by James Millar
A bastion of party power in science and higher education, the Communist Academy was nevertheless symbiotically linked to the Academy of Sciences. In essence, the Communist Academy thrived as long as its rival was able to preserve its semi-autonomous, apolitical status. But by 1928, the Academy of Sci-ences-the longest-lasting of the powerful NEP-era bourgeois institutions-found itself under attack. In an effort to bring the Academy of Sciences under state control, the party leadership ordered the institution
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to elect Marxist scholars as academicians. Then, during the radical years of the cultural revolution (1928-1932), the Academy of Sciences was terrorized by official harassment and wave after wave of arrests and dismissals, which ultimately forced the institution to adopt a more conformist line. This process was completed in 1934 when the newly cowed Academy of Sciences was uprooted from its historical habitat in Leningrad and moved to Moscow to work alongside the Communist Academy.
Although these changes broke the resistance of the Academy of Sciences, they undermined the very raison d’?tre of the Communist Academy. After all, once the Academy of Sciences had begun to employ Marxist-trained scholars and produce at least nominally Marxist scholarship, it became difficult to justify the continued existence of the Communist Academy. Within two years, the latter institution was subsumed into the newly Sovietized Academy of Sciences by government decree on February 8, 1936. See also: ACADEMY OF SCIENCES; EDUCATION; INSTITUTE OF RED PROFESSORS; MARXISM
BIBLIOGRAPHY
David-Fox, Michael. (1997). Revolution of the Mind: Higher Learning among the Bolsheviks, 1918-1929. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. David-Fox, Michael. (1998). “Symbiosis to Synthesis: The Communist Academy and the Bolshevization of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 1918-1929.” Jahrb?cher f?r Geschichte Osteuropas 46(2):219-243.
DAVID BRANDENBERGER
COMMUNIST BLOC
Countries after the end of World War II (i.e., after August 1945), which became linked by adherence to the ideology and practice of communism, as developed by Vladimir Lenin and Josef Stalin and their successors in the Soviet Union.
Before the collapse of the USSR, some of the countries within it were also informally known as the Soviet bloc. Their official name was Sodruzh-estvo sotsialisticheskikh gosudarstv (Commonwealth of Socialist Countries), for not even the USSR claimed that it had reached the communist stage after socialism. Lenin and his associates, most notably Leon Trotsky and Grigory Zinoviev, had vainly tried to spread communism throughout the world after the successful October, or Bolshevik, Revolution in Soviet Russia, despite the short-lived communist regime of Bela Kun in Hungary (March-August 1919). The Communist International, or Comintern, in Moscow (March 1919- June 1943), which was dominated by leaders of the Russian Communist Party, helped to train communist revolutionaries from all over the world. They became leaders of their countries in East Central and Southeastern Europe and in Asia after World War II. International links were then provided by the Communist Information Bureau, or Cominform (September 1947-April 1956), the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (January 1949-June 1991) and the Warsaw Pact (May 1955-July 1991). At the height of its largest extent under Stalin (late 1940s, early 1950s), the communist bloc comprised more than a billion people or one-third of the world’s population. In Europe, there was the USSR itself, with Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania having been incorporated after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (August 23, 1939); the German Democratic Republic; Poland; Czechoslovakia; Hungary; Romania; Bulgaria; Yugoslavia; and Albania. In Asia, the Bloc included: Cambodia (Kampuchea), China (People’s Republic of China), Laos, Mongolia, South Yemen (People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen), and Vietnam (North Vietnam only from 1946-1975, then all of Vietnam). In America, Cuba joined the Bloc after the Fidel Castro Revolution of January 1959. In Africa, Angola, Benin, Congo, Ethiopia, and Mozambique linked up in the 1960s.
Did Marxist-Leninist socialism advance modernization in the communist bloc, or would modernization have occurred anyway and without the increase in authoritarianism and the use of terror? Zbigniew Brzezinski criticized in The Grand Failure “the dogmatic grand oversimplification inherent in the communist claim to a unique grasp of all truth and in the communist quest for a total monopoly of power.” Arguably, total monopoly of power presupposed the use of terror, which, as Merle Fainsod put in his How Russia Is Ruled, “[was] the linchpin of modern totalitarianism.” Stephane Courtois and others implicitly extended Fainsod’s insight to the entire communist bloc. When, in the interest of reforms and modernization, Stalin’s successor Nikita S. Khrushchev and, even more, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, restricted the use of terror within the USSR and police violence and military intervention in the communist bloc, the bloc began disintegrating in the 1960s and broke apart completely between
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1989 and 1991, after the semi-free elections in Poland in June 1989 and the establishment in September 1989 of the first Polish government after World War II that was not dominated by communists from the Polish United Workers’ Party.
It is also arguable whether U.S. and Western policy of containment and coexistence helped more to break up the already reforming and modernizing USSR, the key state in the communist bloc, or whether it was U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s policy of military containment through rearmament that led to the political transformation and demise of the USSR. Reagan’s political war, in turn, was based on U.S. President Jimmy Carter’s support of Soviet dissidents.
Finally, it remains to be seen whether Vladimir V. Putin, who was elected president of Russia in March 2000 and whose formative experience had been the breakdown of communist authority in East Germany in 1989, will succeed in attempting to reassert Russia’s great power status, particularly in the territory of the former USSR. Russia’s weak economy and Western diplomacy may prevent reestablishment of Russia’s influence over portions of the old communist bloc. See also: COMINTERN; WARSAW TREATY ORGANIZATION,
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Brzezinski, Zbigniew K. (1967). The Soviet Bloc: Unity and Conflict, rev. and enlarged ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Brzezinski, Zbigniew K. (1990). The Grand Failure: The Birth and Death of Communism in the Twentieth Century. New York: Macmillan. Courtois, Stephane; Werth, Nicolas; Panne, Jean-Louis; Paczkowski, Andrzej; Bartosek, Karel; Margolin, Jean-Louis. (1999). The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, tr. Jonathan Murphy and Mark Kramer; consulting ed. Mark Kramer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Fainsod, Merle. (1953). How Russia Is Ruled, 1st ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Garthoff, Raymond L. (1994). D?tente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan, rev. ed. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution. Garthoff, Raymond L. (1994). The Great Transition: American Soviet Relations and the End of the Cold War. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution. Gorbachev, Mikhail. (1988). Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World, new updated ed. New York: Harper amp; Row. Hunt, R. N. Carew. (1962). The Theory and Practice of Communism: An Introduction, 5th rev. ed. New York: Macmillan. Schweizer, Peter. (2002). Reagan’s War: The Epic Story of His Forty-Year Struggle and Final Triumph Over Communism. New York: Doubleday. Zacek, Jane Shapiro, and Kim, Ilpyong J., eds. (1997). The Legacy of the Soviet Bloc. Gainesville: University of Florida Press.
YAROSLAV BILINSKY
COMMUNIST INFORMATION BUREAU
The Communist Information Bureau was an organization, usually known as the Cominform, created by Stalin in 1947 ostensibly for the purpose of exchanging information among the communist parties of Europe. Actually, the Cominform served two purposes: 1) to solidify relationships among the communist parties of Eastern Europe as tools of Soviet foreign policy; 2) to act as a device for dealing with Tito and the Communist Party of Yugoslavia. The organization’s full name was the Information Bureau of the Communist and Workers’ Parties, sometimes known by its Russian abbreviation, Informburo.
Following World War II, one of Stalin’s primary for
eign policy goals for Eastern Europe was to establish friendly (i.e., subservient) states in Eastern Europe as a buffer against a potentially revived Germany. Whereas the western allies did not disagree with that goal in principle, they did find the Soviet Union’s revolutionary rhetoric and its aggressive policies in Poland and the Balkans unacceptable, even frightening, as they began to establish their own vision of a liberal world system. In 1947 the British decided to pull back from the international commitments that had characterized their imperial history, and the United States stepped into the breach. Citing the apparent division of the world into two camps, a free one based on “individual liberty” and an unfree one based on “terror and oppression,” President Harry Truman endorsed what later became called the policy of containment, that is, limiting communism to those countries where it already existed. Shortly thereafter, the United States introduced the Marshall Plan for the recovery of Europe.
In the summer of 1947, largely in response to these western initiatives, Stalin had Wladyslaw
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Gomulka, head of the Polish Workers Party, invite the representatives of Communist parties of nine European countries (USSR, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Yugoslavia, France, and Italy) to the Polish resort of Szklarska Poreba for a “private conference . . . to exchange information on the situation in the various countries” and perhaps to create a journal. Actually, as documents made available in the 1990s show, Stalin intended to create a mechanism for subordinating the activities of the other parties to Soviet aims.
The main speech at the conference, which convened on September 22, was made by Andrei Zhdanov, second only to Stalin in the Soviet hierarchy. In an aggressive and strongly-worded talk, Zhdanov restated the “two-camp” notion, but this time with the democratic camp (the USSR and its allies) consisting of those “antifascist” countries that had “broken with imperialism and have firmly set foot on the path of democratic development,” and the imperialist camp (the U.S. and its allies) consisting of countries that relied on “reactionary, anti-democratic forces.” Zhdanov characterized “America’s aspirations to world supremacy” as “highly reminiscent of the reckless program . . . of the fascist aggressors,” the Hitlerites. Stalin gave the Yugoslav party pride of place at the conference by permitting its representatives to be the harshest critics of the other parties, particularly the French and Italian, which recently had been dropped from their coalition governments. He added to Yugoslavia’s prestige by making Belgrade the location of the editorial offices of the new Com-inform monthly (later biweekly) publication entitled For a Lasting Peace, For a People’s Democracy!
It is not clear whether Stalin was rewarding the Yugoslavs at Sklarska Poreba or setting them up. But in the winter and spring of 1948, a serious controversy arose between the Yugoslav party and Stalin that led to an exchange of messages. At one point the Yugoslavs stated that “no matter how much each of us loves the land of socialism, the USSR, he can, in no case, love his own country less.” This was exactly what Stalin could not abide. The second meeting of the Cominform, which took place in Bucharest in June 1948, therefore expelled Yugoslavia from the fraternal brotherhood of socialist states (i.e., the Soviet bloc). Because the events leading up to this expulsion had been strictly secret, this expulsion produced a great sensation in Europe and the world. It put a shocked Yugoslavia on a path toward an independent style of self-managed socialism, while at the same time opening a vicious campaign against alleged “Titoism” in the socialist countries of Eastern Europe.
The Cominform, now excluding Yugoslavia, met only one more time, in November 1949 in Hungary. This meeting was devoted primarily to the “anti-Titoist” campaign. Stalin’s death in 1953 and the changes in Soviet policy that ensued made the organization increasingly obsolete. Khrushchev decided in 1956 to restore good relations with Yugoslavia, and the Cominform was dissolved on April 17 of that year. See also: STALIN, JOSEF VISSARIONOVICH; YUGOSLAVIA, RELATIONS WITH; ZHDANOV, ANDREI ALEXANDROVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bass, Robert Hugo, ed. (1959). The Soviet-Yugoslav Controversy, 1948-1958: A Documentary Record. New York: Prospect Books for the East European Institute. Procacci, Giuliano, ed. (1994). The Cominform: Minutes of the Three Conferences, 1947/1948/1949. Milan: Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli.
GALE STOKES
COMMUNIST INTERNATIONAL
Communist International was an organization of communist parties devoted to hastening socialist revolution. During World War I, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin condemned the Second International, a loose coalition of socialist parties, because most of its leaders had voted for war credits and supported the war. He dubbed them traitors to Marxism and the proletariat, and thereafter urged creating a new international, a Third or Communist International, which would lead the world’s workers to socialism.
The founding Congress of the Communist International (Comintern) in 1919 was the first step toward realizing Lenin’s dream. That Congress did little more than announce the birth of the Com-intern-“a unified world Communist Party, specific sections of which were parties active in each coun-try”-and its basic principles. Delegates to the Second Congress in 1920 adopted the Twenty-One Points, which defined membership rules. Certain points deserve note. Each party seeking Comintern affiliation had to remove reformists from its ranks, purge its membership periodically, and adhere to the principles of democratic centralism. Those prinCOMMUNIST INTERNATIONAL
General Staff of the Communist International, July 1917. © UNDERWOOD amp;UNDERWOOD/CORBIS ciples applied within member parties as well as to each party’s relation to the Comintern. All decisions made by Comintern congresses and the Comintern Executive Committee (ECCI) were binding on member parties.
The Comintern’s primary function was to identify and enact the proper strategies and tactics to promote international socialist revolution. During its existence, it enacted several policies to achieve that goal. Until 1921, it advocated the united front policy, the goals of which were to win workers away from Social Democratic and radical parties and to seize power in their respective countries. A belief in inevitable revolution drove this policy. But in 1921 the prospects for revolution ebbed, and the Comintern adopted a more flexible set of united front tactics, which allowed for conditional cooperation with Social Democratic parties, preserving the goal of extending Communist Party influence among workers. At its Sixth Congress in 1928, the Comintern adopted a hard-line policy when it dubbed Social Democrats and reform socialists the main enemy and “social fascists.” Any collaboration with “social fascists” became unthinkable. The Comintern urged workers and unions to reject and destroy Social Democrats. Known as the Third Period, this policy proved disastrous.
The Seventh Congress in 1935 rejected this policy and resolved that fascism was the primary enemy. It required member parties to drop their attacks on reformists and to forge broad antifascist coalitions. This policy, the Popular Front, lifted the Comintern’s fortunes. Its call for a broad- based, antifascist struggle won many supporters worldwide. Popular Front coalition governments came to power in France and Spain in 1936. The Popular Front’s victory in Spain triggered the Spanish Civil War, during which the Comintern organized the International Brigades, a ragtag
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army of international volunteers who flocked there to fight fascism.
Following the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of August 1939, the Comintern abandoned its antifascist policy and announced that communists should not support the imperialist war in Europe. After the Nazi invasion of the USSR on June 22, 1941, Comintern policy changed again, calling for antifascist activities to defend the USSR. In 1943, on Josef Stalin’s orders, the Comintern disbanded.
Although the Comintern was a collective of fraternal communist parties, the Communist Party (CPSU) wielded unrivalled influence. It did so because it was the only communist party to have seized power, it had organized the Comintern, and it prov
ided the Comintern and member parties with political, organizational, and financial assistance. The Twenty-One Points reflected the CPSU’s organizational and operative principles. Party leaders prepared many of the Comintern’s major decisions and often decided which tactics and strategies the Comintern would pursue and whom to remove from and appoint to the leadership bodies of the Comintern and fraternal parties.
By the late 1920s the CPSU’s values and behaviors had infused the Comintern. A variety of factors accounted for this. Within the ECCI apparatus there were CPSU committees. The removal of those who opposed the party or Comintern line hastened the process. In the 1920s the ECCI removed the followers of Leon Trotsky and Grigory Zinoviev, chairman of the Comintern from 1919 to 1926, and later the followers of Nikolai Bukharin, Zinoviev’s successor, for their opposition to party policy.
Nonetheless, the Comintern was an international political institution and therefore possessed some distinctive characteristics. Most members of the ECCI and its apparatus were foreigners; representatives from abroad routinely participated in Comintern activities. The ECCI was responsible for fraternal parties, each of which was assigned to a national or regional section in the ECCI; many members of these parties lived in the USSR.
The Comintern, therefore, existed in two worlds: in the USSR, the socialist world; and in the international arena, the capitalist world. Within the USSR, its roles were to elaborate policies to strengthen the international communist movement, to defend Soviet foreign and domestic policies, and to cooperate with the appropriate party and Soviet offices. In the capitalist world, the Comintern guided and directed Communist parties, helped to build their organizational structures, educated party members in Marxism-Leninism, and demanded that its followers defend the USSR’s policies and leaders.
