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Un Parti sous Influence
Brigitte Studer, Un parti sous influence: Le Parti Communiste Suisse, une Section du Komintern 1931 à 1939, L'Age d'Homme, Lausanne, 1994, pp.818.
The Swiss Communist Party (PCS) was one of Europe's smallest, and this eight hundred-page monograph, covering just one decade in its history, may at first appear aimed at a rather narrow readership. In fact, as a fully documented case study in the workings of a Comintern section Studer's volume merits attention well beyond the ranks of Helvetic specialists. Making extensive use of archives in Moscow as well as Switzerland, she offers a careful delineation of the Comintern's structures and modus operandi, focussing on the Swiss case but providing ample argument and data of a more general application. Thus there are substantial sections on funding, on cadre formation, including material on the International Lenin School, and on the role of the Comintern's leading bodies, its commissions and its emissaries. Special attention is given the CI's clandestine communications networks, in which Studer demonstrates that Switzerland was a crucial link, and there is full discussion of the recruitment and activities of the International Brigades. In the absence to date of any comparable treatment of an English-speaking communist party, Studer's is an invaluable contribution on the relations between the Comintern and one of its member parties.
While these relations take up the bulk of the volume, there are also useful sections on the personnel and implantation of the PCS, including a comprehensive biographical appendix. Rooted most firmly in German-speaking Switzerland, whose predominance was not always appreciated in the French and Italian-speaking cantons, the PCS derived little apparent benefit from the popular front stance that proved so attractive elsewhere. By 1939 its membership fallen to below a thousand and its share of the national vote to below one per cent. Both these figures were all-time lows and Studer's account is essentially one of increasing political marginality, even as compared with other smaller communist parties.
Although her book is a mine of information, Studer's interpretative framework is more open to debate. Her stated aim is to combine a close attention to Comintern command structures with a proper sensitivity to the indigenous social determinants of Swiss communism. That is a laudable objective, but not really achieved here. Despite much sociological data and the recovery of local issues and personalities, these are rarely allowed to qualify or even impact upon an essentially totalitarian model in which communists give total allegiance to the party, and the party total allegiance to the international. Acknowledged points of reference are the works on French communism of Kriegel, Robrieux and Tasca (A Rossi) and one could have wished that Studer's numerous but rarely cited interviewees had been drawn on to test these authors' assumptions more rigorously.
Here as elsewhere, Comintern archives are presented as the clinching argument for a centripetal interpretation. If the British case is anything to go by, however, even these records, despite their Moscow-centred perspective, can reveal something rather more complex than just a culture of control, if only the historian is alert to countervailing as well as centralising currents. Studer explicitly distances herself from some recent social histories of communism and is no doubt right to stress the danger of sanitised accounts that neglect the international dimension. If she veers in compensation towards an overly traditionalist perspective, she does so with a formidable scholarship that will not be found in some other recent counter-revisionist publications.
