Child of the Revolution by Wolfgang Leonhard

Author:Wolfgang Leonhard
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The Last Days of the Comintern School

The dissolution of the Comintern was variously received at our school. It goes without saying that there was no one who voiced any dissentient opinion against the dissolution of the Comintern, even indirectly. On the other hand, it was unmistakable that the reactions of the older and younger students on the course to this event were very different, not only during the first few days after the dissolution, but also during Mikhailov's lecture. The older comrades who had been Party members or officials for many years, or even decades, sat listening with grave faces; even a few hours earlier the Communist International had still been the summit of everything in their fives. Perhaps at this moment they remembered the words of Dimitrov at the Reichstag Fire trial, that “the programme of the Communist International was the highest of all laws and the Control Commission of the Communist International was the highest of all courts.” Perhaps, too, they remembered Stalin's oath over Lenin's grave: “We swear to you, Comrade Lenin, that we will not spare our lives in our efforts to strengthen and extend the league of workers of the whole world, the Communist International.” And now from one day to the next there was to be no more Communist International!

For us younger ones, however, the blow was not so hard; and we represented more than half the number of those taking part in the course. We had grown up at a time when the Communist International had long ceased to have the prestige and significance and influence that it had had in the 1920's. Its dissolution seemed to us to be a logical continuation of what we had learned at the Comintern School; indeed, there were some younger ones among us—and I was one of them—who looked upon the dissolution of the Comintern as in a sense a positive advance. It was with some sympathy and even enthusiasm that I read again and again the passage in the decree of dissolution which set out the argument that the Party in each individual country must now tread its own path:

“The profound difference in the paths of historical development in every country in the world, the diverse character and even contradictions in their social organisations, the difference in the level and degree of their social and political evolution, and finally the difference in degree of consciousness and organisation of their workers, require that the solution of the problems which the working class has to face in each individual country should also be different.”

We younger ones were satisfied to read that the victory over Fascism could “best and most fruitfully be achieved by the vanguard of the workers' movement of every country in the framework of their own state,” and that the Party in each individual country—as it had already been put at the Seventh World Congress—”must in making its decisions on every question, start from the concrete situation and the specific conditions which prevail in that particular country.

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