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Stalin had once again won the battle of wits. For he understood, as the intellectual Bukharin did not, that political effects did not depend on simple logic, just as, in the 1920s, his opponents had “won” the arguments at Congresses in the debating-point sense, without affecting his practical victory.

All the accused except Yagoda were rehabilitated in 1988.

13

THE FOREIGN ELEMENT

The N.K.V.D. organs … could extend the category of “enemy of the people” to everyone who dared to utter a word of criticism.

Wladislaw Gomulka

IN THE COMINTERN

The Purge also operated abroad and against foreigners in the USSR. The most obviously purgeable of the latter were the foreign Communists in the apparatus of the Comintern. It was more particularly the Communist Parties which were illegal in their own countries that bore the brunt. First of all, their leaderships were mainly ready to hand in Moscow. Then again, there was no democratic opinion back in Germany or Yugoslavia or Italy which could raise objections. There were almost no victims, even in Moscow, among British or American Communists, who were thus not called upon to run the risks, either at home or in Russia, which the rest of the Comintern Parties had to face. Their protection derived from the nature of the regimes they were working to overthrow.

Lenin, in creating the Comintern, skimmed off a lively section of the European revolutionary Left, which might have otherwise fertilized a broad and unified movement and barred the way to Fascism. It became instead a set of parties founded strictly on the Bolshevik model, and constitutionally subordinated to the Comintern—which always remained under effective Soviet control. After a while, these parties’ leaderships were selected and their tactics dictated by Moscow—almost invariably with disastrous results.

The last flicker of independence in the Comintern took place in May 1927. In the presence of Stalin, Rykov, Bukharin, and Manuilsky, the Executive Committee of the Comintern was asked by Thalmann to condemn a document of Trotsky’s on the Chinese question. All present were prepared to do so, when the Italian delegates—Togliatti and Silone—said that they had not seen the document. It turned out that no one else had either. The Italians objected that though Trotsky was doubtless wrong, they could hardly be expected to subscribe to a formal condemnation of something they had not seen. It was explained to them that the Soviet Politburo thought it inexpedient to circulate it. The session was adjourned so that the old Bulgarian Communist Kolarov could go over the question with the recalcitrant Italians in private. He told them quite frankly that it was not a question of getting at the truth, but of the struggle for power. The Comintern must go along with the Soviet Politburo majority, and that was all there was to it. The Italians still persisted in their attitude, and Stalin typically withdrew the motion.¹ This appeal to independent judgment was, however, the last.

Silone left the Party. Togliatti must have decided that his choice was of submitting to Stalin and hoping to exert some influence, or going under; he chose the former course, and persisted in it, as an accomplice in many a far grosser breach of confidence, in later years.

Henceforward, the Comintern—after the removal, at that time peaceable, of various supporters of Trotsky and Bukharin—became merely another element in Stalin’s political machine. As early as 1930, a member of the Yugoslav Politburo observed that apart from men of “limited intelligence” like Pyatnitsky and Remmele, the Comintern leaders appeared to him to be “men at one time remarkable, but now demoralized or exhausted.”²