history of international relations and that of communism. For the history of Stalinist repression and how the Comintern was affected and deeply weakened by it, see Chase, William J., Enemies Within the Gates? The Comintern and the Stalinist Repression, 1934–1939 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001); Firsov, Fridrikh I., “Dimitrov, the Comintern and Stalinist Repression,” in McLoughlin, Barry and McDermott, Kevin (eds.), Stalin’s Terror: High Politics and Mass Repression in the Soviet Union (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 56–81; and Laporte, Norman, Morgan, Kevin and Worley, Matthew (eds.), Bolshevism, Stalinism and the Comintern: Perspectives on Stalinization, 1917–53 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
The global history of communism in the twentieth century is examined in Wolikow, Serge, L’Internationale Communiste (1919–1943): Le Komintern ou le rêve déchu du parti mondial de la révolution (Paris: Éditions Ouvrières, 2011), and Pons, Silvio, The Global Revolution: A History of International Communism, 1917–1991 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
With the development of digital humanities, parts of the archives of the Comintern are available online on the RGASPI site: sovdoc.rusarchives.ru/; and for French records, on the site of MSH Dijon Pandor, pandor.u-bourgogne.fr/.
The popular front period of the 1930s is of such significance that all the histories of the Comintern and the international communist movement deal with it. For good recent examples see Wolikow, Serge, L’Internationale Communiste (1919–1943): Le Komintern ou le rêve déchu du parti mondial de la révolution (Paris: Éditions Ouvrières, 2011); Pons, Silvio, The Global Revolution. A History of International Communism, 1917–1991 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); and McDermott, Kevin and Agnew, Jeremy, The Comintern: A History of International Communism from Lenin to Stalin (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996). In many ways the best starting point for more specific research are the essays in Wolikow, Serge and Bleton-Ruget, Annie (eds.), Antifascisme et nation. Les gauches européennes au temps du front populaire (Dijon: Éditions universitaires de Dijon, 1998); Alexander, Martin and Graham, Helen (eds.), The French and Spanish Popular Fronts: Comparative Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); and Graham, Helen and Preston, Paul (eds.), The Popular Front in Europe (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987). On the change in Comintern policy, Carr, E. H., The Twilight of the Comintern, 1930–1935 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1982) remains a useful starting point. Much light is also shed by the documents in Dallin, A. and Firsov, F. I. (eds.), Dimitrov and Stalin, 1934–43: Letters from the Soviet Archives (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), and in Banac, Ivo (ed.), The Diary of Georgi Dimitrov 1933–1949, trans. Hedges, Jane T., Sergay, Timothy D. and Faion, Irina (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003). On the connections between Soviet foreign policy and Comintern policy see Haslam, Jonathan, “The Comintern and the Origins of the Popular Front, 1934–35,” Historical Journal 22 (1979), 673–91, and Pons, Silvio, Stalin and the Inevitable War, 1936–1941 (London: Frank Cass, 2002). For an overview of Chile see Drake, Paul, “Chile 1930–1958,” in Bethell, Leslie (ed.), The Cambridge History of Latin America, vol. VIII, Latin America since 1930: Spanish South America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 267–310, and Loyola, Manuel and Rojas, Jorge (eds.), Por un rojo amanecer. Hacia una historia de los comunistas chilenos (Santiago: Impresora Vals, 2000). Overviews of the Popular Front in France, with considerable discussion of the communist role, include: Jackson, Julian, The Popular Front in France: Defending Democracy, 1934–1938 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Brunet, Jean-Paul, Histoire du Front populaire, 1934–1938, 2nd edn. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998); Wolikow, Serge, Le Front Populaire en France (Paris: Éditions Complexe, 1999); and Tartakowsky, Danielle and Margairaz, Michel (eds.), L’avenir nous appartient. Histoire du Front populaire (Paris: Larousse, 2006). On the PCF, see Sirot, Stéphane, Maurice Thorez (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2000), and Girault, Jacques, Des communistes en France (années 1920 – années 1960) (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2002). Good overviews of the Spanish Popular Front are provided by Ramos, José Luis Martín, El Frente Popular. Victoria y derrota de la democracia en España (Madrid: Pasado y Presente, 2012), and in Calleja, Eduardo González and Comas, Rocío Navarro (eds.), Política, sociedad, conflicto y cultura en la España de 1936 (Granada: Editorial Comares, 2011). Communist involvement in the civil war and Popular Front is covered by Rees, Tim, “The Highpoint of Comintern Influence? The Communist Party and the Civil War in Spain,” in Rees, T. and Thorpe, A. (eds.), International Communism and the Communist International, 1919–43 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 143–67; Hernández Sánchez, Fernando, Guerra o revolución. El Partido Comunista de España en la guerra civil (Barcelona: Crítica, 2010); Payne, Stanley, The Spanish Civil War, the Soviet Union, and Communism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004); Kirschenbaum, Lisa A., International Communism and the Spanish Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); and Schauff, Frank, Der verspielte Sieg: Sowjetunion, Kommunistische Internationale und Spanischer Bürgerkrieg 1936–1939 (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2005).
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