Legacy of the Comintern

Abstract

From the perspective of the mid-1990s the legacy of the ‘Soviet experiment’ seems self-evident: failure. The communist party-state structures in the USSR and Eastern Europe have collapsed in disgrace, the Marxist-Leninist project has imploded and at least one influential observer has declared that the near universal triumph of liberal democracy and the free market signifies the ‘End of History’.¹ For some scholars the whole communist enterprise was fundamentally ‘wrong’ from its very inception in October 1917, ‘a world-historical fraud’.² Such views are no longer restricted to unsympathetic Western specialists. The tendency to dismiss the last seventy-five years of the Russian past is, understandably, strong among many academics and the general public in the former Soviet Union. The logical corollary is that the legacy of the Communist International, like that of the USSR, is one of failure from beginning to end, an historic mistake of major proportions. To what extent is this an accurate assessment of the Comintern’s troubled existence? Is there really nothing positive in the balance sheet of Lenin’s ‘world party of the revolution’? Indeed, is it possible to evaluate the Comintern dispassionately?