Documente Academic
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Documente Cultură
Geoff Eley
P. Spriano, Storia del Partito communista italiano, 5 vols., Turin 196775; W. Angress, Stillborn
Revolution: the Communist Bid for Power in Germany, 192123, London 1972; H. Weber, Die Wandlung des
deutschen Kommunismus. Die Stalinisierung der KPD in der Weimarer Republik, 2 vols., Frankfurt 1969; J.
Rothschild, The Communist Party of Bulgaria: Origins and Development, London 1959; H. G. Skilling,
Czechoslovakias Interrupted Revolution, Princeton 1976; L. J. Macfarlane, The British Communist Party:
Its Origin and Development, London 1966; J. R. Starobin, American Communism in Crisis, 19431957,
Cambridge Mass., 1972; W. Leonard, Child of the Revolution, Chicago 1958; E. Fischer, An Opposing
Man. The Autobiography of a Romantic Revolutionary, New York 1974; J. Humbert-Droz, LOeil de
Moscou, Paris 1964, and De Lnine Staline: Dix ans au service de lInternationale Communiste, Paris 1971.
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See P. Anderson, Communist Party History, in R. Samuel, ed., Peoples History and Socialist Theory,
London 1981, pp. 14556. It would be inappropriate to include long lists of references to recent work
in these footnotes. As excellent examples I would cite the work of Stuart MacIntyre and James Hinton
on the CPGB; Eve Rosenhaft and Detlev Peukert on the KPD; George Ross and Irwin Wall on the PCF;
Harald Hamrin, Grant Amyot, and Donald Sassoon on the PCI; Jacques Rupnik on the Czechoslovakian
CP; Janusz Radziejowski on the CP of the West Ukraine; and Maurice Isserman, Mark Naison, and a
variety of others on the CPUSA. A wider range of additional works on various aspects of workingclass history and associated forms of left-wing or progressive politics also bear centrally on Communist
Party history. Finally, there is also a large body of excellent work now on Communist Parties in the
Third World. Quite apart from the extensive literature on the Chinese CP, we should also mention
works on Vietnam (Huynh Kim Khanh, William J. Duiker, John T. McAlister, and especially David
Marr), Cambodia (Ben Kiernan), Indonesia (Ruth McVey, Rex Mortimer), India (John Haithcox,
Tilak Raj Sareen, Sobhanlal Datta Gupta, Bhagwan Josh), the Middle East (Hanna Batatu, Ervand
Abrahamian, Suliman Bashear), and parts of Latin America (e.g. Carmelo Furci on Chile).
3 The characteristic medium of this continuing generational project has been the tape-recorder, through
which the experience of earlier militants has been captured. This has been particularly true of the USA,
and to a lesser extent of Britain. The impressive oral histories collected by the South Wales Miners
Library are perhaps a special case in this regard, which should not be assimilated too easily to the
above remarks.
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cal regions, and has necessarily been outpaced by the rapidity of research
on individual CPs.8 This is partly a matter of sources, so long as
the Comintern archive in Moscow remains firmly closed. But key
documentation has been coming gradually to light, via the residual
holdings of individual party archives (the general practice was to destroy
Comintern materials or ship them back to Moscow), important private
collections (such as those of Humbert-Droz), and the police surveillance
and intelligence operations of capitalist states. More to the point, the
burgeoning scholarship on individual CPs now allows us to circumvent
some of these difficulties. The ideological climate has also changed,
freeing discussion from the Cold War polemics of the 1950s and 1960s,
and so far the turn to the right in Britain and the USA since the late1970s has failed to achieve a significant intellectual closure in the
academy.9
Accordingly, the high quality of current research on the individual CPs
makes the time especially propitious for a critical and imaginative
revisiting of the history of the International, and this makes the appearance of Paolo Sprianos excellent new book all the more welcome.* Its
formal scope is a detailed account of the international dimension of
Communist politics in the 1930s and 1940sfrom the last Congress of
the Third International (1935) to the dissolution of that organization in
1943, from the years of the wartime Resistance to the establishment of
a new organ, the so-called Cominform, which opened a new historical
phase (194748) (p. 1). Broadly speaking, the analysis alternates between
two levels or perspectives: that of the Soviet Union itself, or properly
speaking of Stalin, and that of the Communist Parties on the ground.
It is organized basically as an analytical narrative, mounted via careful
assessments of the state of our knowledge on the different moments of
Communist history in this period, in a sort of dialogue with the
conclusions and hypotheses of the abundant available literature (p. 2).
This is not the least of the books virtues, because, like the translation
of the authors previous book on Gramscis prison years, it provides
some preliminary access to materials in Italian, which are by far the
richest for the study of the international Communist movement in the
period after 1928. The vogue for Eurocommunism and the more lasting
fascination with Gramsci have brought a thin selection of these materials
into English. But Spriano opens a window onto a much larger universe
of discussion, comprising not only an enormous amount of partyoriented scholarship, but also large numbers of memoirs, translations
from Russian and East European languages, the deliberate exposure of
the movements history to a larger public, and the concerted political
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appropriation of the past. This historical culture is not the least of the
Italian Partys impressive achievements.10
The book has some excellent vignettes. Spriano particularly excels at
dissecting the evidence for episodes where the motivation has been not
only controversial, but notoriously opaque. The NaziSoviet Pact of
August 1939, the Soviet lack of preparedness for the invasion of June
1941, and the dissolution of the Comintern in 1943 come especially to
mind. In each case the authors procedure is the same: the circumstantial
evidence for Stalins thinking is carefully weighed, using both the
testimony of other Communist participants (from memoirs, diaries,
and occasional documents from the PCI and related archives) and the
secondary literature based on German, British and US diplomatic sources
(although here Sprianos reading is often surprisingly dated); the resulting anthology of hypotheses (p. 162) is then sifted for the most
plausible explanation, usually very persuasively. Throughout, the discussion of Stalins policies is counterposed to analyses of the reactions
inside the Internationals constituent parties, with a central emphasis on
the Italian and French Parties, supplemented intermittently with evidence drawn from others as the narrative demands, such as the Yugoslav.
At an illustrative level, the net is cast as widely as possible, catching
not only the circumstances and thinking of the smaller European Parties,
but also those elsewhere in the world, notably in Asia and Latin America.
Moreover, having begun this review by describing the upswing of
work on particular CPs, it is worth stressing how ignorant we still are
about certain moments of Communist history (which grow in frequency
as we approach the present), and Spriano provides an excellent framework for research to proceed. Because of its controversial character and
emotional connotations, the NaziSoviet Pact is an especially good
example, and Sprianos treatment of the Communist reactions displays
his caution, sensitivity, and command of the Italian sources to particular
advantage.11
As the title of the book suggests, Sprianos central theme concerns the
relationship of the non-Soviet Communist Parties to the Soviet Union
in the period when the latters meaning and significance for the wider
European Left had become almost wholly condensed into the personal
stature of Stalin and the policies he chose to support. As Spriano says:
The book is therefore a contribution to the analysis of Stalinism and
its characteristics and consequences, and also seeks to provide a vantage
point from which to observe broader tendencies and contradictions of
the Communist movement, both when it was mired in adversity (the
10
At the same time, Sprianos familiarity with the major English-language literature is often disconcertingly patchy, often preferring older and superseded works such as William Shirers The Rise and Fall
of the Third Reich to the latest scholarship. For a useful introduction to the PCIs approach to its history,
see F. Andreucci and M. Sylvers, The Italian Communists Write Their History, Science and Society,
XL (1976), pp. 2856.
11 Roderick Kedward stands very much alone in exploring the nature of the Communist response to
the NaziSoviet Pact, although there are signs of work on the CPGB on the way: Kedward, Behind
the Polemics: French Communists and Resistance, 193941, in S. Hawes and R. White, eds., Resistance
in Europe, 19391945 Harmondsworth 1976, and Resistance in Vichy France, Oxford 1978; J. Hinton,
Killing the Peoples Convention: A Letter from Palme Dutt to Harry Pollitt, Bulletin of the Society for
the Study of Labour History, 39 (1979); J. Attfield and S. Williams, eds., 1939: The Communist Party of
Great Britain and the War, London 1984.
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book opens with a sort of group portrait of the movement in the spring
of 1939) and when it enjoyed extraordinary numerical, political, and
intellectual expansion, as in 194547 (p. 3).
The starting-point is important from this point of view, because the
author spends very little time on either the inception or the heyday of the
Popular Front in the strictest sense, namely, the period of reorientation
between 1934 and 1937, when the sectarianism of the Third Period was
repudiated. Instead, he begins with the Eighteenth Congress of the
CPSU in March 1939, after the Munich Capitulation had spelt the
collapse of the Popular Front as an international strategy, when the
recriminations of Socialists and Communists had again reopened, and
when the fortunes of the European Communist movement had reached
something like their nadir since the foundation of the Third International
in 1919. There is a brief discussion of the efforts at unity in France and
Spain in 193637. But otherwise, the early chapters emphasize failure
and defeat, in the context both of events in Europe and the unleashing
of the great terror in the Soviet Union. Spriano provides a memorable
portrait of the international movement in 1939, in which the only
surviving European mass CP was the French (around 270,000 members),
and illegality was fast becoming the general condition of Communist
existence: the German, Austrian, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Czechoslovakian, Greek, Bulgarian, Romanian, Hungarian, Turkish, and Tunisian Parties were all underground, as were most of the Communist
Parties in the Middle East, Latin America, the Far East, and SouthEast Asia. Once the war broke out, the PCF was also forced underground,
soon to be followed by any surviving legal CP whose country fell to
German invasion.
The tide flowed in the same direction for several years, until the Nazi
invasion of the Soviet Union reharmonized the politics of anti-fascist
resistance on the basis of the broadest possible democratic unity. Spriano
is certainly clear about the importance of the Popular Front as a
major programmatic and practical departure: It was the Popular Front
experience, the persistent search for unity at both rank-and-file and
leadership levels, the education of cadres and masses in the practice of
doing politics in the thick of events and in the harsh light of day, of
dealing with the great issues of national life, that finally created mass
Communist Parties in Western Europe (p. 36). But in the context of
193940, after the series of shocks administered by the defeat of the
Spanish Republic, the disintegration of the French Popular Front, the
dismemberment of Czechoslovakia (and the suppression of the second
largest European CP), and the NaziSoviet Pact, this existed solely as a
series of potentials, nourished by the aspiration to unity of the workingclass rank-and-file and the sound political instincts of the indigenous
Communist leaderships. It was the subsequent experience of the antifascist resistance, when the Second World War permitted a unique
fusion of international and national causes on the Left,12 and European
Communists re-situated their politics on the territory of broadly shared
popular-democratic aspirations and national particularities, that gave
the new perspectives material force. Spriano makes the point by means
12
95
Ibid., p. 143.
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97
Here I am indebted to Ron Suny for discussions of current research under way on the Soviet Union
in the 1930s, from which J. A. Gettys Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered
19331938, Cambridge 1985, is the first major fruit.
16
Leonhard, Child of the Revolution, pp. 195226.
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Leonhard again provides an excellent sustained insight into the Stalinist mentality this involved, in
the context of the Communist political work in the Soviet Occupation Zone of Germany. Ibid., pp.
226ff.
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The thoughts contained in this review owe much to discussions associated with a Symposium on
the Popular Front held at the University of Michigan on 15 November 1985. This meeting was
intended to help initiate a longer-term commitment to serious research on the history of international
Communism, and to this end a second larger conference will be held on the 1940s and 1950s in the
autumn of 1986.
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