World Revolution? 1918-1924

The Russian Revolution
1815-1924
Session VIII
The World Revolution?

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

• Introduction: Internationalism during the War, 1918

• Germany & Hungary: The First Failures

• The Comintern

• Poland: Revolution by War

• The Colonial World: A Diﬀerent Approach

• America: It Didn’t Happen Here

• Failure of the Comintern & the Death of Lenin


Introduction:
Internationalism
during the
War


Introduction:
Internationalism
during the
War

Comrade Lenin
CLEANSES
the land of
uncleanness

Adolf Abramovich
Ioﬀe
(1883-1927)

Trotsky’s “right-hand-man”

ﬁrst at Brest-Litovsk;
then April-6November 1918
as the Bolshevik ambassador
in Berlin


Germany--Marx’s site of the World Revolution

• 23 March 1918--the initial success of Ludendorff ’s western offensives led Lenin
to draw closer to his “odd bedfellow”

• April--Adolf Ioffe took over the old Imperial Embassy in Berlin, “no ordinary
embassy, but rather a revolutionary outpost deep in enemy territory”

• it had three principal missions, all of which it successfully carried out:
• to neutralize the German generals who wanted the Bolshevik government liquidated.
This Ioffe accomplished by holding out before the German business community dazzling
prospects of profits in Soviet Russia

• to encourage and assist revolutionary forces in Germany and neighboring countries

• to gather political and economic intelligence

• he was able to pursue these objectives with remarkable brazenness because
he enjoyed the protection of the German Foreign Ministry, which thought
it worth almost any price to keep the Bolsheviks afloat


Ioffe’s “Red” German Sailors Revolt

• anti-war speeches in the Reichstag, the January, 1918
munition strike, the 8 August “Black Day of the German
Army; none of these began the German Revolution

• 28 October 1918--the German High Seas Fleet mutinied in
three separate ports

• this set off a wave of shore based Red soldiers’ uprisings, all
the work of Ioffe’s agents and funds

• the German communists were the left wing of the SPD, the
USPD (Independent Socialdemocratic Party, Germany)

• the most radical of these took the name Spartacists, after
the leader of the gladiators’ revolt in 73-71 BC

Matrose (sailor),
Volksmarine Divisoin

Demonstration march of armed sailors on
the Unter den Linden, Berlin,
9 November 1918

Germany & Hungary:
The First Failures


What does
Spartakus
want?

Germany & Hungary:
The First Failures


Proclamation of the Republic before the Reichstag building by
the Socialist Philipp Scheidemann


Scenes from the Christmas Fighting


Fateful Bargain

SPD leader, acting Kriegsminister Noske -- “Of
chancellor, Ebert --“I hate course. Someone must become
the Social Revolution like the bloodhound. I won’t shirk
Army Chief Groener --
sin.” the responsibility.”
“The army will support the
government against the Reds.”


Karl Liebknecht
(1871-1919)

son of SPD co-founder,
Wilhelm Liebknecht,
anti-war SPD wing, 1916
founds Spartakusbund,1918,
proclaims “free socialist
republic” 2 hours after
Scheidemann


Rosa Luxemburg
(1870-1919)

Russian Poland, philosophy
major, Zurich; married
German, 1898; imprisoned for
political activities, left wing of
SPD,founded “Die Rote
Fahne,” (The Red Banner)
pamphlets signed Spartakus,


Lenin’s Replacement for Ioﬀe
• born Karol Sobelsohn to a Jewish family in Lviv,
Austria-Hungary

• 1904-joined the Polish Social Democratic Party and
participated in the 1905 Revolution in Warsaw

• 1907-to Germany, joined the SPD

• 1914-17-moved to Switzerland, became part of Lenin’s
circle, accompanied him on the “sealed train”

• 1918-20-in Germany as Lenin’s agent, radicalizes the
Spartakus, which becomes the KPD

• January, 1919-pushes the uprising, goes underground

Karl Radek • 1920-escapes to Russia, a Comintern functionary until
the Stalin purges, sentenced to hard labor in the Trial of
1885-1939
the Seventeen, killed by an NKVD agent in the gulag


Spartacists
marching towards
Berlin Streetfighting the [newspaper] Vorwärts


Spartakus Week
5-12 January

Soldiers! Workers! Citizens!

The “Forwards”
is retaken!
The rejoicing for our side is exceedingly great.
300 Spartacists we have taken prisoner, and
Büxenstein is again free.

The situation improves hour to hour
so that we dare hope the incredible disgrace of
this brothers war to see made an end to

Join with all who support democracy and
socialism, against those who favor
dictatorship and bloodsoaked preaching!


A Bloody End

•Freikorps forces re-take the streets and 1,000,
mostly Reds, die

•Liebknecht and Luxembourg hide in the
working class district of Weding

•betrayed, they are arrested, beaten, and shot
•Luxemburg’s body is found four months later
in the Landwehr Canal


Hungary and Bela Kun
March-August, 1919


Hungary and Bela Kun
March-August, 1919

How’s your Magyar?

"Everywhere counter-revolutionaries run about and
swagger; beat them down! Beat their heads where you
ﬁnd them! If counter-revolutionaries were to gain the upper
hand for even a single hour, there will be no mercy for any
proletarian. Before they stiﬂe the revolution, suffocate
them in their own blood!"

Tibor Szamuely


Szamuely speaking on Red Square. Behind him
is Vladimir Ilyich

Szamuely Kun Landler

Founder of the Hungarian Communist Party
• born Kohn to a lapsed Jewish notary and a
lapsed Protestant mother

• still, educated at a famous Reformed schule

• before the war a muck-raking journalist

• 1916-drafted into the Austro-Hungarian
army, becomes a Russian POW

• 1918-co-founds, with fellow ex-POWs, the
HCP, joins the Red Army, ﬁghts in the Civil
War

• November, 1918-with several hundred other
Hungarian communists and a lot of soviet
money, returns to Hungary

Bela Kun
• 1938-dies in the Stalin purges 1886-1938

Hungarian Soviet Republic
• 31 October 1918-the Hungarian National Council overthrows the defeated Austro-
Hungarian Empire and establishes the Hungarian Democratic Republic

• in the chaos which followed defeat, occupation and partition this regime fails to gain
popular support

• 21 March 1919-after rioting and arrests, a coalition of communists and social democrats take
power and proclaim the Hungarian Soviet Republic

• a Red Guard and an even less disciplined group called Lenin’s Boys begin the terror

• Bela Kun, Commissar of Foreign Affairs and Tibor Szamuely, War Commissar, attempt to
regain Hungary’s imperial borders; declare a Slovak Soviet Republic and invade Transylvania
which the Paris Peace conference had given to Romania

• these unsuccessful foreign adventures, coupled with unpopular nationalizations of industry,
land confiscations and assaults on religious observances erode popular support

• 6 August 1919-Romanian forces enter Budapest, the communists flee and a conservative
regime under Admiral Miklos Horthy replaces them


Münchner Räterepublik
Munich Soviet Republic
November, 1918-April, 1919


Münchner Räterepublik
Munich Soviet Republic
November, 1918-April, 1919

Toller’s six day regime of anarchists and communists


The Bavarian Republic
• 7 November 1918-on the ﬁrst anniversary of the
October Revolution, Kurt Eisner proclaimed
Bavaria a Free State

• thus ended the 700 year old Wittelsbach
monarchy

• he became the premier of a Socialist Republic

• 21 February 1919-he was assassinated by Anton
Graf (Count) von Arco-Valley

• 21 March-the Hungarian Soviet Republic
encouraged radicals in Bavaria

• 6 April-the Bavarian Soviet Republic of Ernst
Toller

• 12 April-its incompetence led to its replacement
by the regime of Eugen Levine KURT EISNER, Bayerischer Ministerpräsident


To the Bavarian Working Class!

•Bavaria is a Soviet Republic!

•What’s the difference between
the Soviet and the Landtag (the
previous parliament)?

•Prov. revolutionary central
[committee] signed Ernst Toller


Eugen Levine--”the Bavarian Lenin”
• 1883-born, Skt-Peterburg

• 1905-fought in the Revolution

• associate and agent of V.I. Lenin,
member, KPD (Communist Party,
Germany)

• raised the 20,000 man Red Army of
the unemployed

• took eight aristocratic hostages who
were murdered in the May ﬁghting

• 5 July, 1919-executed in Stadelheim
Prison


Red Army

Freikorps von Epp
Krupp-Daimler
Plattformwagen

The Saviors of Munich

Idealized Actual

The Munich victory raised the Freikorps to a zenith of
prestige....From an army that had seemed to be on the point of
evaporation after the Armistice, an effective military force had
been created. However, that effort to rebuild the army would be
checked by the Treaty of Versailles.

Carlos Caballero Jurado, The German Freikorps, 1918-1923. p.15


The Ruhr Uprising
1920


The Red Army
on the Ruhr &
Rhine

Against the
Kapp Putsch
1920

The Ruhr Uprising
1920


For the first time in western European history
the state’s professional armies were in
confrontation with a properly organized
revolutionary army. Within five days
[3/15-20/1920], the Ruhr workers had
managed to organize their own force of fifty
thousand armed and determined men....This
scratch force had succeeded in defeating
Government militias, police, FKs, and the
regular Reichswehr and were in possession of
Germany’s main industrial region.

Nigel Jones, The Birth of the Nazis;
How the Freikorps blazed a Trail for Hitler. p. 194


Things were so bad that even the “useless
generation,” those too young for the war, were
called upon. Most were eager to follow their
elders.


Chronology

• 15-20 March 1920-Reds seize control
as a response to the earlier
unsuccessful Kapp Putsch in Berlin

• 24 March-truce

• 3 April-broken

• 8 April-FKs ﬁnish “restoring order”


Conclusions
Thus the [four] efforts to promote revolutionary upheavals in
central Europe at a time when conditions for it were uniquely
propitious went down in defeat. Although Moscow, hailing each
as the beginning of a world conflagration, had stinted on
neither money nor personnel, it had gained nothing. European
workers and peasants turned out to be made of very different
stuff from their Russian counterparts. Indeed, such initiatives
produced the very opposite result from that intended: they
discredited communism and played into the hands of
nationalist extremists. “The main results of that mistaken
policy,” writes Neil McInnes, “were to terrify the Western
ruling classes and many of the middle classes with the specter
of revolution, and at the same time provide them with a
convenient model, in Bolshevism, for a counterrevolutionary
force, which was fascism.”

Pipes, p.289

Comintern


During the ﬁve years when Lenin was in charge, the foreign policy of
Soviet Russia was an adjunct of the policies of the Russian
Communist Party. As such, it was intended to serve, ﬁrst and
foremost, the interests of the global revolution. It cannot be stressed
strongly enough or often enough that the Bolsheviks seized power in
Russia not to change Russia but to use her as a springboard to
change the world. “We assert,” Lenin said in May, 1918,”that the
interests of socialism, the interests of world revolution, are superior
to national interests, to the interests of the state.” The founders of
the communist regime felt that their revolution could not survive for
long unless it promptly spread abroad.

Pipes, p.286


A Two-tiered Foreign Policy

• the Commissariat of Foreign Policy, acting in the name of the state,
maintained formally correct relations with those foreign powers that
were prepared to have dealings with it

• March, 1919-the task of promoting world revolution devolved on a
new body, the Third or Communist International (Comintern)

• formally, the Comintern was independent of both the Soviet
government and the Russian Communist Party

• in reality, it was a department of the latter’s Central Committee
• the separation of the two entities enabled Moscow to conduct a
policy of concurrent “peaceful coexistence” and subversion


The Comintern’s Two Tasks

• one offensive: to promote revolution abroad
• one defensive: to neutralize the efforts of “capitalist” countries to
launch a crusade against Soviet Russia

• it had much more success with its defensive than its offensive
mission

• its agents appealed to socialists and liberals with slogans such as “hands off Russia”

• its agents appealed to capitalists with the offer of lucrative business deals

• by the early 1920s, virtually all European countries had established
diplomatic and commercial relations with a government they had
initially treated as an outlaw


A Paper Existence
March, 1919-the founding congress
consisted of 35 delegates. Only ﬁve
came from abroad and only one
carried a mandate. Still, Zinoviev,
Lenin’s appointed chairman was
ecstatic!

Trotsky’s German publication,
1919


“The movement advances with
such dizzying speed that one
can conﬁdently say; in a year
we shall already have forgotten
that Europe had to ﬁght for
Communism, because a year
hence al l Europe shal l be
Communist. And the struggle
for Communism will shift to
America, and perhaps also to
Asia and other parts of the
world.”

Grigori Zinoviev
summer, 1919


A Well-ﬁnanced Operational Organization
Second Congress, Summer, 1920
• foreign communists and sympathizers were far better represented
• 217 delegates from thirty-six countries

• Russia had one third of the delegates

• next largest delegations were from Germany, Italy, and France

• the mood was euphoric because during its sessions the Red Army
approached Warsaw in a campaign that Communists saw as the opening
stage of the conquest of Europe

• Lenin had three objectives for the congress:
1. create in every country a communist party “subject to iron military discipline”

2.the Comintern was to be centralized “A single Communist party with sections in every country”

3.foreign Communist parties were required to inﬁltrate and seize control of parliaments and trade
unions with the ultimate goal of “armed insurrection” against all existing governments


Results of Lenin’s Program

• Goal 1: Communist parties were indeed established abroad. It was
not difficult to split off the left wings of existing socialist parties. But
the ensuing conflicts weakened the political left and made the rise of
right wing groups easier, most notably in Italy (1922) Austria (1932)
and Germany (1933)

• Goal 2:Foreign Communist parties proved remarkably docile and
submissive to Moscow’s control. “He who pays the piper calls the
tune.”

• Goal 3: Here the challenge was much greater. Workers found
communism less attractive than did intellectuals! (Pipes) Lenin
fumed at the lack of success here.”During the next fifteen years
[1920-1935],” writes Franz Borkenau, “the communists in the West
were unable to conquer a single union.”


COMMUNIST
INTERNATIONAL
-------------
EXECUTIVE
COMMITTEE

Comrade Kilbom’s ID Card
dated 14 July 1921


Poland:
Revolution by War


Poland: A map of the
new states with
borders yet to

Revolution by War be established
1920


"The war of giants has ended, the wars of the pygmies began."

Winston Churchill


Overview (February, 1919-March, 1921)
• the Polish-Soviet War was a conflict between Soviet Russia and
Soviet Ukraine against the Second Polish Republic and The
Ukrainian Peoples Republic. It overlapped the Civil War.

• the frontiers between Poland and the Soviet states had not been
defined in the Paris Peace Settlement

• as the Central Powers withdrew from the Brest-Litovsk cession, both
Ukraine and Belarus(White Russia) sought to establish their
independence and claim historic territories

• Josef Pilsudski sought to create a Polish-led buffer federation
(Miedzymorze, Between the Seas, i.e. Baltic and Black) between
German and Russian imperialism

• Lenin saw Poland as the bridge that the Red Army must cross to
carry the Revolution to the West


Pilsudski’s Grandiose Scheme

Invited to join were the Baltic States (Lithuania, Latvia,
Estonia), Finland, Belarus, Ukraine, Hungary, Romania,
Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia


The Polish-Ukrainian War (November, 1918-July, 1919)

• the origins of the conﬂict lay in the mixed ethnicity, Polish and
Ukrainian, of Galicia, until 1918, part of Austria-Hungary

• 1 November 1918-- the West Ukrainian National Republic was
proclaimed with Lviv (Polish, Lvov, German, Lemberg) as its capital

• the rural areas were indeed majority Ukrainian, but Lviv and other
cities were majority Polish speakers (Jews and Catholics)

• 1919-ﬁghting began to expel Ukrainian forces. Polish troops had
French military advisors and equipment. About 10,000Poles and
15,000 Ukrainians were KIA

• summer,1919-the Ukrainian Hetman Petlura was attacked by the
Reds in Eastern Ukraine


“The Young Eagles”(1927) youthful defenders of Lvov, 1918
in the Polish Army Museum


March, 1919

Blue-gray=West Ukrainian Republic
yellow=relief of the siege of Lwow

Symon Petliura
1879-1926

Hetman of the Ukraine, 1919-1920;
directed the aﬀairs of the
Ukrainian government-in-exile,
assassinated in exile in Paris for
his alleged responsibility for
pogroms in the war years


Lenin’s Ambitions Grow

• the ﬁrst step was to recover the borderlands ceded in the Treaty of
Brest-Litovsk

• In early 1919, they also set up a Lithuanian-Belorussian Republic
(Litbel). This government was very unpopular due to terror and the
collection of food and goods for the army.

• By the end of summer 1919 the Soviets managed to take over most of
Ukraine, driving the Ukrainian Directorate from Kiev.

• late 1919-as Lenin saw the tide turning in the Civil War, he began to
hope for further military successes

• Poland was the “bridge” for carrying the revolution to Germany and
Western Europe


The Bolsheviks propaganda, aimed at the international scene, would
deny any visions of conquest:

“But our enemies and yours deceive you when they say that the
Russian Soviet Government wishes to plant communism in Polish soil
with the bayonets of Russian Red Army men. A communist order is
possible only where the vast majority of the working people are
penetrated with the idea of creating it by their own strength. Only
then can it be solid; for only then can communist policy strike deep
roots in a country. The communists of Russia are at present striving
only to defend their own soil, their own constructive work; they are
not striving, and cannot strive, to plant communism by force in other
countries.”
EH Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, volume 3, p.165


Pilsudski & Petliura Take the Oﬀensive
• early 1920-Petliura and some forces ﬂed
from the Ukraine to Poland after being
defeated by the Reds. He controlled only
a sliver of territory along the Polish
border

• 21 April-the Warsaw Treaty between
Petliura representing the Ukrainian
People’s Republic and Poland

• Petliura accepted the loss of Western
Ukraine to Poland

• he was promised Polish military assistance
for winning an independent Ukraine

• 15,000 initial Ukrainian troops expanded
to 35,000 as the campaign began with
initial success against the Red Army Polish General Antoni Listowski
& Symon Petliura


Pilsudski and Petliura in Kiev

The Polish 3rd Army easily won border clashes with the Red Army in
Ukraine but the Reds withdrew with minimal losses. The combined
Polish-Ukrainian forces entered an abandoned Kiev on May 7,
encountering only token resistance.


CORRUPT PETLYURA HAS SOLD UK-
RAINE TO THE POLISH PANS

THE PANS HAVE BURNED AND PLUNDERED UKRAINE
DEATH TO THEM AND THE PETLYURISTS


A RED PRESENT
FOR THE
WHITE
PAN

LET’S CHUCK
THIS LITTLE
PACKAGE HIS WAY


Beat
the Bolshevik


The Polish-Ukrainian Oﬀensive at its height; June, 1920

Latvian-
Lithuanian-
Polish-
Soviet
War;
January, 1919-
May, 1920


Polish-
Soviet-
Lithuanian
War;
May-Aug, 1920


The Soviet oﬀensive at its height; August, 1920

Mikhail Nicholaevich Tukhachevsky
• tsarist lieutenant, member of the minor nobility

• 1918-commanded 1st Red Army against KOMUCH

• spring, 1919-commanded the 8th Army against the
Don Cossacks, rising to lead the Caucasus Army
Group in early 1920

• May, 1920-commands the Western Army Group in
the counterattack against Poland

• 1935-made Marshall of the Soviet Union

• 12 June 1937-in a secret trial, along with eight other
high ranking generals, tried, convicted, and
immediately executed in the “Case of the Trotskyist
Anti-Soviet Military Organization”

1893-1937

To Arms!

Save the fatherland
consider well our
future fate


Polish Thermopylae: Russian cavalry are stopped at the Battle of Zadwórze.
(Painting by Stanisław Kaczor-Batowski, 1929. Polish Army Museum, Warsaw.)


Battle of Zadwórze (sometimes referred to as the "Polish Thermopylae") was a battle
of the Polish-Bolshevik War. It was fought on August 17, 1920 near the train station of
Zadwórze, a small village located 33 kilometres from the city centre of Lwów (now
Lviv). The battle, lasting roughly 24 hours, resulted in the complete destruction of the
Polish forces but at the same time halted the Soviet advance, preventing the forces of
Siemion Budionnyi from seizing Lwów and so contributing to the successful defence
of Warsaw.

The final engagements, Polish Salamis (?), were called the Miracle of the Vistula
which led to Russian withdrawal and acceptance of boundaries 150 miles east of what
the Paris peacemakers had proposed for Poland.

The sad part of this military triumph was that Poland had an implacable enemy to its
east. Stalin would take his revenge in 1939 with the Nazi-Soviet Pact and the Katyn
Forest massacres.


Miracle at the Vistula,
oil on canvas, 1930. Painting by Jerzy Kossak


The Battle of Warsaw (sometimes referred to as the
Miracle at the Vistula, Polish: Cud nad Wisłą) was the
decisive battle of the Polish-Soviet War, which began soon
after the end of World War I in 1918 and lasting until the
Treaty of Riga (1921).
The Battle of Warsaw was fought from 13 to 25 August
1920 as Red Army forces commanded by Mikhail
Tukhachevski approached the Polish capital of Warsaw and
nearby Modlin Fortress. On August 16, Polish forces
commanded by Józef Piłsudski counter-attacked from the
south, forcing the Russian forces into a disorganised
withdrawal eastward and behind the Niemen River.
Estimated Bolshevik losses were 10,000 killed, 500
missing, 10,000 wounded and 66,000 taken prisoner,
compared with Polish losses of some 4,500 killed, 10,000
missing and 22,000 wounded


Initial Soviet Advance prior to the Battle, 12 Aug 1920

WARSAW


Polish Counterattack, 14 Aug 1920

WARSAW


Outcomes of the Battle

• Polish intelligence had broken the Soviet codes and continued to
proﬁt from this advantage

• three of the four Soviet armies had all but disintegrated along with
the bulk of their cavalry corps, including Budyonny’s famous 1st
Cavalry Army

• those retreating into German East Prussia were disarmed and brieﬂy
interned

• 15-25 September 1920-Tukashevski’s attempt to hold the line of the
Nieman River resulted in another defeat, the second greatest battle
of the war

• Lenin resolved never to send the Red Army outside Soviet borders
again in pursuit of the World Revolution


Polish-Soviet Border under the Riga Treaty, 18 March 1921

DOWN WITH THE RIGA TREATY OUTRAGE!

Caricature for Riga Peace 1921. Shows a Pole in old-style ofﬁcer's uniform and
sword-belt, and an ammunition-bandoliered and skull-faced Red Army soldier,
together tearing White Russia or Belarus into two, while stomping on Ukraine.

Seeds for a bitter future harvest


Our army is an army
that liberates workers
Seeds for a bitter future harvest J. Stalin


The Colonial World:
A Diﬀerent Approach


The Colonial World:
A Diﬀerent Approach PROLETARIANS
OF EVERY LAND
UNITE


Although it concentrated on the industrial countries, the
Comintern didn’t ignore the colonies. Lenin had become
persuaded long before the Revolution by J.A. Hobson’s
Imperialism (1902) that advanced capitalism managed to
survive only thanks to the raw materials, labor, and
markets provided by the colonies. Depriving it of these
proﬁts would, in his judgement, deliver capitalism the
coup de grâce.

Pipes, p. 298


How to incite class war without a proletariat?
• it was necessary to ﬁnd a surrogate for class war if the developing
countries were to join the ﬁght against capitalist imperialism

• this was nationalism: reactionary in capitalist countries, it was
“progressive” in their colonial dependencies

• Lenin urged wars of “national liberation” in the colonies:
• the “masses” would join hands with the “bourgeoisie” to expel colonial masters

• the native communists would promote and lead this struggle
• once victorious, they would turn the “masses” against their erstwhile “bourgeois” allies

• the handful of Communists from the colonial areas attending the
Second Congress objected to no avail. Lenin’s will prevailed and a
resolution passed “actively to support liberation movements”


Turkey--Case Study #1

• 16 March 1921-the Treaty of Moscow bound the two “pariah nations”
of Turkey and Russia in a pact of mutual friendship

• both considered the West, especially Britain, to be their enemies
• but accepting Soviet help did not mean that the Turkish strongman,
Mustapha Kemal, Atatürk, would accept Communism

• "Communism is a social issue. Social conditions, religion, and national traditions of our country
conﬁrm the opinion that Russian Communism is not applicable in Turkey."

• Atatürk proceeded to make modern secular Turkey into a one-party
state

• “Richard Loewenthal has called him the ﬁrst nationalist dictator to embrace the
Communist political model without embracing Communist ideology”--Pipes, p.299


China--Case Study #2

• 1923-Lenin’s agent, Mikhail Borodin, advised and supplied arms to
China’s strongman, Dr. Sun Yat Sen

• following Borodin’s suggestion, Communists were allowed to join the
Kuo Min Tang party and attend Whampoa Military Academy

• 1925-1927-after Sun Yat Sen’s death Borodin continued as an advisor
and arms dealer until Chiang Kai-Shek began his purge of
Communists which began the Chinese Civil War

• Borodin escaped to the USSR where he edited the English language
Moscow News until it was his turn to go to the Gulag and die there

• 1949-ﬁnally, Mao, Chou and the rest of the CCP would bring the
victory that the Comintern had long sought


Vietnam--Case Study #3
• born to a family of Confucian scholars and teachers, he was
educated in a Vietnamese French Lycee in Hue

• 1911-1919-travelled to France, worked at menial kitchen jobs
there & in Boston! tried in vain to speak at the Paris Peace
Conference for Vietnamese independence

• Citing the language and the spirit of the U.S. Declaration of
Independence, Qu!c petitioned U.S. President Woodrow
Wilson for help to remove the French from Vietnam and
replace it with a new, nationalist government. His request was
ignored.

• 1921-became a founding member of the Parti Communiste
Français and spent much of his time in Moscow afterwards,
becoming the Comintern’s Asia hand and principal theorist on
colonial wars of national liberation

• 1923-1927-after the Fifth Comintern Congress he went to Nguyen Sinh Cung, aka
China and British Hong Kong and worked with Mikhail Nguyen Ai Quoc, aka
Borodin until Chiang Kai-Shek’s anti-Communist coup
Ho Chi Minh
1890-1969
• 1927-1941-more wanderings in Russia, Western Europe, and
Southeast Asia until his rendezvous with destiny

America; It Didn’t
Happen Here


America; It Didn’t
Happen Here

CURSES! IT WON’T
EXPLODE IN AMERICA
source: Literary Digest, 10/18/1919


The 1919 Red Scare
• labor tension was high even before the war

• 1916-”Hyphenated Americans (who) have poured the
poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our
national life. Such creatures of passion, disloyalty and
anarchy must be crushed out “ -Wilson

• 2 June 1919-bombs were detonated in several
American cities. One in Washington, D.C. at the
home of Atty Gen’l, A. Mitchell Palmer almost
killed FDR and Eleanor, walking across the street

• the bombers were anarchists, not “Bolsheviks”

• 1919-1921-this led to a series of crack-downs on
radicals of all types known as the Palmer Raids

THE RED: “LET’S GO TO
• also fueling the Red Scare were a series of strikes THE BOTTOM FIRST
led by such home-grown radicals as the I.W.W., source: Literary Digest, 11/15/1919
the “Wobblies,” president, “Big Bill” Haywood


Reds, Blacks, Who Cares! Get Rid of ‘em!
• 1919-the news of the Russian Civil
War and America’s intervention
merged in the public mind with
domestic radical unrest

• 9 September 1919-the Boston police
strike, the ﬁrst of its kind, electriﬁed
national opinion

• when Governor Calvin Coolidge
intervened, he won the second spot
on Harding’s ticket

• sentiment grew for deporting the
radicals to Russia, a “Christmas
present” for Lenin

John Reed & Louise Bryant
• wealthy Harvard student, attended meetings of
the Socialist Club, Walter Lippmann, president

• as a journalist, Reed ﬁrst covered the Mexican
Revolution, then the European war

• 1917-he and long-time lover Bryant arrived in
Petrograd just in time for the Ten Days that Shook
the World (his title for his book describing the
October Revolution)

• both championed the Red government, he as a
member of the Comintern

• 1920-while serving in war-torn Russia, Reed
contracted typhus and died

• he, along with “Big Bill” Haywood, is buried in
the Kremlin wall, behind Lenin’s tomb


Fellow Travelers and “Useful Idiots”
• perhaps the most useful allies of Soviet Russia were the capitalists
who were depicted in their cartoons with big bellies and opera hats

• there was a positive scramble to invest in and sell to the Reds
• writers and journalists like Reed found that they were given royal
treatment, as long as they adhered to “the Party line”

• Pipes characterizes the “naive” category as follows:
• they desperately wished for a world free of war and want

• capitalism disgusted them because of the poverty it tolerated in the midst of aﬄuence
and because of its inner contradictions that they believed made for war

• they believed that man and society could be perfected

• they readily accepted Communist ideals for Communist reality


Failure of the Comintern &
the Death of Lenin


Failure of the Comintern &
the Death of Lenin

“Man at the Crossroads” mural by Diego Riviera,
originally intended for Rockefeller Center, 1933


In the final reckoning, the conventional efforts of Soviet diplomatic and
economic agencies succeeded far better than the Comintern’s efforts at
subversion. The record of the Comintern, from it’s foundation in 1919
until its dissolution in 1943, is one of unrelieved failures. Probably the
main cause was the Bolsheviks’ ignorance of Europe….

And they refused to be taught. “Is there nothing more to learn from the
struggles, movements, and revolutions of other countries?” an
exasperated British Comintern delegate asked Zinoviev. “Have the
Russians come here not to learn, but only to teach?”...

To these causes of the Comintern’s failure may be added a third, one
imponderable by its ver y nature. This had to do with the
“Russianness” of Bolshevism...a uniquely Russian phenomenon, with
deep roots in the Russian soul.

Pipes, pp. 310-11


Lenin at Gorky, 1923

• physical strain from leading a revolution,
running a government, and ﬁghting a civil war
combined with the trauma of his wounds

• 24 April 1922-a German surgeon removed
Kaplan’s bullet from his neck. It had been there
since August, 1918

• May, 1922-the ﬁrst of three strokes. Partly
paralyzed on his right side, his role in
government diminshed

• December, 1922-the second stroke led him to
withdraw from politics

• March, 1923-the third stroke left him dumb and
bed-ridden until he died, 21 January 1924


Stalin viewing Lenin’s body


“Iron Felix”, head of the Cheka, pall bearer
at Lenin’s funeral

Lenin’s Mausoleum


Thus the Bolsheviks, who five years earlier in a noisy
campaign of blasphemy and ridicule exposed as sham the
relics of Orthodox saints, created a holy relic of their own.
Unlike the church’s saints, whose remains were revealed to be
nothing but rags and bones, their god, as beﬁtted the age of
science, was composed of alcohol, glycerin, and formalin.

Pipes, p. 381


Against the threat of war, Soviet Russia needed the
traditional tools of war, a strong, well-armed home base
and the industrial society to support it. This, in 1924, was
still a distant goal. At the time of Lenin’s death, Soviet
Russia had not much advanced, in terms of military and
industrial power, beyond the point where tsarist Russia
had ignominiously left oﬀ. But the day of the decisive
attack on the trammels of weakness was rapidly
approaching.

von Laue, Why Lenin? Why Stalin?, p. 201


World Revolution? 1918-1924

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