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The Moscow Meridian
The Moscow Meridian: the CPN and the Communist International (1919-1930) Gerrit Voerman Publisher: L. J. Veen Amsterdam/Antwerp ISBN 90 204 4638 5
This study (developed from an earlier Phd thesis) deals with relations between the Dutch Communist Party (CPN) and the Communist International (referred to hereafter in the abbreviated form of Comintern) during the period from the founding of the international organisation in 1919 to the year 1930. The theme throughout this chronologically constructed account is the party’s increasing loss of autonomy as a consequence of the process of ‘domestication’, instigated by Moscow. The study describes how the CPN as a section of the Comintern, gradually lost its financial, ideological and organisational independence during the 1920s. The CPN’s Gleichschaltung can be regarded as having been completed by 1930, when the Comintern prescribed in detail how the new party’s leadership had to be constituted. The book concludes with a description of the intervention and its after effects.
The decline of the CPN’s independence is described against a background of bureaucratisation, centralisation and ‘Russification’ at the hand of the Comintern: in short, the increasing dominance of the Soviet leaders within the organisation. In turn, this development was strongly influenced by the course of events within the Soviet Union, particularly the struggle for power within the top echelons of the of the Russian Communist Party (RCP) following the death of Lenin in 1924. These developments will only be dealt with cursorily in the book. It then deals with the various methods used by the Comintern in an effort to gain complete control over the CPN, methods such as summoning party representatives to come to Moscow, sending envoys authorised to act on their behalf to the Amsterdam party office, and the provision of financial support.
The loss of authority that all the parties affiliated with the Comintern actually underwent can be particularly well traced within the Dutch section because it was one of the oldest parties with an affiliation with the Comintern. In 1909, the revolutionary wing of the Sociaal- Democratische Arbeiderspartij or SDAP (Social Democratic Labour Party) split itself off from the party and formed the Sociaal- Democratische Partij, or SDP (Social Democratic Party). Its leaders, David Wijnkoop and Willem van Ravesteyn, had contacts with Lenin and other Bolsheviks in the years prior to the October Revolution. However, the period during which they were on an equal footing with them came to an abrupt end shortly after the founding of the Comintern in March 1919. The CPN, as the SDP had renamed itself in the meantime, affiliated itself to the Comintern one month later.
The Process of Domestication
The process of domestication took place during various partly overlapping periods of time. During the first years it was mainly a matter of bringing the affiliated parties into line in an ideological sense. Towards the middle of the twenties this was followed by a process of making those parties uniform in an organisational sense. In most of the larger national parties, the Comintern was already becoming involved with matters relating to personnel such as the recruitment of those in charge; in the less important sections, this would not happen until 1930. During the whole of this period, the sections were financially dependent on the Comintern following the provision of financial support (for the CPN, this was estimated to be at least NLG 160,000; this would be about NLG 1,500,000 in today’s terms — $US 750,000).
During the twenties, developments within the CPN followed this same pattern. After the October Revolution, the expectations of the Dutch party leaders were high as a result of the contacts they had with Lenin. Wijnkoop and Van Ravesteyn assumed that they would come to occupy a special position within the Comintern as a result of that relationship. The instruction to set up a West European branch of the Comintern given to the CPN in 1919 by Moscow seemed to confirm that expectation. The sudden dissolution of the ‘Amsterdam Office’ six months later brought an end to all the dreams, however. The office had fallen out of favour particularly because of the left-communist position it was taking during a period in which Moscow was attempting to make the Comintern more ideologically homogenous, an operation that was completed by 1921.
After it had managed to enforce ideological conformity, Moscow attempted to effect organisational uniformity within the various sections of the Comintern. A beginning had already been made in the form of the twenty-one conditions that Lenin had laid down. The bolshevisation of the communist party was decreed four years later: they were obliged to adopt the same structure as the RCP. However, at the organisational level, conformity could be enforced less easily than at the ideological level. In many of the parties (including the CPN), this operation was not successful.
The bolshevisation also had the purpose of making the parties more centralised and monolithic. It enabled the leaders of the Comintern sections to strengthen the positions they had within the party. Wijnkoop, Van Ravesteyn and the third party leader, treasurer Jan Ceton, (the so-called trio) attempted to increase discipline for their own purposes. The effect of this was that within the CPN, opposition to the three party leaders increased. There had been opposition to their authoritarian style and what was seen as their hostile position in relation to the Nationaal Arbeids-Secretariaat, or NAS (the National Labour Office), a league consisting of anarcho-syndicalist trade unions. The trio were accused of paying too little attention to the Comintern’s wishes.
Recruitment of the Party's Leaders
Discontentment in the CPN with the party’s leaders in combination with the relative independence they demonstrated was Moscow’s pretext for calling Wijnkoop and Van Ravesteyn to order. This ushered in the third area in which the Comintern was to exercise control during the twenties: selection of the party leadership. In major sections such as the French and German ones, the Comintern had made sure the top echelons had been moulded to their will at a very early stage. Some considerable time passed before the same was achieved within smaller sections such as the CPN. Although in this regard Moscow left the Dutch section to its own devices until 1923, after that year meddling in the CPN’s leadership commenced. The form this took can be divided into three phases. Initially, the Comintern played a mediating role in the conflict between the leading trio and the opposition, giving corrective advice or at the most adopting a slightly admonishing position. It functioned as a neutral arbitrator indicating the mistakes made by both parties and looking for compromises. The main objective was the maintenance of unity within the CPN.
This diplomatic approach gradually made way for a sterner approach after the mid-twenties. The Comintern demanded that the opposition be given an equal representation on the party’s board and the list of candidates for the Lower House elections. The trio defied Moscow by refusing to accept this proposal, thereby marginalising themselves politically. In the meantime, the Comintern representatives were busy forming a middle group loyal to Moscow within the CPN. This group’s task was to help get the Dutch section back to taking the Comintern’s line. Despite the fact that Moscow had stressed that it was up to the CPN to choose its own leaders, the trio’s successors, being mainly from the middle group, came to the fore under the auspices of the Comintern.
By 1930, the Comintern was no longer showing any leniency. Moscow was dealing with all of the sections in a heavy-handed way. The second generation leaders of the CPN who had helped to ditch the trio were themselves axed. They had to be removed because Moscow, whether correctly or not, doubted their unconditional loyalty. The Comintern was now also appointing the party leaders openly and in an authoritarian way. The policy of mediation had been replaced by one of confrontation.
With this, Moscow’s policy of domesticating the CPN was complete. Moscow already had the last word in several important areas, including its trade union strategies, its position with respect to social democracy, colonial politics, the party’s organisational structure and the nomination of candidates for the national parliamentary elections. Now the Comintern itself was appointing the party’s leadership.
Opposition to the ‘Moscow Meridian’
Justification of the ideological, organisational and personal ‘forcing into line’ of the Comintern’s sections was based on the presumed superiority of the Russian revolutionary experience. As Lenin saw it, the importance of the October Revolution went far beyond the Russian borders; it was a revolution with universal relevance. Just as geographical positioning is based on the standard of the Greenwich zero meridian, the Moscow meridian became the frame of reference within the communist movement: the opinions of those in power in the Soviet Union had become the standard of the international communist movement. The 1917 successes gave the Bolsheviks the right to function as the Comintern’s guiding light and to dictate how all the national parties were to operate.
As a consequence of the increasing Bolshevik domination within the Comintern, a number of prominent party members left the party during the twenties. Herman Gorter was the first to do so, followed by Anton Pannekoek, Henk Sneevliet, Jacques de Kadt and Henriette Roland Holst. They had initially put all their hopes on Moscow. Had not the October Revolution ushered in a new era? All salvation seemed to come from the east; the moral prestige of the Bolsheviks was great in those early years. However, one by one they rebelled against the all-encompassing validity of the Russian Revolution model. Essentially, what they thought was that Moscow was not entitled to take over the spiritual leadership of the revolution in Western Europe since the circumstances in this part of the world were so totally different from those in Russia. As they saw it, there could be no question of a uniform strategy; the western European labour movement had to go its own way, with no meddling on the part of the Bolsheviks. The Comintern had to be completely independent of the Kremlin. The treatment that was meted out to Trotsky after Lenin’s death was another reason for Sneevliet, De Kadt and Roland Holst to draw away from Moscow.
It was not only in the CPN but also within the NAS that Moscow’s dominance functioned as a divisive element. In 1923, when the trade union federation decided to join the Red International of Labour Unions (RILU), one of the Comintern’s subsidiary organisations, a number of anarcho-syndicalists left the federation. They too rejected Moscow’s claims to leadership of the international revolutionary labour movement. After all, once NAS had joined the RVI at the end of 1925 it was confronted virtually immediately with what it regarded as Bolshevik pedantry and meddling. In the summer of 1927, NAS turned its back on the RILU, having decided that it was not going to give up its independence. Sneevliet, the chairman of the NAS, claimed that the Bolsheviks were having too great an influence on the RILU.
Wijnkoop’s, Van Ravesteyn’s and Ceton’s clashes with the Comintern mainly had to do with Moscow’s policy of organisational centralism. This conflict should also be seen in the context of the polarity between western Europe and Russia. From the time of the founding of the party, the three had seen it as primarily their own. As mentioned above, the party leaders embraced the Comintern’s centralist policies if their own interests could thereby be promoted. However, when their independence was put in jeopardy, Wijnkoop, Van Ravesteyn and Ceton rebelled against what they saw as ‘meddling.’ This was the main issue in their conflict with the Comintern: discipline at the international level and acceptance of the Bolshevik’s claim to leadership. Although the trade union question was a major part of the polarity, it was not the crucial issue, even though it has been represented as such within the CPN’s historiography. It was simply one of the areas in which the trio permitted themselves a point of view that deviated from that of Moscow.
In 1925, Wijnkoop, Van Ravesteyn and Ceton resigned after they had rejected interference by Moscow in the nomination of candidates for the Lower House elections. One year later the CPN expelled them from the party, a decision later endorsed by the Comintern. The trio formed a new party, but it did not take long for Van Ravesteyn to completely reject communism. As he saw it, the western European labour movement could not possibly be run from Moscow. In 1930, after the new leaders of the CPN had taken up their posts, Wijnkoop dissolved his dissident party and again affiliated himself to the Comintern and its Dutch section, though it was not until he had made a full confession of his political crimes that he was allowed to be admitted as a member again. Wijnkoop’s submission was symbolic of the fact that the CPN had become dependent on Moscow.
The Communists’ ‘Moral Community’
This study is mainly concerned with describing the relationship between the CPN’s leadership and the Comintern. How the party members at the grass root level reacted to Moscow is dealt with in the final chapter. That it was not terribly difficult for Moscow to gain power over the CPN had partly to do with the attraction it had for a part of the Dutch labour movement, though admittedly only a small part: in the twenties, the CPN could boast of a mere couple of thousand supporters and never achieved more than 2.3% of the vote in the national elections. Hero worship of Lenin and all that the October Revolution symbolised, along with warm feelings towards the Soviet Union, had laid the foundation for a subculture with a specifically communist orientation which mainly constituted the CPN’s supporters. This ‘moral community’ had an identity all of its own. Fostered by Moscow, an insider world of subsidiary organisations came into being, symbols were set in place, and traditions were manufactured. The party was central to this community’s existence, and it played a major role in the life of its members.
In the metaphor of the ‘Moscow Meridian,’ the two elements that dominated the relationship between the CPN and Moscow — the political and ideological magnetism exerted by the Soviet Union and the politically and morally based centralist leadership of the Comintern — came to expression. They were to form the basis for the stalinisation of the CPN that got underway towards the end of the twenties.
New Sources of Information: the Comintern Archives
There is virtually no archive material on the CPN dating back to the period between the wars. When Hitler sent German forces into the Netherlands in May 1940, the party archives were destroyed. The archives of the internal security service, which almost certainly would have contained material relating to Dutch communism, were also destroyed during that period. The scant personal archives of the leading CPN members of the time are silent when it comes to relations with the Comintern. In the absence of source material, it has thus so far been impossible to obtain a good and accurate view of relations between the CPN and Moscow in that interbellum period.
The opening up of the Comintern archives at the beginning of the nineties has changed all that. This study is largely based on material that originates from the Comintern archives filed at the Rossijski Tsentr Chranenija i Izoetsjenija Dokumentov Novejsjej Istorii (RTsChIDNI: The Russian Centre for the Conservation and Study of Documents relating to Modern History), since 1999 called the Rossijski Gasoedarstvenny Archiv Sotsialno-Polititsjeskoj Istorii (RGASPI: Russian State Social and Political History Archives). For the first time it has become possible to obtain documents relating to the main organs (Präsidium, Sekretariat, Politisches Sekretariat, Politische Kommission), regional offices (Anglo-Amerikanisches Ländersekretariat, Mitteleuropäisches Ländersekretariat, Ost-Sekretariat) and regional bureaus (Amsterdam Büro, West-Europäisches Sekretariat) in order to reconstruct the relationship between the Comintern and the CPN as seen from Moscow’s point of view. The RILU’s archives have also been consulted.
The enormous volume of information make one thing obvious: during the twenties, Moscow was constantly tightening the Comintern’s reins, a process that had already started under Lenin. At the same time, it is clear that the Comintern was less of a monolith than has been assumed until recently: in the middle of the twenties, those Comintern bureaucrats who were responsible for the CPN had quite a considerable amount of personal input in what happened. Right up to 1930, the leaders in Moscow were to a certain extent delegating decision-making in respect of the composition of the party leadership to their office in Berlin. This combination of centralisation and decentralisation should really be analysed in greater detail: what is needed is a thorough study on the Comintern’s central apparatus in Moscow and its relations with the sections elsewhere.
