Index: Lenin’s Comintern revisited

Analysis of the Communist International 1919-24

The texts listed below, under subject headings, are being considered for inclusion in a forthcoming collection of writings, whose working title, is “Lenin”s Comintern Revisited: Studies in Global Revolutionary Politics,” by John Riddell. Other materials for this book will be posted as they become available.

I will be glad to receive your suggestions, objections, and criticisms, either directly via email or Facebook or as comments to this website. — JR

Comintern as a Whole

• ‘Toward the United Front’: Translations for the Twenty-First Century
• The Legacy of the Second International
• 1907: The Birth of Socialism’s Great Divide
• 100 years ago: How the Comintern was founded
  • Heroic wager: The decision to found the International
• The Comintern’s Second Congress: A Centennial Introduction
• The Comintern’s Great Turn of 1920-21
  • Part 1: From the Second World Congress to the “March Action”
  • Part 2: The Third World Congress and Its Outcome — How front-line parties took the lead in Lenin’s Comintern 
• The Comintern in 1922: The periphery pushes back
• Weighing the legacy of Lenin’s Comintern – reply to Paul Kellogg
• Translators and Global Workers’ Unity
• Introduction to ‘The Communist Movement at a Crossroads
  • Part 1: First and Second Enlarged Plenums (1921-22)
  • Part 2: Third Enlarged Plenum (1923)
  • Part 3: A Sharp Break; An Ongoing Legacy (1923-24)

Colonial and National Freedom

• How socialists of Lenin’s time responded to colonialism
• Nationality’s role in social liberation: the Soviet legacy
• The Russian Revolution and National Freedom
• The Russian Revolution and the Global South
• The Comintern and Asia (1919-1925):
  • Part 1: Toward a global strategic framework: The Comintern and Asia (1919-1925)
  • Part 2: Should Communists ally with revolutionary nationalism?
  • Part 3: Fruits and perils of the ‘bloc within’
• The Baku Congress of 1920
• The Congress of Toilers of the Far East (1922)
• The League Against Imperialism (1927-37): An early attempt at global anti-colonial unity
• Black Liberation and the Communist International
• Indigenous Socialism and the Latin Americanization of Socialism

Democratic Centralism

• Lenin the unifier: The Comintern compromise of 1921
• Party democracy in Lenin’s time – and ours
• Did the Russian NEP trigger the German March Action? — An exchange
• Party Organization in Lenin’s Comintern (two parts)

Women and the Comintern

• The Communist Women’s Movement (1921-26)
• Clara Zetkin in the lion’s den
• Clara Zetkin’s struggle for the united front

Germany

• Gregory Zinoviev at his best
• Lenin the unifier: The Comintern compromise of 1921
• Why did Paul Levi lose out in the German Communist leadership?
• Triumph, disarray, defeat – German workers 1918-1933

The Soviet Republic

• Reassessing Leon Trotsky’s biography of Stalin
• The Russian Revolution and national freedom
• Did Trotsky retreat from viewing USSR as a workers’ state?
• Dissecting the failure of Soviet ‘socialism’
• Nationality’s role in social liberation: The Soviet legacy

Workers’ and Farmers’ Government

• A ‘workers’ government’ as a step toward socialism
• The Comintern’s unknown decision on workers’ governments
• The Comintern’s workers’ government: Study guide

United Front, Strategy

• Clara Zetkin’s Struggle for the United Front
• Fumble and Late Recovery: Comintern and Italian Fascism
• The origins of united front policy
• On the Meaning of ‘Popular Front’
• The Shape of Socialist Strategy
  • The Comintern as a school of socialist strategy
• Daniel Bensaid and the shape of socialist strategy
• Review: The Communist Movement at a Crossroads (“The United Front: Adoption and Application” — two parts)
• How Socialists Resist Rightist Coups (three parts)