Vol. XIII (2007), no 20 - The International Newsletter of Communist ...

The International Newletter of Communist Studies Online XIII (2007), no 20 38
History is often judged and written by the winners and the Comintern case has been
perceived by many as a failure. 76 However, contradicting this view one can argue along
Russian historian Apollon Davidson’s line of reasoning. 77 First, if communism as an ideology
and factor in world politics during the twentieth century is understood as an important
phenomenon, then the Comintern certainly was without doubt one of the “most important
global organizations ever to have existed”. Second, the study of Comintern, its national
sections (the Communist Parties), the organisational structure and its institutional dynamics
(and incapacities), and front organizations represents consequently an essential part in the
history of the “short twentieth century”, choosing historian Eric J. Hobsbawm’s limitation in
time in his Age of Extremes. 78
The LAI was entirely in the hands of the communists from its initiation in February 1927
until the Reichstag Fire in Berlin on the 27 February 1933, and with the Nazis finally seizing
ultimate power in the German Weimar Republic, the anti-imperialist network was to be
shredded to pieces. The organisational base of the LAI was during this whole period located in
Berlin at the International Secretariat.
Examination of empirical material related to LAI, and filed in the Russian State Archive for
Social and Political History (more known as RGASPI, and in which the Comintern archive is
deposited) in Moscow has uncovered a multilayered organization, in which analysis has been
able to distinguish the turmoil that actually existed in a front organization like the LAI. In this
scenario there are individual ambitions by certain actors (both institutional and individual),
whose history to a large degree has been hidden away due to the secret character of the
Comintern apparatus, now able to step out into the light, but also, to analyze the major idea
on why the Comintern endorsed so much energy in constructing and keeping a organization as
the LAI alive.
One of the major purposes of this thesis dissertation is to unveil the organisational
(functional, instrumental, institutional) dimension, and the individual ambitions of humans
that were active under the characteristics as “international communists”. 79 With this
ambition, so far during the interpretative process, organisational and individual networks
previously unknown to the scholarly world started to appear in the relation between LAI’s
International Secretariat in Berlin and Comintern headquarters in Moscow. Empirical evidence
confirms assumptions, that the LAI in fact was considered to be an important actor in
facilitating partly the foreign policy interests of the Russian Bolsheviks, and, partly acting as a
connective force for the anti-imperialist movement in Europe and other parts of the world.
Sources also specify that authorities at Comintern headquarters in Moscow experienced the
LAI as a difficult project to keep under total control, in comparison with the national
76
Jane Degras: The Communist International 1919-1943. Dokuments. I, London 1965, p. IX.
77
Apollon Davidson: South Africa and the Communist International. A Documentary History. 2 vols.,
London 2003.
78 Eric J. Hobsbawm: Age of Extremes. The Short Twentieth Century. 1914-1991, London 1995.
79 The term ”international communists” refer to the idea that these persons perceived the whole world
as their working field, all active in the name of communism.