Brigitte Studer, The Transnational World of the Cominternians, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. ix, 227 p.
The 'Cominternians' who staffed the Communist International in Moscow from its establishment in 1919 to its dissolution in 1943 led transnational lives and formed a cosmopolitan but closed and privileged world. Full of sympathy, eager to learn, hopeful of emulating Bolshevik success 'at home', they were first-hand witnesses to the difficulties of the young Russian Revolution, before seeing it descend into the terror to which many of them fell victim. This book tells of their experience through these decades , of the encounter between utopian imagination and the real, and how the Party as institution sought to bend subjectivity to its needs, even as they became ever more questionable. Opened some 25 years ago, the Comintern archives provide a surprising wealth of autobiographical materials generated by these militants, and it is on these that this account of political commitment and its vicissitudes is based.
CHAPTER ABSTRACTS
Introduction
Studer asks what made Communism attractive, not just to party members but to Western workers and intellectuals more generally, despite later show trials and Stalinist terror. She identifies the Soviet Union’s role as a ‘heterotopia’, an elsewhere where utopia seemed to be in the making or even to have been realised. Arguing then to the importance of the subjective and emotional dimension of the behaviour of historical actors, she goes on to examine the beliefs, hopes and expectations of the professional revolutionaries who went to work full-time for the Communist International in Moscow, forming a transnational culture and community that would later disintegrate as the Comintern came under particular suspicion during the Great Terror, to which it lost half of its then staff.
Chapter 1 – The Bolshevik Model
Drawing on the 25 years of scholarship since the opening of the Russian archives, Studer introduces the Communist International, a ‘world party with national sections’, and explores the power relationships that led to the Soviet party’s domination of this transnational but hierarchical organisation. She shows that party discipline was not a simple response to political and practical needs but a culture generated by organizational practices and techniques of subject-formation: centralization and Bolshevization, the ‘rules of conspiracy’ and intra-party surveillance (‘cadre policy’), the appeal to subjectivity and the demand for ‘work on the self’. In the end, control turned to represssion as in the 1930s the ever-expanding powers of the Comintern’s Cadre Department merged with those of the NKVD.
Chapter 2 – The New Woman
Drawing on a broad range of sources and scholarship, the chapter examines changes in the gender policies of the Communist International and its national sections, from the Revolution to the 1930s. In the Soviet Union, women were expected to be both workers and wives, well before the ‘double burden’ became the norm in the West. Yet although women and men were officially defined as equal members of the party, gender determined their career prospects in the Comintern and the type of responsibilities they were given. While women at first enjoyed real but limited opportunities for taking on political roles, the advent of Stalinism made ‘femininity’ once again socially desirable and the Comintern abandoned its politics of women’s emancipation.
Chapter 3 – In Stalin’s Moscow
This chapter looks at the ‘political emigrants’ who lived in Stalin’s Moscow in the 1920s and more especially the 1930s (the term designating foreign activists as opposed to ‘imported’ technicians). Studer shows how the encounter with Soviet everyday life proved a disappointment to Western communists, though they inhabited a cosmopolitan and relatively privileged world closed off to most Russians. Autobiographies, memoirs and correspondence reveal how they sought nonetheless to cling on to their high expectations and sometimes clichéd images of the Soviet Union. This ambivalence involved the development of mental strategies that enabled the preservation or non-destructive adjustment of their existing world-view in the face of the facts, sometimes maintaining faith in the Party through the worst of times.
Chapter 4 – Soviet Party Practices
This chapter considers the specifically Soviet party practices that Western Communists encountered for the first time in Soviet Union. Studer discusses the different ways in which party members were required to testify to their political loyalty in the context of ‘cadre selection and control’. She also examines the significance of transfer from home party to Soviet party and the procedures by which this was effected – a process that would become compulsory with the growing suspicion of foreigners in the 1930s. The Soviet Communist Party demanded an intimate knowledge of its members as it mobilized subjectivity in order to forge allegiance. Accumulated in personal files, this would be devastating in its effects during the Great Terror.
Chapter 5 – Becoming a ‘Real Bolshevik’
This chapter looks at the pedagogical practices adopted by the Comintern’s international schools in Moscow in ‘adjusting’ communists from abroad to the (Soviet) party’s requirements, together with the micro-strategies of negotiation the students deployed in their efforts to conform to – and occasionally to elude – the dominant rules and norms. It shows how – by learning how to write a party autobiography, to present a ‘self-report’, and to speak out in sessions of criticism and self-criticism – the dedicated student was brought to appropriate Stalinist values. But working on the self to become the ‘real Bolshevik’ he or she generally aspired to be could prove a difficult task, even at the heart of Soviet power.
Chapter 6 – The Party and the Private
This chapter concentrates on the significance accorded to ‘private matters’ at party meetings. For communists, the Party’s interest had always to come first. But with ever-increasing calls for ‘vigilance’ and the advent of mass purges in the mid-Thirties, there came a growing suspicion that members might not really be loyal to the party, that they might be ‘wearing a mask’. To deal with this, party meetings became increasingly concerned with the examination of members’ private life, sexual practices, personal feelings about the Soviet Union, leisure activities, and especially their personal relationships and contacts. But speaking about oneself inevitably led to speaking too about family, friends and neighbours, entangling more and more people in expanding networks of accusation.
Chapter 7 – From Comrades to Spies
This closing chapter shifts from a micro-perspective on Party life to examine changes in the Soviet Union’s policy regarding political emigrants and other resident foreigners, and how these affected the Comintern and other Moscow-based international organisations. The professional revolutionaries who formed the transnational world of the Comintern now became a ‘nest of spies’ in the eyes of the Soviet Communist Party, and Studer documents how they and the organisation experienced the official hunt for ‘hostile elements’, from the mid-1930s to the end of the Great Terror.
Epilogue
The book closes on the dissolution of the Comintern in 1943, which marks the definitive end of the transnational cultural milieu formed by the professional revolutionaries who had converged on Moscow in the 1920s and ’30s, the culmination of a process of disentanglement from the Western cultural and political influence represented by these foreigners in the USSR, a process initiated by Stalin in the second half of the 1930s. The hopes and beliefs of the Comintern generation were disappointed, but Studer argues that their creation of a distinctive transnational cultural and political space represents a unique historical experience, the internationalism of later communists being of a different nature and never again reaching the same depth and intensity.
For a sample chapter see:
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