Lenin was certain that the Bolsheviks, despite their enthusiasm in the first flush of victory, could not build a Communist society in Russia unless the working classes of advanced countries came to their aid. He saw his bold experiment doomed to failure unless backward agricultural Russia was joined by at least one of the great industrial states. He put his biggest hopes in a speedy revolution in Germany.
The last twenty years indicate that Lenin underestimated the significance of existing labor organizations, trade-union as well as political, and over-estimated the adaptability to Western Europe of Russian Bolshevism, with its battle cry of the immediate overthrow of all governments, democratic as well as autocratic, and the establishment of an International Communist Dictatorship.
For two decades the Communist International—the Comintern—founded, inspired and directed by the Russian Bolsheviks, sought to implant their methods and their program beyond the boundaries of the Soviet Union. It established its Communist parties everywhere, patterned them closely after the highly centralized and disciplined Bolshevik model and made them responsible and obedient to the general staff in Moscow.
It sent its agents to every corner of the earth. It planned mass insurrections and military uprisings in Europe, in the Far East, and in the Western Hemisphere. And finally, when all these efforts failed, it embarked in 1935, upon its last course of political action, the Popular Front. In this final period, with the new weapons of camouflage and compromise, it made its greatest drive, penetrating into the organs of public opinion and even the governmental institutions of the leading democratic nations.
I was in a position from the very beginning until 1937 to observe closely the workings of the Comintern. I took a direct political and military part in its revolutionary actions abroad for eighteen years. I was one of the executive arms of Stalin’s intervention in Spain, during which the Comintern sent its forces into battle for the last time.
My work with the Comintern began in 1920 during the Russo-Polish war. I was then attached to the Soviet Military Intelligence for the Western Front which had its headquarters in Smolensk. As the Red Armies of Tukhachevsky moved toward Warsaw it was the function of our department to operate secretly behind the Polish lines, to create diversions, to sabotage the shipment of munitions, to shatter the morale of the Polish army by propaganda, and to furnish the general staff of the Red Army with military and political information.
As there was no clear line separating our work from that of the Comintern agents in Poland, we cooperated in every possible way with the recently formed Polish Communist Party, and we published a revolutionary newspaper Svit (Dawn) which we distributed among the soldiers of the Polish army.
On the day that Tukhachevsky stood before the gates of Warsaw, Dombal, a peasant deputy, declared in the Polish parliament: “I do not see in the Red Army an enemy. On the contrary, I greet the Red Army as the friend of the Polish people.”
To us this was an event of great importance. We printed Dombal’s speech in Svit, and distributed hundreds of thousands of copies throughout Poland, especially among the Polish soldiers.
Dombal was immediately arrested and confined in the Warsaw Citadel, the dreaded Polish political prison. After three years the Soviet government finally obtained his release by exchanging him for a number of Polish aristocrats and priests held as hostages. He then came to Moscow where he was acclaimed as one of the heroes of the Comintern. Lavish honors were heaped upon him and he was raised to a high position. For more than a decade, Dombal was one of the most important non-Russian officials of the Communist International.
In 1936 he was arrested on a charge of having been a Polish spy for seventeen years—ever since his speech in the Polish parliament. The Ogpu decided that Dombal’s greeting to the Red Army, as well as his three-year prison term, had been part of a prearranged plot of the Polish Military Intelligence. Dombal was executed.
During the Russo-Polish war the Polish Communist Party worked hand in hand with our department, and we prepared that party for action in cooperation with the Red Army. The Polish Communist Party obeyed all the commands of the advancing army of Tukhachevsky.
Members of the Polish Communist Party aided us in organizing sabotage, in creating diversions, and in impeding the arrival of munitions from France. We organized a strike in Danzig to prevent the landing of French munitions for the Polish army. I traveled to Warsaw, Cracow, Lemberg, German and Czech Silesia and to Vienna, organizing strikes to stop arms shipments. I organized a successful railroad strike in the Czech railroad junction of Oderberg, persuading the Czech trainmen to walk out, rather than handle Skoda munitions for the Poland of Pilsudski.
“Railroad workers!” I wrote in a leaflet. “You are transporting on your line guns to slaughter your Russian working-class brothers.”
At the same time, a Polish Soviet government, organized in anticipation of the capture of Warsaw, was moving with Tukhachevsky’s staff toward the Polish capital. Felix Djershinski, veteran Polish revolutionist and head of the Russian Cheka (the earlier name for the Ogpu) had been appointed by Moscow to head this government.
The Russo-Polish war was the one serious attempt made by Moscow to carry Bolshevism into Western Europe on the points of bayonets. It failed, despite all our efforts, military and political, despite the victories of the Red Army, and although we had a Polish section of the Comintern working with our political agitators and intelligence men behind the Polish front. In the end the exhausted Red Army was forced to fall back. Pilsudski remained master of Poland. Lenin’s hope of joining hands through Poland, with the revolutionary workers of Germany and helping them extend the revolution to the Rhine was lost.
The idea of hastening Bolshevist Revolution through military invasion had been entertained earlier, in 1919, during the existence of the short-lived Hungarian and Bavarian Soviet republics. Detachments of Red Guards were then only about a hundred miles from Hungarian territory. But the Bolsheviks were then too weak, and were moreover fighting against the Whites for their very existence.
By the beginning of 1921, when the treaty of Riga was signed between Russia and Poland, the Bolsheviks, and especially Lenin himself, realized that to bring successful revolutions to Western Europe was a serious and long-time task. There was no such hope of quick triumph on an international scale as had existed at the first and second Congresses of the Comintern when Zinoviev, its President, proclaimed that within one year all Europe would be Communist. Even after 1921, however, and as late as 1927, Moscow launched a series of revolutionary adventures and putsches.
In this series of irresponsible attempts, thousands of workers in Germany, in the Baltic and Balkan countries, and in China, were needlessly sacrificed. They were sent to slaughter by the Comintern on a gamble, with cooked-up schemes of military coups d’état, general strikes and rebellions none of which had any substantial chance of success.
Early in 1921 the situation in Russia was particularly threatening to the Soviet regime. Hunger, peasant uprisings, the revolt of the sailors in Kronstadt, and a general strike of the Petrograd workers, brought the government to the brink of disaster. All the victories of the Civil War seemed to have been in vain, as the Bolsheviks groped blindly in the face of opposition from those workers, peasants and sailors who had been their chief support. The Comintern, caught in this desperate situation, decided that the only way of saving Bolshevism was through a revolution in Germany. Zinoviev sent his trusted lieutenant Bela Kun, former head of the Hungarian Soviet republic, to Berlin.
Bela