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The Communist, Third International or Comintern was founded in 1919 by those few Marxists who believed that the old parties of the left had betrayed the working class cause by supporting their own countries, their own bourgeoisies, in the First World War. This article aims to consider to what extent the Comintern continued to uphold internationalism, concentrating on a specific aspect of the question, one that, at least in western historiography, has been little discussed. In a period when the centre of revolution was moving from Europe to the East, did the Comintern radically break with the entrenched Euro-Centrism of the old parties? It be argued that after an initial period in which it paid far greater attention to the revolutionary movement in the colonies and semi-colonies of imperialism, the Comintern reverted to Euro-centrism, supporting in the Second World War the defence of their imperialist interests around by the allied imperialist powers. The one revolutionary gain of that period, the Chinese revolution of 1949, was achieved by a Communist Party which disregarded the Comintern.

Influenced by developments in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, the British Communist Party (CP) began to treat its rivals on the far left, principally the Trotskyists, as class rather than political enemies. Surveillance, including the maintenance of dossiers, began in 1932, but was greatly heightened in the late 1930s, as international tensions, notably the Nazi threat to the Soviet Union, increased. Less attention was paid to the Trotskyists in the later years of the Second World War and in the immediate post-war period, but was intensified during the Party crisis which followed the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Party. Later, the CP was faced with additional rivals, the Maoists, to monitor. Surveillance came to an end in the 1970s as sectarian attitudes abated and the CP entered its terminal decline.

In the wake of the Teheran Conference of 1943, the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) adopted the political line that later became known as “Browderism.” The Party dissolved itself in favor of a loose Communist Political Association, declared an effective end to the class struggle and argued that the war-time alliance of Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States could continue into the postwar era. The political content of “Browderism” scarcely changed until the eruption of the Cold War later in the 1940s. The British Communist Party, no less than that of the USA, had seen Teheran as an indication that in the postwar world there need be no return to the fierce class struggle characteristic of the prewar decades. It abandoned the insurrectionary model provided by the Bolsheviks, and set out to provide mettle for the wider labor movement rather than act as a vanguard party. Though some elements on the Party’s left sternly criticized the leadership’s post-Teheran policies, their comprehensive defeat ...