Bolshevism, Stalinism and the Comintern: Perspectives on Stalinization, 1917-53.

Edited by Norman LaPorte, Kevin Morgan and Matthew Worley. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).

Reviewed by Dr Martin McCauley.

The book Bolshevism, Stalinism and the Comintern sets itself the task of understanding communism in a comparative context.  Histories of Communist Parties almost always restrict themselves to one country.  Robert Service’s recent book on the history of communism follows this format.  It looks at many parties in turn.

The editors start with the conundrum of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD).  How does one explain the evolution of the party from one which was German-led, with a high degree of internal democracy, to one which became the lap-dog of Moscow?  The doyen of German communist studies is Hermann Weber, who has had direct personal experience of the KPD and the east German SED.  His Wandlung des deutschen Kommunismus (1969) is the seminal work.  He regards the Stalinization of the KPD as beginning in 1924 and ending in the late 1920s.  Weber traces four stages: the domination of the party by the apparatus; the role of internal factionalism; the political and material dependence on the Comintern; and the fact that the KPD played a marginal role in German politics.  The KPD was always haunted by its failures to take power, especially in 1923.  This made the successful Bolshevik Revolution even more attractive.

The KPD was quite unable to dent the totally false Comintern view that the main enemy in Germany in 1933 were the social democrats.  The Communists collaborated with the Nazis in Berlin and elsewhere to bring down the Social Democrats.  The KPD talked big but delivered little.  The party was brushed aside by Hitler with astonishing ease.  It transpired that the communists had no battle plan to take power or even resist the Nazis.  Their leader, Ernst Thälmann, was arrested by the Gestapo in 1933, held in solitary confinement and executed on Hitler’s orders in Buchenwald in 1944.  Many leading cadres escaped to Moscow but there fell victim to Stalin’s NKVD.  Walter Ulbricht, communist ruler of East Germany from 1945 to 1971, survived by informing on his fellow comrades.
As the editors note, comparative communism is in its infancy.  It requires great linguistic skill and the ability to understand various cultures.  An attempt is made to compare French and German communism.  This book ignores China, Vietnam and other Asian parties.

There are chapters about many European parties and even one on Chicago’s foreign language Communists.

Since the book ends in 1953 there is no opportunity to compare the various breeds of communism in Eastern Europe, for example.  From personal experience in the 1980s I would rate the Communist regime in Hungary as the most relaxed (this even led to a non-communist heading a Hungarian party economic delegation to the GDR.  He told me he returned to Budapest after two days because the east Germans did not understand the law of value!), the most cynical was the Polish, the most stable was the Czechoslovak and the most dogmatic was the GDR regime.  Just why was this?  One is tempted to offer a cultural explanation.

The Soviet Union was a special case.  I participated in several government agricultural exchanges.  My host was the USSR Ministry of Agriculture in Moscow and the republican ministries in other parts of the Soviet Union during the 1970s and early 1980s.  I discovered that once in Moscow I became a member of the nomenklatura.  I had my own driver and car and my many requests were granted.  I did not need to go through customs at Moscow airport.  I was treated as an equal by many officials.  If we collaborated we could enjoy ourselves.  It was a nice feeling.  Hence Stalinism had evolved into a privileged lifestyle for the ruling elite.  On one occasion, my ministry official invited me to accompany him around Moscow to see some new sites.  After all I had a driver and car at my disposal!  On stopping at the Yuri Gagarin space memorial, which is in the form of a huge arrow piercing the sky, he asked: ‘Do you know what we Muscovites call this?’  ‘No,’ I said.  ‘We call it the mechta impotenta (“impotent’s dream”).’  On reflexion, I thought that summed up nicely the Stalin experiment: the impotent’s dream.