This is the official Soviet history of the Communist International - the Third International, the Comintern - from its founding under Lenin in March 1919 to its dissolution by Stalin in June 1943.
It was produced by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism under the Central Committee of the CPSU, by a group of seven historians headed by A. I. Sobolev, and issued under the modest Russian title Kratkii istoricheskii ocherk, "short historical sketch". At some 207,000 English words it is neither short nor a sketch. It is the institutional self-portrait of the organisation that shaped the communist movement in every country for a quarter of a century.
The credentials are worth reading closely, because they announce what kind of document it is. The title page thanks, "with the co-operation of", a roll of surviving Comintern leaders and functionaries - Walter Ulbricht, Dolores Ibarruri, Jacques Duclos, Tim Buck, Palme Dutt, Boris Ponomarev and others. These were not consulted historians; several were participants defending their own past.
That is precisely its value. Nothing else sets out at this length what the Soviet party, in 1971, wanted the Comintern's history to have been: the congresses and their theses, the united front, the Third Period, the Popular Front, the war and the dissolution, told from inside the apparatus by the people who had run it. As a record of the official account against which every other history of the Comintern has had to argue, it is indispensable.
Translated by Bernard Isaacs. New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.
