800.00b Communist International/10–1147: Airgram
The Chargé in the Soviet Union (Durbrow) to the Secretary of State
A–1023. The declaration of the recent Communist Information Conference laid upon member Communist parties the special task of “taking into their hands the banner of the defence of the national independence and sovereignty of their own countries.” That this task is to be carried out as a corollary to support of the Soviet Union has been well exemplified by the recent statements of prominent Communists of the countries participating in the “Cominform”.
In the week preceding the Conference in Poland, meetings between the Aktiv of the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions and trade union delegations of France and Italy brought reaffirmation of the old Comintern line that “support of the Soviet Union is one of the chief tasks of all Communists” (Stalin-Pravda 1925). Fachon [Frachon], then speaking for the French General Confederation of Labor, “promised to defend with all our strength the Soviet Union, a country which wants peace, is fighting for peace and is defending the cause of peace throughout the world”. Saillant was “more than ever convinced that it is more and more necessary to understand, love and defend the Soviet Union”. And Bitossi [Bitosi], representing the General Confederation of Labor of Italy, pledged the “forces of Italian democracy … to render determined opposition to the provocateurs of a new war, who are conducting an unbridled campaign against the Soviet Union”.
The three statements correlate closely with Georgi Dimitrov’s 1937 exhortation to party workers throughout the world—”You cannot carry on a struggle for Socialism in your own country if you do not oppose the enemies of the Soviet state where this Socialism is being fulfilled by the heroic efforts of the working people.”
Pravda’s assertion that the Information Bureau is not a revived “single world-wide Communist organization, with a centralized leadership such as the Communist International once was” is undeniable. The original International, “guided in its struggle by the principles of revolutionary Marxism”, underwent a transformation during the purges of the thirties. The successor organization, often called the Stalintern, served rather as an instrument of Soviet policy than of revolutionary Marxism. As far as can be ascertained, its formal dissolution in 19431 had little if any effect on its operations which by that time were in great part underground.
[Page 600]The statements quoted above indicate an obvious parallel between the views of leading party members of those countries participating in the Information Bureau and the well-established line of the Stalintern—to them, “defence of the Soviet Union” is emphasized at least equally with “defence of their own countries against imperialist enslavement”.
- The process of dissolution of the Communist (Third) International from the resolution adopted by the presidium of the Executive Committee of the Communist International on May 15, 1943 (published on May 22) recommending this action, to the communiqué of June 10 of the presidium considering this organization abolished is described in Foreign Relations, 1943, vol. iii, pp. 532–543 passim.↩