• DOI:10.1177/002200949503000105
• Corpus ID: 161318303

Stalinist Terror in the Comintern: New Perspectives

@article{Mcdermott1995StalinistTI,
  title={Stalinist Terror in the Comintern: New Perspectives},
  author={K. Mcdermott},
  journal={Journal of Contemporary History},
  year={1995},
  volume={30},
  pages={111 - 130}
}

• K. Mcdermott
• Published 1 January 1995
• History
• Journal of Contemporary History

The Stalinist terror unleashed on Soviet society in the 1930s claimed millions of victims. Western researchers have long disputed its origins, nature and impact. Rather less attention, however, has been paid to the terror in the Communist International (Comintern). Founded by Lenin in March 1919, the Comintern certainly did not escape Stalin’s wrath some twenty years later. Over two hundred Comintern officials, thousands of foreign communists and tens of thousands of foreign political 6migr6s living in the USSR were repressed in those dark years 1936-8. For Soviet historians writing in the era of Brezhnevite ’stagnation’, this assault on the Comintern remained a strictly taboo subject. The authoritative Outline History of the Communist International, published in English in 1971, devoted a mere two paragraphs to the ’cult of the Stalin personality’, as it was euphemistically called. This lamentable situation changed in the late 1980s as Gorbachev’s glasnost took hold and material from the Central Party Archive became increasingly accessible. Western experts eagerly joined their Russian colleagues in the quest for new knowledge. As a result, we are now better informed about the inner workings of the terror process in the Comintern. There is still, of course, much to learn and no definitive consensus has emerged on such a contentious and highly charged theme. To gain a clearer perspective we must await the opening up of all the relevant files, including those in the Russian Centre for the Preservation and Study of Contemporary Historical Documents (the former Party Archive), the so-called Presidential Archive, firmly under Yeltsin’s lock and key in the Kremlin, and the KGB Archives, parts of which are