Abstract
In 1928 Comintern theoreticians had detected unmistakable signs of a new revolutionary upsurge, impending imperialist wars and the danger of foreign intervention against the USSR. Capitalism was approaching its final crisis and the historic victory of socialism was at hand. The reality could not have been more devastating or unexpected: the Nazi rise to power, the brutal destruction of the mighty German labour movement and the resultant imbroglio of communist theory and practice. It is no wonder, then, that the ‘Third Period’ of Comintern history has been the subject of intense debate. Admittedly, there is a near universal consensus that the ‘ultra-leftist’ tactics of these years proved disastrous, in some cases suicidal. Nowhere was revolutionary rhetoric translated into action; the membership of most communist parties plummeted and only very slowly recovered; communist influence in national working-class organisations declined with the imposition of a sectarian ‘united front from below’ policy; and inner-party democracy and open debate, already stifled by the attack on the Trotskyite-Zinovievite United Opposition, were all but emasculated as Stalinist ‘bureaucratic centralism’ took hold.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
S. Bahne et al. (eds), Archives de Jules Humbert-Droz III: Les partis communistes et l’Internationale communiste dans les années 1928–1932 (Dordrecht, 1988) p. 165.
F. de Felice, Fascismo, Democrazia, Fronte Popolare (Ban, 1973) p. 210.
T. Draper, American Communism and Soviet Russia. The Formative Period (New York, 1986) pp. 409, 414, 419, 422.
See for example, G. Gill, Stalinism (Basingstoke, 1990).
S. Fitzpatrick, The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia (Ithaca, 1992) pp. 113–14.
M. Hâjek, Jednotnâ fronta. K politické orientaci Komunistické internacionâly v letech 1921–1935 (Prague, 1969) p. 162.
V. V. Sokolov, ‘Neizvestnyi G. V. Chicherin. Iz rassekrechennykh arkhivov MID RF’, Novaia i noveishaia istoriia, no. 2 (1994) pp. 13–14.
B. Kun (ed.), Kommunisticheskii internatsional v dokumentakh (Moscow, 1933) p. 920.
E. Rosenhaft, Beating the Fascists? The German Communists and Political Violence 1929–1933 (Cambridge, 1983) pp. 76–9.
I. N. Undasynov, ‘Ot taktiki edinogo rabochego fronta k taktike “klass protiv klassa” ’, Rabochii klass i sovremennyi mir, no. 2 (1989) p. 176.
K. Gottwald, Spisy, vol. 1 (Prague, 1951) p. 322.
For details, see P. Preston, The Coming of the Spanish Civil War (London, 1983).
A. Howkins, ‘Class against Class: The Political Culture of the Communist Party of Great Britain, 1930–35’, in F. Gloversmith (ed.), Class, Culture and Social Change: A New View of the 1930s (Brighton, 1980) pp. 245, 254.
S. Macintyre, Little Moscows: Communism and Working-class Militancy in Inter-war Britain (London, 1980).
F. M. Ottanelli, The Communist Party of the United States: From the Depression to World War II (New Brunswick, 1991) pp. 4–5.
For the ‘Guttmann Affair’, see J. Rupnik, Histoire du Parti communiste tchécoslovaque: des origines à la prise du pouvoir (Paris, 1981) pp. 95–104.
D. Beetham, Marxists in Face of Fascism (Manchester, 1983) p. 2.
R. C. Tucker, Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above,1928–1941 (New York and London, 1992) pp. 225–32;
also R. C. Tucker, ‘The Emergence of Stalin’s Foreign Policy’, Slavic Review, vol. 36 (1977) pp. 563–89.
T. J. Uldricks, ‘Stalin and Nazi Germany’, Slavic Review, vol. 36 (1977) pp. 599–603.
Copyright information
© 1996 Kevin McDermott and Jeremy Agnew
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
McDermott, K., Agnew, J. (1996). Stalin and the Third Period, 1928–33. In: The Comintern. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25024-0_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25024-0_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave, London
Print ISBN: 978-0-333-55284-1
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-25024-0
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)