Foreign Relations of the United States, The Soviet Union, 1933–1939

861.00 Congress, Communist International, VII/35: Telegram

The Ambassador in the Soviet Union (Bullitt) to the Secretary of State

Moscow, August 2, 1935—7 p.m.
[Received August 2—4:15 p.m.]

326. Pravda, August 2, 1935, publishes the following:

“Resolutions of the Seventh All World Congress of the Communist International accepted on August 1, 1935, on the report of Comrade William Pieck concerning the work of the Executive Committee of the Communist International.

1. The Seventh All World Congress of the Communist International approves the political line and the practical work of the Executive Committee of the Communist International.

2. The Seventh All World Congress of the Communist International approves the appeal of the Executive Committee of the Communist International of March, 1933; October, 1934; and April, 1935, to the national sections and leadership of the Second International with an offer of united action in the struggle against Fascism and the attack of capital and war. Expressing its regret that all these offers were declined by the Executive Committee of the Second International and by the majority of its sections to the harm of the interests of the working class, and noting the historical significance of the fact that the Social Democratic workers and a series of Social Democratic organizations are already fighting hand to hand with the Communists against Fascism and for the interests of the toiling masses, the Seventh All World Congress of the Communist International obliges the Executive Committee of the Communist International and all parties which enter the Communist International to strive in the future by all possible means to bring about a united front both on a national as well as an international scale.

3. The Seventh All World Congress of the Communist International recognizes the growing revolutionary influence of the work and slogans of the Communist Parties on the wide working masses including members of the Social Democratic Party. Proceeding from this premise the Congress obliges all sections of the Communist International in the shortest possible time to overcome the survivals of sectarian traditions, preventing access to Social Democratic workers and to change the methods of agitation and propaganda which up to the present have often borne an abstract and inaccessible character for the masses, giving them a doubly concrete direction tied with the immediate needs and daily interests of the masses.

4. The Seventh All World Congress of the Communist International notices the serious shortcoming in the work of a number of sections of the Communist International: the delay in conducting the tactics of the united front; the inability to mobilize the masses around the partial demands of both a political and economic character; the failure to understand the necessity for the struggle to protect the remnants of bourgeois democracy; the failure to understand the necessity for the creation of an anti-imperialist people’s front in colonial and dependent countries; the indifference to the work in reformist and Fascist labor unions and mass organizations of toilers created by the bourgeois parties; the failure to evaluate the work among toiling women; the failure to evaluate the significance of work among the peasantry and the petit bourgeois masses of the city, as well as the delay in rendering political assistance to these sections on the part of the Executive Committee. Taking into account the ever growing role and responsibility of the Communist Parties palled to head the movement of the masses who are being revolutionized, taking into account the necessity for concentrating the active leadership in the sections themselves, the Seventh All World Congress of the Communist International offers to the Executive Committee of the Communist International: (1) to transfer the center of gravity of its activity to the working out of the fundamental political and tactical aims of the world workers movement, in deciding all questions to proceed from the concrete conditions and peculiarities of each country and to avoid as a rule direct interference of [in?] the intra-organizational affairs of the Communist Parties; (2) systematically to assist in the creation and education of cadres and real Bolshevist leaders in the Communist Parties in order that the Parties, on the basis of the decisions of the Congresses of the Communist International and the plenums of the Executive Committee of the Communist International in times of a sharp turn of events, could quickly and independently find a correct solution of political and tactical problems of the Communist movement; (3) to render active assistance to Communist Parties in their ideological struggle with political opponents; (4) to assist in the utilization by the Communist Parties both of their own experience as well as the experience of the world Communist movement, avoiding, however, the mechanical transfer of the experience of one country to another and avoiding the substitution of concrete Marxist analysis by conventionality and general formulas; (5) to insure a closer tie with the directing organs of the Communist International with the sections of the Communist International by means of a more active participation in the daily work of the Executive Committee of the Communist International of authoritative representatives of the more important sections of the Communist International.

5. The Seventh All World Congress of the Communist International points out the failure both on the part of the Communist Unions of Youth as well as the Communist Parties to evaluate the importance of mass work among youth and the weakness of this work in a number of countries, and proposes to the Executive Committees of the Communist International and the Communist International of Youth to take active measures for overcoming sectarian reticence in a number of Comsomol⁵⁰ organizations, obliging Comsomol members to enter all mass organizations of toiling youth (labor union, cultural and sport) created by bourgeois, democratic, reformist and Fascist parties as well as religious societies, and to carry on a systematic struggle in these organizations to exert an influence on the wide masses of youth, mobilizing youth for the struggle against militarization, forced labor camps, for the amelioration of its material position, for the rights of the young toiling generation, to acquire by these means the establishment of a wide united front of all non-Fascist mass organizations of youth.

6. The Seventh All World Congress of the Communist International observes that during recent years under the influence of the victory of Socialism in the U. S. S. R., of the crisis in capitalist countries of the fury of German Fascism and the danger of a new war, that there has commenced throughout the whole world a turning of the wide working and in general toiling masses from reformism toward revolutionary struggle, from a lack of unity and dispersion to a united front. The Seventh All World Congress of the Communist International considering that the tendency of the toilers toward united action will increase in the future, in spite of the opposition of separate leaders of social Democracy—proposes to all sections of the Communist International, in the process of the struggle for the united front of the proletariat and the peoples front of all toilers against the onslaught of capital, against Fascism and the danger of a new war, to concentrate its attention on the further strengthening of its ranks and the winning over of the majority of the working class to the side of Communism.

7. The Seventh All World Congress of the Communist International points out that only on the strength and influence of the Communist Parties in the wide masses of the proletariat, on the energy and self-denial of Communists depends the transformation of the gathering political crisis into a victorious proletarian revolution. Now when in a series of capitalist countries the political crisis is ripening, the most important and decisive task of the Communists consists in not resting on the successes which have been achieved but to go forward to new successes, to increase the ties with the working class, to win over the confidence of the millions of toilers, to turn the sections of the Communist International into mass parties, to embrace through the influence of the Communist Parties the majority of the working class and to insure in this manner the conditions which are necessary for the victory of the proletarian revolution.”

Bullitt

50. Communist Union of Youth (Kommunistichesky Soyuz Molodezi).