Stalin in Power: The Russian Revolution From Above, 1928–1941 by Robert C. Tucker

Author:Robert C. Tucker [Tucker, Robert C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: 20th Century, Biography & Autobiography, Communism & Socialism, Foreign Affairs, History, Presidents & Heads of State, Russia & the Former Soviet Union
Amazon: B07X4B4HW4
Publisher: Endeavour Media
Published: 2017-12-19T03:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen – Stalin and Fascism

Popular Front Politics

If the victory of fascism in Germany had a place in Stalin’s policy design, further spread of fascist power did not. A tidal wave of fascism could not only preclude the very division of Europe into opposing armed camps on which he was counting, but could also expose Soviet Russia to a deadly danger of attack by a fascist phalanx of states. He had therefore to do everything possible to keep remaining European democracies and above all France—the keystone of any anti-German grouping—from going fascist, and to encourage them to take a stand against German aggression. So, he abandoned the extremist left tactics that eased Hitler’s path to power and through Comintern authorized for other Communist parties what he had denied their German comrades: united fronts with other working-class parties to preserve democratic institutions and bar the road to fascism.

In effecting the Comintern’s shift of position, Stalin found a useful instrument in the Bulgarian Communist Georgi Dimitrov. When the Reichstag was set afire in 1933, Dimitrov was in Berlin. Arrested by the Nazis and put on trial in Leipzig as one of the alleged culprits, Dimitrov courageously defied the Nazi court’s charges and gained international fame. Released from a German prison after the Soviet government conferred its citizenship upon him, he arrived in Moscow in late February 1934 convinced of the need for a new policy for international Communism. In mid-March he requested an interview with Stalin, who received him in the presence of his Comintern representative, Manuilsky, engaged him in lengthy discussion, and allowed him to carry the day. On the way out Manuilsky confided: “Your meeting with Stalin will have historic importance later on.” Dimitrov was brought into the Political Commission of the Comintern Executive Committee where he plunged into the work of developing the new tactics and lining up foreign Communists’ support in preparation for the Comintern’s coming Seventh Congress.

Since France was the core country of nonfascist Europe, and its Communist party the main one now after the crushing of German Communists, it was the logical proving ground for the new policy, all the more so as the demonstration by antidemocratic extremists in Paris on 6 February 1934 awakened many Frenchmen to the fascist danger at home. In May 1934 the united-front line was launched in Pravda with an endorsement by the French Communist leader Maurice Thorez, an editorial appeal for a united front, and an antifascist manifesto on “proletarian humanism” by Gorky. At their national conference in Ivry the following month, the French Communists adopted the policy of antifascist unity of the Left. In July they signed a unity pact with the French Socialists (no longer “social-fascist”), the first of numerous such agreements concluded by Communist parties in other European countries within the next few years.

Before the French cantonal elections in October 1934, Thorez took the significant further step of calling for a broader antifascist “Popular Front” coalition of the two left-wing parties and the nonsocialist Radical Socialists, who drew their support from the peasants and middle strata.

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